Today, softer forms of sustainable housing are emerging and contemporary architecture, more fluid in its organization and in its forms, challenges the functionalist model. In Austria, where building players are at the forefront of green technologies and wood construction, architects and design offices, relying on an innovative industrial fabric, are offering more skilful and more environmentally friendly architecture. ‘environment.
The architecture of tomorrow lives between technological innovations and environmental realities
From virtual to real: the announced reign of the digital model
The architecture of the future, whatever its form, will be connected. The digital environment is already disrupting design methods: AI techniques and the appearance of modeling software, such as those offered by the Austrian company Xeometric GmbH based on the BIM solution Elitecad make it possible, via virtual reality, to make the project phase more interactive, within the agency, vis-à-vis the clients, or vis-à-vis an urban planning organization.
Through predictive logic, the digital model facilitates simulations, comparisons and promotes the scalability of projects. It allows you to anticipate energy costs and maintenance operations.
A digital construction site and smart materials
These new tools logically lead to the evolution of implementation processes. A challenge well understood by Austria, which for prefabrication, simplified thanks to digital controls, frees itself from the single model to favor the creation of complete and varied assemblies, like the components produced by Kaufmann Bausysteme with panels of CLT. Site planning and management applications like those developed by Planradar make it possible to shorten deadlines and optimize materials and therefore waste and energy consumed.
Techniques for optimizing structural calculations, the provision of connected home automation and centralized technical management tools, but also new materials, such as intelligent glazing designed by Glasmarte gmbh, connected heating or lighting systems improve energy efficiency and comfort of life.
Frugality and life cycles: the new paradigms
In Lustenau in Vorarlberg, the Baumschlager-Eberle agency designed a frugal and comfortable office building while avoiding any use of sophisticated technologies. To do this, the Austrian agency used centralized management software, connected to sensors, to permanently monitor energy flows, temperature, humidity and CO2 levels to maintain the interior temperature of the building between 22°C and 26°C all year round.
For heating, they use the residual heat emitted by the occupants, lighting or computer equipment, controlled facade openings ensure regulation by natural ventilation. With this achievement, Austrian architects confirm their understanding of the building of the future, which depends on the evolution of its uses.
A hybrid architecture for 4.0 lifestyles
Mobility and nomadism, teleworking or coworking are changing space practices. Shared accommodation or Airbnb, shared and intergenerational housing are shaking up the notions of appropriation and social sharing. We are seeing hybrid buildings appear, inhabited structures whose functions evolve over time. Thus, parking lots become homes and housing is transformed into shared offices.
Well aware of these developments, the Dietrich-Untertrifaller Agency offers, in Strasbourg, a set of housing units that can be transformed according to the needs of the residents. They are located on nine floors around a structure housing car parks and an active hall, a new crossroads in a district undergoing restructuring, which connects the tram station and the platforms. Like the roof of the building, it is an open space which can accommodate a plurality of practices and activities.
These projects, carried out by Austrian agencies, remind us that before comfort, security or energy efficiency, the primary role of the architect, and perhaps also of the project owners, is to give meaning to space, to regulate the proportion, to qualify the light, to design a building in which to create society, and to offer sustainability. The Sagrada Familia or the Villa Savoye could never have been born from Artificial Intelligence.