E1 Bachelor Design Course – CLIMATIC COMMONS: Adaptive Typologies for Living and Production

Amidst accelerating climate change, increasing housing scarcity, and shifting socio-ecological conditions, Innsbruck’s Alpine edge becomes a testing ground for new forms of climate-responsive and adaptive architecture. This semester, the E1 Design Studio will explore how volumetric typologies can rethink the relationship between dwelling, working, and collective life – negotiating between the urgent demand for accessible and alternative forms of living, the pressures of densification in constrained valleys, and the need for spatial models that are climatically resilient and socially inclusive.
The studio will focus on the transitional zones between city and landscape, where sensitive architectural strategies are required to integrate new forms of inhabitation into the Alpine terrain. Here, climatic commons emerge: shared infrastructures, layered spaces, and adaptive structures that act simultaneously as housing, workplace, and social condenser. Students will develop volumetric design proposals that articulate not only built mass, but also environmental filters and spatial layers, rethinking what it means to live collectively under the pressures of climate, economy and social change.

“No city is ever frozen. It is transforming; it is all about constant transformation all around us.” As Yona Friedman emphasized, “In architecture, the whole idea should be to find ways to adapt to reality.” Friedman’s awareness of the necessity for adaptive approaches arose from surviving catastrophic conditions during the war, where flexibility and improvisation were essential for survival. Today, the built environment faces many ongoing challenges and transformation processes – climatic shifts, social changes, and evolving modes of living and working – which call for architectural strategies that are adaptive, responsive, and resilient.
Innsbruck, situated in the narrow Alpine valley of the Inn, exemplifies the urgency of this approach. Environmental change, including shifting climatic conditions and seasonal extremes, directly impacts the ways buildings perform and interact with their surroundings. At the same time, urban expansion is constrained by topography and rising housing costs create social pressures. Conventional densification strategies often fail to address the rising cost of housing and the lack of alternative models, climate resilience, or hybrid modes of living and working. Meanwhile, the peri-urban and mountainous zones surrounding the city – where the urban edge merges with forest and mountain landscapes – are particularly sensitive: these transitional thresholds require careful design that negotiates topography, ecology, and urban expansion.
In this context, rethinking living environments is not only about producing more housing units but about reconfiguring spatial priorities: redefining borders, thresholds, and transitions between individual space and collective infrastructure; developing adaptive architectures that respond to seasonal and climatic shifts; and designing typologies where living, making, and working coexist.
The studio frames this challenge as both urgent and experimental: How can volumetric strategies generate new forms of collective living and creative production that are affordable, flexible, and environmentally responsive? How might these hybrid typologies – climatic commons – function as interconnected spatial, social, and ecological network, mediating between built mass, community, and terrain? The studio situates these questions within the discourse of volumetric design, where spatial mass is conceived as differentiated, layered, and adaptive. Structure becomes not only a framework or technical support, but the organizer of social layers and climatic filters – a carrier of meaning, atmosphere, and character.

DESIGN PROPOSAL
The E1 Studio will investigate how adaptive typologies can integrate living and working into Innsbruck’s urban-rural edge, by developing projects that respond to pressing socio-ecological challenges and that operate through layered volumetric thinking.
All programs – from individual living units to shared infrastructures such as ateliers, workshops, digital production spaces, and collective courtyards – will be conceived as interdependent strata within one continuous system. Climatic adaptation is not treated as an added layer or external buffer, but as an intrinsic generator of structure and configuration: volumes, transitions, and networks of spaces are organized to respond differently to seasonal, social, and environmental requirements, while remaining part of a coherent architectural whole.
The task is not to design conventional housing blocks, but to propose hybrid environments where living and creative production are interwoven, and where climatic responsiveness becomes a central design driver. These projects should rethink the balance between private and collective space, between individual needs and shared infrastructures, and between domestic life and cultural or productive work. In doing so, they must address the social urgency of developing inclusive and alternative modes of inhabitation that respond to social and economic pressures, while at the same time engaging the environmental urgency of designing for climate-responsive futures.
Each proposal will be rooted in a specific site condition along Innsbruck’s thresholds, where the tension between terrain and city calls for sensitive integration into the natural environment. These edge conditions will become laboratories for testing how architectural responses can blur the distinctions between building and landscape, enclosure and exposure, dwelling and production. The ambition is to develop volumetric typologies that integrate structure, character, and climate into a spatial continuum – spaces that are not static enclosures, but adaptive frameworks capable of hosting diverse forms of collective life and creative making.

DESIGN METHODOLOGY
Within the framework of the i.sd year topic, the studio will explore the volumetric condition as a design methodology. Volumetric design allows students to synthesize programmatic, climatic, and social information into differentiated spatial structures. Volumes are not conceived as inert mass, but as layered, porous, and adaptive environments.
Structure and character form the critical discourse: structure is not only a technical system of support, but also an organizer of spatial, social, and aesthetic relations. Character emerges from structural logics and volumetric articulation, from the way structure filters light, organizes collective spaces, or mediates between inside and outside. Rather than style imposed from above, character is understood as an emergent temperament arising from the accumulation of nuanced perceptions.
Through this method, students will be asked to create proposals that are at once performative and expressive — buildings that embody climatic responsiveness, social inclusivity, and material presence.

DESIGN DELIVERABLES & FORMAT
Over the course of the semester, students will produce a complete architectural proposal for a hybrid typology situated in Innsbruck’s Alpine edge. The work will begin with analytical studies of site, climate, and social conditions, which will then feed into iterative volumetric explorations and structural experiments. These explorations will be developed into precise architectural proposals articulated through drawing, modelling, and atmospheric representation.
The final deliverables will include analytical diagrams and mappings; volumetric models exploring layering, density, and climatic adaptation; architectural drawings such as plans, sections, axonometrics, and elevations; and sectional studies that reveal the relationship between built structure, terrain, and collective space. Both physical and digital models will be used to communicate volumetric character, materiality, and atmosphere.
The semester will culminate in a final presentation where students present their projects as prototypes for new adaptive typologies: buildings that propose alternative futures of collective living, working, and co-production in the context of Innsbruck’s climate, economy, and social dynamics.