Rewilding the Ground

2023

Location: Vienna 

Size: Urban scale

Competition entry: Europan 17 

In collaboration with Panagis Marketos

Design team: Lida Badafareh, Panagis Marketos, Mehrshad Atashi

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Our proposal for am Heidjöchl envisions a highly dense settlement for 11.000 inhabitants whose configuration renders dialectics between the urban artifact and nature. It is a dense urban settlement whose geographical/thematic epicenter is devoted to nature as a complex program, ranging from wilderness to domesticity. The project is offering the city of Vienna a new attraction with diverse events and common spaces. We deploy a constellation of architectural objects -follies, a voided center and a set of housing with pilotis- embedded within a gradient of nature of varying qualities, conditioning it and being conditioned by it in return. The settlement has a configuration of accesses that restrict the degrees of freedom of car traffic while simultaneously promoting mild mobility.