Laboratory for Sustainable Architectural Production
LSAP - Laboratory for Sustainable Architectural Production is a Master programme led by Professor Walter Unterrainer. Our international students produce projects on all scales. We see sustainable architecture as a spatial challenge, including cultural, social and economic sustainability. Applications of new technologies on rather conventional buildings are no solution.
We believe, that even the state of the art is far away from being good enough for substantial sustainability in architecture and it needs to investigate and invent new approaches and solutions. That is what a laboratory is about, thinking outside the mainstream and known parameters. We focus on the conjunction between art and science, and we provide the tools for testing and evaluating the environmental and economic impact of the projects. Workshops on architectural theory as well as for simulating life cycles, simulating thermal performance, structural optimization with new materials, simulating daylight and economic impact etc. are run by high ranked international specialists.
Soon we can test and optimize the physical models in our brand new daylight studio and in a modern wind channel, which in combination with other equipment makes us a real laboratory for future architecture.
Sustainable Architecture is not about buildings as such. It is about the living conditions of humans now and in the future. In its essence, sustainability is about survival, although at the moment it is the most misused term and not only in the building sector.
Large scale small scale. Material and construction. Building processes
Sustainability is about ALL resources, and they are strongly affected by our building activities: air, water, biodiversity, soil and land, raw materials, energy sources, human resources. Architects tend to reduce sustainability to energy efficiency and to reduce energy efficiency to the consumption of energy used for making buildings comfortable. When ignoring production processes, social and economic aspects as well as historical and cultural contexts, we never build up anything sustainable in architecture which values more than a hollow.
