EM2 Design Studio – „DEEP SURFACES | PERMEABLE DEVICES – Interfaces for Encoding and Decoding Architectural Space“
DEEP SURFACES / PERMEABLE DEVICES is a collaborative research laboratory dedicated to the generation of new typologies and topologies, grounded in a novel design and modeling interface environment entitled CLOUDER.
At the core of the design studio is an understanding of architecture as a generative interface between tectonic systems, geometric logic, and digital design processes. Buildings are not conceived as static objects, but as dynamic spatial systems that organize relationships between volume and data, material and climate, use and movement, as well as between guests, neighborhood, and city. The studio seeks an intervention into everyday urban life that incorporates cultural scenarios as a narrative design instrument.
The project is anchored at the specific site of the Innsbruck Youth Hostel, an urbanly charged location situated between infrastructure, tourism, everyday city life, and local culture. The site is understood not merely as a plot containing an existing building to be integrated into the design, but as a volumetric field of social, climatic, and spatial forces. Existing structures, noise, movement patterns, visual relations, microclimate, density, and socio-cultural activity are analyzed through 3D scanning, simulation, and mapping, and are directly integrated into the design process.
The task is to develop a new youth hostel conceived not as an isolated accommodation facility, but as an urban catalyst: a social condenser, a cultural interface, and a spatial platform for exchange between travelers and the local population. In addition to lodging functions, deliberately public-oriented programs must be integrated, including cafés, food services, sports and movement facilities, cultural spaces, workshops, coworking areas, and publicly accessible courtyards, terraces, and urban interior spaces. The building thus becomes a shared urban realm in which temporary living, everyday routines, and local and international cultures intersect.
A central design theme is the development of transformable dwelling units that can adapt spatially, structurally, and programmatically from individual occupation to collective living arrangements of up to eight people. This adaptability is not achieved solely through furniture, but is architecturally embedded in volumetric organization, load-bearing structure, façade depth, circulation systems, technical layers, and climatic buffer zones. Dwelling is understood as a mutable condition that is continuously renegotiated.
Methodologically, the studio does not begin with the floor plan, but with the development of a façade that is not a surface but a spatial volume. This “thick façade” (“deep surface,” poche) operates as a habitable and performative system mediating climate, structure, use, movement, and the city. It constitutes the first architectural prototype—the genetic core from which the entire building evolves.
The existing building is explicitly included in these considerations. An analysis of the building stock with regard to materiality, joining, construction, tectonics, circularity, and, above all, existing spatial qualities and reuse potentials forms the point of departure for the development of sustainable strategies of extension and transformation.
Particular emphasis is placed on material and time. Weathering, aging, patina, and material transformation are not treated as deficiencies but as productive design parameters that generate architectural depth, ornamentation, and atmospheric differentiation. The building is conceived as a process rather than a finished state.
The studio operates with the volumetric design system CLOUDER and individually customized point-cloud workflows for each student. The site is captured as a dataset, translated into functional and atmospheric clusters, and encoded in multilayered systems of notation. Each point stores information on geometry, material, structure, use, climate, and fabrication logic. AI-based transformations generate spatial and tectonic patterns, which are subsequently translated into concrete architectural systems. Design thus becomes a form of spatial programming of density, porosity, and threshold conditions.
The studio’s mode of operation is explicitly collaborative. Students work in teams, share datasets, models, methods, and design strategies, engage in continuous discussion through open reviews, and develop their projects through mutual exchange. The studio functions as an open laboratory in which experimentation, analysis, insight, adaptation, and iteration are understood as productive components of the design process. The objective is the development of innovative design strategies and experimental building typologies and morphologies.
All projects operate within a maximum volume of 30 × 30 × 30 meters. This scale enables high urban density and programmatic complexity while simultaneously allowing for maximum tectonic and constructive resolution down to the level of joints and material articulation. This limitation is not a constraint, but a framework of resolution within which volumetric design, data-driven methods, and architectural tectonics can be precisely interlinked.
Micro / Macro Permeable Devices understands architecture not as an object, but as a system: as social and spatial infrastructure, as a medium of exchange, and as an experimental instrument for designing new forms of urban coexistence.