agenda

Please note the Fulbright Commission scholarship deadlines for the 2023/24 academic year. Fulbright core program for scientists.

The conference is thematically focused on the Sub-Ore-Mountains region, roughly defined by the Ústí nad Labem and Karlovy Vary regions, or by the areas of existing surface brown coal mines and those already reclaimed, yet sharing a similar industrial past. Presentations will address topics related to cultural landscapes, heritage conservation, industrial heritage, nature protection, archaeology, and history (among others), including international contributions from the German side of the Ore Mountains, specifically the UNESCO World Heritage site Erzgebirge/Krušnohoří. A separate section will feature shorter presentations by students from Czech universities who, as part of their studies, have focused on one of the aforementioned fields and directed their interest specifically toward the Sub-Ore-Mountains region.

If you are interested in attending in person, you can register free of charge at the registration desk before the start of the conference. Those interested in online participation can join at any time during the conference via MS Teams – LIVE STREAM (Meeting ID: 359 134 461 620 9 | Access Code: eF9fJ3XH).

Thank you for your interest!

We invite all students and employees to join Anežka Mervartová for yoga classes promoting harmony and energy. Mats are provided. The classes are free of charge.

We exercise in the atrium near the plaster room.

What Housing Owes People

The UK has been at the vanguard of a 40 year neoliberal housing experiment and is in a state of emergency. In the light of multiple overlapping emergencies, a new architecture of the home is needed. One that is more social, more adaptable, more climate resilient, and that gives agency to people and communities.

Astrid Smitham is an architect and academic based in London, and co-founder of APPARATA. APPARATA are an architecture, design and research studio that create convivial and adaptable spaces and objects. They work foundationally with how material, environmental and social realms are enmeshed and interact with each other, addressing issues around social bonds, repair, dematerialisation, altering typologies and agency. Their work has won various awards including the RIBA Neave Brown Award for Housing and a Civic Trust Award and been nominated for the Stirling Prize and the European Collective Housing Award. Astrid teaches architecture at Kingston University and at the Architectural Association. 

We invite all students and employees to join Anežka Mervartová for yoga classes promoting harmony and energy. Mats are provided. The classes are free of charge.

We exercise in the atrium near the plaster room.

Housing Otherwise

Practices of Care and Diversity in Vienna’s Housing Model

Housing Otherwise raises the question: how can we move towards a more just future of living together? What can an architecture of empathy, solidarity, generosity, and circularity offer to housing? In a time of multiple crises—from the climate catastrophe to growing social segregation—the world is suffering from a housing crisis. Housing is not merely a matter of shelter; it entails creating better living conditions for all, encompassing affordability, diversity in living concepts, and new forms of sharing and community.

The city of Vienna has a long history of social housing, from the settler movement and the housing blocks of Red Vienna to pioneering projects such as the One-Kitchen House. But where do we stand today? How can a feminist approach to social housing be practiced, taught, and imagined? This lecture offers historical, contemporary, and imagined housing experiments in Vienna, seeking multi-perspective and previously underrepresented concepts of cohabitation to advance spatial justice in housing.

Bernadette Krejs (PHD) is an architect and Senior Scientist at the Research Unit of Housing and Desing at TU Wien. Her work is situated in a transdisciplinary research field between architecture, housing and visual culture. Her awarded dissertation focuses on the media representation of housing through digital platforms. She has extensive international teaching experience (DAE Design Academy Eindhoven) and is co-founder of the international PHD Program on New Social Housing. She is editor and author of numerous books, Changing Spatial Practices (transcript, 2025), Vienna: The End of Housing (as a Typology) (Spektor Books, 2024), Instagram-Wohnen (transcript, 2024). Her work has been published in various exhibitions, AGENCY OF BETTER Living (La Biennale di Venezia 2025), PLATFORM AUSTRIA (La Biennale di Venezia 2021). She is Margarete Schütte Lihotzky Project Fellow (2024) and LINA – European Architecture Platform Fellow (2023). She is co-founder of the queer feminist collective Claiming*Spaces and co-founder of the activist research practice Palace of Un/Learning where she collaborated with various institutions, including Fundació Mies van der Rohe Barcelona, Oslo Architecture Triennale, DAZ – Deutsches Architektur Zentrum Berlin and many more.

We invite all students and employees to join Anežka Mervartová for yoga classes promoting harmony and energy. Mats are provided. The classes are free of charge.

We exercise in the atrium near the plaster room.

Housing to build community

Cooperative housing projects can be used as a framework for experimenting in the production of collective housing. This makes it possible to overcome some of the limitations of conventional developments of public and private housing. The particularities of the model offer the possibility of questioning pre-established values and practices. And architecture can help rethink the collective housing programs and our relation with our homes. In the last years, Barcelona and Catalonia have witnessed how a new model of cooperative housing has been the base for alternative and innovative housing solutions.

Lacol is a cooperative of architects based in Barcelona. It has been awarded with several recognitions, including the Emerging category of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Awards 2022, and has been selected in the biennials of architecture in Venice (2016, 2021), Buenos Aires (2017) and San Sebastián (2019). La Borda has also won the European Collective Housing Award and has been awarded at the European Responsible Housing Awards and the World Habitat Award.