Ephemeral Landscapes | Julia Dorninger

The project Ephemeral Landscapes questions established planning processes and methods in architecture. The requirement evaluation of certain target groups, fixed spatial programmes and time- and context-dependent insights are usually relevant parameters in the design process. However, structures designed according to these planning specifications often prove themselves rigid or hardly flexible. Notions such as living and working are still associated with physical spaces, despite the fact that global trends towards a coupling of knowledge and mobility allow us to see that residence and work space may no longer be tied to one fixed location in the future. Ephemeral Landscapes evokes radical rethinking in the development of space, a change in paradigms in which conventional meanings of paradigms are turned upside-down, new paradigms are introduced and traditional marginal conditions are ignored. Space is here understood primarily as empty space which generates needs. This physical vacuum has the energy for material expansion: movement and actions permeate the space, thereby assigning its functions. The resulting action spaces, in turn, improve the understanding of their users’ needs. Ephemeral Landscapes can be considered an impulse sparking a continuous process, never complete, in which spaces are continuously developed further depending on situations, instead of being adapted to pre-defined necessities.

Julia Dorninger was born in Vienna in 1973, where she continues to live and work. Since 2001 she has been a freelancer in the fields of art and architecture. She has successfully participated in international competitions and has been exhibited in Austria and abroad. Thus, in 2000 she held a stipend for the International Summer Academy of Visual Arts in Salzburg, in which she also participated in 1999. From 1997 to 2001 she studied draughtsmanship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at ENSBA Paris. From 1992 to 2001 she studied architecture at the Technical University in Vienna and at ENSAPLV Paris, graduating in 2001.