Social and Environmental Impact Academy for Architects (SEIAA)

In a five days’ workshop from the 2nd to the 6th of May 2022 in the context of the University of Liechtenstein the participants have explored ways to (re)design the built environment so that a sufficient use of it becomes a key to a good life. The findings were brought together and translated into “sufficiency-lessons” that the participants implemented with four classes of teenagers at the high school in Vaduz and the Formatio school in Triesen. In a playful way the students made the teenagers aware of the impact of their lifestyles on the environment. Together, they thought about ways that allow a lower environmental footprint without reducing the life-quality. In a half-day workshop and under the guidance of the students, the teenagers designed tiny apartments and shared flats, evaluated the use of different building materials, and thought about how to integrate green areas in their visions.

SEIAA Booklet_uni.li

In the second workshop the students came together in Genk (BE) from the 4th to the 8th of July 2022 to address the issue of Re-Wilding in relation to the social and ecological dynamics of the Winterslag-neigbourhood (BE), which was originally designed as a garden city in the first half of the 20th century. The focus of the five-day workshop was on five selected sites in Winterslag, where the architecture students and teachers searched for ways to reactivate lost spaces in the neighborhood to foster social interactions in the community. Together with the local community committee, children from a childcare center and interested inhabitants, the participants created temporary installations in the scale 1:1, which were, compared to plans and diagrams, easier to grasp by the inhabitants and could be tested immediately. Like the others, this workshop was characterized by a collaboration with a partner outside the university campus to increase its social and environmental impact and receive direct feedback from involved stakeholders and target groups.

SEIAA Booklet_UHasselt

The third workshop took place at the Bergen School of Architecture from the 1st to the 5th of August 2022. In Bergen the workshop participants were invited to a five-day empathic exercise to dwell with all the living species that one can find in the shared habitat at the seaside, outside the school. The workshop was a search for ways to reorient design impulses towards gestures for enhancing the habitats of the living species as alternatives to the proposed municipal seaside-pathway. In an inter- and transdisciplinary approach, involving marine biologists, city planners, a dancer, a sailor, an artist, and a curator, the students got to know different perspectives on their design task and learned to negotiate among environmental, social, as well as economic aspects of sustainability. The encounters made during boat trips, excursions to a salmon industry, in the labors of marine biologists, or in the nearby fishery museum provided the participants with a different attitude to how the urban might coexist with nature.

SEIAA Booklet_BAS

From 26th until 30th of June 2023 the students came together in Copenhagen to explore and define circular design strategies through hands-on 1:1 experiments, combining functionality, aesthetics and circularity and exploring questions, such as: What does it mean to build for a circular economy? Through inputs from experts in the field of circular building and during excursions to built examples, the students got inspired to design and test their own strategies with the waste materials that were provided to the participants at the beginning of the workshop. Neither the teachers nor the students knew the materials in advance so that the design strategies and solutions needed to be developed from the limitations of the given materials. During the workshop, the students provided material evidence for how you can work with the topic of circularity in the built environment. The findings were brought together and materialized into five multipurpose podiums, that demonstrated five strategies of how a random assortment of materials can be translated into a multipurpose podium.

SEIAA Booklet_RDA

The workshop at the Royal Danish Academy was followed by the UIA Congress in Copenhagen, the world’s largest event on sustainable architecture, centered around the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This provided an ideal chance to present the learnings of the Erasmus+ project SEIAA to a bigger audience and expand the network for future cooperations. As part of “Resilient Communities”, one out of six panels, a narrative essay on SEIAA was accepted for publication and presentation at the congress. In addition, the SEIAA team organized a side-event with the title “Four Course – Discourse”, a mix of traditional food from the location of the four partner universities and short inputs, discussions and interventions on the outcomes and learning outcomes from the workshops. The UIA Congress marked the end of an inspiring three-year cooperation with the University of Liechtenstein, Hasselt University, Bergen School of Architecture, and the Royal Danish Academy, four architecture schools across Europe, with different approaches and settings but a common goal: To educate responsible architects and social entrepreneurs that are motivated and equipped to work towards a more sustainable and equitable future.

SEIAA_Impact Manifesto