SPRING 2025

This seminar explores Alpine typologies as spatial systems, examining their evolution across valleys, settlements, buildings, and architectural elements to understand the natural-built interface and its interactions with human habitation. By analyzing traditional and contemporary Alpine structures, students investigate how these typologies shape and respond to environmental conditions, material constraints, and cultural practices.
Focusing on adaptive typologies, the seminar examines how architectural objects contribute to the climate resilience of the built environment. Students explore the performative aspects of these typologies as integrated components of the urban-ecological system, assessing their role in mediating between nature, infrastructure, and habitation.
Through a digital mixed-methods approach, students engage in analytical, representational, and generative investigations, combining human and artificial intelligence in their typological research on spatial patterns in the Alps. Utilizing machine learning, they train generative AI tools on vernacular typologies to decode, reinterpret, and develop new hybrid models. By merging physical, digital, and biological concepts, they establish innovative frameworks for evolving these spatial systems in response to climate adaptation and architectural innovation.

COURSE ENVIRONMENT
Students work collaboratively in groups, with 15 participants from the University of Texas at Arlington and 15 from the University of Innsbruck. 

ALPINESTUDIO INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM
The Alpinestudio International Program is the global campus of the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) and the University of Innsbruck (LFU), engaging the fields of contemporary architecture and urban studies, focusing on climate-resilient cities in the Central Alpine Region, offering cross-listed courses open for enrollment to students from both sides of the Atlantic.

INSTRUCTORS

Oswald Jenewein

Ian Gillis

Michelle Hummel