Specialisation - Extractive Resource Territories

Eva Schwab
Hans Hortig

Resource use in the building industry has become a major concern in architectural research, design and discourse. Inevitably, this raises questions about the actual sites of resource extraction and its associated practices. Taking the industry’s shift toward sustainability as a starting point, this specialisation examines mining in Austria and the Alps and the resource territories it produces. Focusing on raw material extraction and building material production in Styria, the specialisation highlights the interconnectedness of Earth’s ecological and social systems through looking at the processes, economic rationales and actors that shape extractive practices, showing that change in one domain invariably reverberates through others.

In a combination of seminars, exercises and field trips organised around the topics of regional building culture and urban development, local conflicts around resource extraction, ecological building materials, global resource networks, speculative mining, and extractivism’s afterlife, we will address human and more-than-human drivers of change in alpine resource territories as well as identify, map, and articulate socio-environmental dynamics. This approach not only reveals the social and ecological entanglement of architecture, territories and the building industry with broader ecological and urban processes, but also opens up the creative possibilities that this implies.

The course will take place on Tuesdays from 10am-4pm and ends on 16.12.25.

Workshop: 19.-21.11.25

Vorstellung: 25.09.2025, 14:00, HS A, Kopernikusgasse 24/1.OG