E2 Bachelor Design Course – „AMPHIBIOUS GROUND: A year-round architecture for a site that floods“

1. Abstract
Public space carries much of a city’s social life and much of its exposure to climate. Riverbanks, promenades and parks are where communities gather, and also where heat, drought and flooding arrive first. As extreme weather events become more frequent, the calendar of public life contracts: ground built for continuous use becomes usable only in certain months, and the conventional responses of defensive walls and seasonal closure shorten that calendar further rather than extending it. Herrmannpark condenses this condition. At the confluence of the Wienfluss and the Donaukanal, it is public land with an intermittent civic life: commercially occupied for one half of the year, dormant for the other, periodically withdrawn altogether when the river rises. In September 2024 a thousand-year flood on the Wienfluss submerged the site completely.
The E2 studio situates these challenges within the volumetric design discourse: structures are conceived as differentiated systems in which water level, programme and material behaviour inform spatial and structural performance. Water is treated not as an external constraint but as an active design parameter, and the flood datum becomes a generative line rather than a limit.

2. The Site
Herrmannpark occupies a narrow wedge of land on the right bank of the Donaukanal in Vienna’s 3rd district, where the Wienfluss discharges into the canal beside the Urania. The ground is artificial: raised in 1930 out of the river’s own sediment, and named that October after Emanuel Herrmann (1839–1902), the economist whose 1869 proposal introduced the postcard.
Today the park is known almost entirely as Strandbar Herrmann, an urban beach running from roughly early April to mid-September. It is genuinely well-used and well-liked. It is also, for the other half of the year, an empty strip of sand behind a wall — and, at intervals, it is under water.

3. The Water Condition
The Wienfluss falls 34 km from the Vienna Woods to the Donaukanal, its final stretch running through nine Vienna districts before it empties here beside the Urania, just downstream of the Aspernbrücke. Its catchment lies in the Flysch zone — sandstone and marl, barely permeable — so the river swells from a trickle to a torrent within hours of heavy rain.
On the night of 15 September 2024, during storm “Anett,” a thousand-year event arrived. The gauge at Kennedybrücke peaked at 3.90 m, the highest since 1951. Herrmannpark was inundated: the beach and the bar stood under roughly a metre of water, furniture and stock were washed away, and mud had to be cleared from the cold stores before the site reopened days later.
200–500 l/s – ORDINARY FLOW
≈450,000 l/s – PEAK, 15 SEPT 2024
≈ 1 m – DEPTH ON THE SITE
3.90 m – GAUGE PEAK
Since then the City has raised the Auhof weir walls by one metre and planned further defences upstream. None of this work is at Herrmannpark. The park has no dedicated flood-protection retrofit; it is still managed by clearing up afterwards. Vienna expects such events to become more frequent, not less.

4. Design Proposal
Design a small public building for Herrmannpark that works across the full year, not just the summer season, and that treats seasonal flooding as a design condition rather than a problem to hide from.
The E2 studio will explore how small public structures can remain usable, open and legible across the full annual cycle of a site that floods. Students will develop proposals calibrated to three states of the same ground — occupied, dormant and submerged — treating inundation and vacancy as ordinary operating conditions rather than as failures. Structures are conceived as differentiated volumetric systems organised around the recorded flood datum: porous and sacrificial below the line, dense and sheltering above it. Porosity is used here in its hydraulic as well as its spatial sense — a strategy that negotiates transitions between water and air, ground and platform, occupied and withdrawn. The design challenge is to synthesise hydraulic performance, programmatic flexibility and spatial character into a single structural logic.
What is fixed:
● The site, and the flood datum as the organising line of the project
● The three states: occupied, dormant, submerged
● A single small public building of roughly 150–350 m², sited within the park
What is yours to argue for
● The programme — café, pavilion, exhibition space, shelter, viewing point, bathing facility, or a hybrid
● The structural system, and how it differentiates above and below the datum
● Form, material, and the character these produce

5. Design Methodology
The studio proceeds through five overlapping phases. Each is supported by a weekly tutorial and tested against the three states of the site.
● Site & Water Analysis — mapping the ground, the edges, the levels and the flood record; documenting the site in section before plan, and establishing the datum each project will work from.
● Volumetric Exploration — massing and structural studies tested against that datum, using porosity and density as the primary design variables rather than outline or façade.
● Programmatic Integration — arguing for a public use that earns its place across the full year, and defining how it changes between the occupied, dormant and submerged states.
● Iterative Development — moving from concept models to precise architectural definition through drawing, volumetric models and physical prototypes, with continuous critique.
● Synthesis — embedding the intervention in the longer narrative of the Donaukanal as public space under changing water conditions, so that structure, programme and character are inseparable.

6. Deliverables
● Site analysis — mapping, sections, photographs, level and flood data, precedents
● Concept diagrams explaining the core idea
● Site plan 1:200 · floor plans 1:100 · two elevations 1:100
● Two sections 1:100, including the flood-datum section
● One architectural detail 1:20, resolving the transition across the datum
● State diagrams — occupied, dormant, submerged
● Physical or digital volumetric model
● Written statement, max. 300 words