Will the new building become an exception? Will we use “waste” as a new building material? Is affordable housing at the expense of climate protection? And anyway: How do we design the entire life cycle of buildings? How do we calculate the gray energy honestly? How does CO₂-free concrete work? What insights are new, where do we discover old knowledge for tomorrow? And how do we shape this complex change process together? – All these questions are asked by the participants of the seventh edition of the “Architecture Matters” conference, which takes place on May 4th and 5th as a hybrid conference in Munich under the title “Second City. About the New in the Old”.
Architects, urban planners, real estate developers, professors, construction officers, researchers and teachers, thinkers and thinkers from a wide variety of disciplines will be present as speakers and participants in the discussion. The conference will be moderated by Jan Friedrich from the building world and Nadin Heinich from plan A, which launched Architecture Matters in 2016.
Various “Focus Sessions” are on the program on May 4th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Hilton Munich Park (15th floor). The location is an office ensemble from the 1960s, which has now been entered into the Bavarian State Monument List and is currently being redeveloped. There are workshops, round tables, networking and speed dating events. Both this and the event in the evening entitled “Zeitenwende – The Bigger Picture” with the philosopher and former Federal Minister of Culture Julian Nida-Rümelin, City Planning Officer Elisabeth Merk and the architects Muck Petzet and Jacob van Rijs are already sold out.
The large-scale conference will take place on Friday, May 5, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the Munich Künstlerhaus on Lenbachplatz. The American architect, author and Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Martha Thorne will open the conference day with her presentation “Agents of Change”. Furthermore, the life cycles of buildings and new buildings should be discussed from the point of view of urban development and climate protection. It also looks into what the concrete industry is doing to reduce CO₂ emissions and how much political regulation is necessary.
Further questions are: What conveniences are we willing to give up ourselves? And which strategies are we developing for regions that are still facing major urbanization processes – and which strategies are these regions ready to develop themselves? What innovations are emerging in the green tech scene and what role do concrete recycling and urban mining play? And anyway: Isn’t everyone building “world-class, award-winning, innovative, sustainable and liveable” today? Reinier de Graaf from OMA will have something to say about this. With “architect, verb” he wrote an entertaining, biting satire about the PR jargon of the industry.
Architecture Matters, Thursday, May 4, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Hilton Munich Park (15th floor), Am Tucherpark 7, and Fri., May 5, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Künstlerhaus am Lenbachplatz; Tickets are available online at event bride