The topic 2023/24

Carpathian - Gateway - Bratislava 

Three Following challenges for architecture and urbanism have been omnipresent in 2023:  

Responsibility: The need to inhabit the planet in ways responsible to the natural ecosystem, global climate and humanity. 

Sustainability: Creating a mind-shift from comfortably-traditional to innovatively-sustainable

Adaptability: The emergence of global crises that rapidly require revamping of the environments we are creating for work, education, commercial and social life.  

Background

A large IT company is establishing its Headquarter Campus on a former military hospital ground at the gateway between the city and the natural reserve around Kamzik mountain. The campus will house more than 1000 employees together with a mix of residential, commercial, event and sport programs. The ambition to create one of most innovative and sustainable campuses is envisioned to bring benefits not just its occupants but also wider public.

The large investment is seen as a highly beneficial development which will bring life to a quiet part of the city, but as a result will present new challenges to the surrounding area ranging from extra footfall to traffic overload in an already overstressed district. The popular recreation area Zelezna Studienka, which is in effect the Small Carpathian gateway, already struggles with recreational crowds. Visitors traditionally come by car (which is the most convenient yet most polluting form of transport). Eventhough the City tries to shift this preference towards public transport, by creating TIOP Zelezna Studienka, at this moment it has barely been seen as a viable replacement. The popularization of this area has to be carefully planned in order not to overload its facilities and disrupt its environment.

We propose to explore a brief from two directions 

Half the program is a real physical project, dealing with the challenges of connection between the site and adjacent recreational area with the city and wider context. In this respect it will be necessary to re-visit they current amenities and functions within the area and suggest solutions for enabling creation of world class recreational gateway.

The other half would contemplate an ideal connection scenario within the realm of alternative reality. Students are to imagine that cars have never been invented and people have never experienced a need for this mode of transport. The task would be to explore possibilities and impacts on local urbanism and how those learnings could be implemented into the real world.