Meeting nature halfway

The hefty weight of responsibility – both in terms of economy and in particular ecology – which was recently put upon the discipline’s shoulders drastically challenges the conventions of architectural design. Architecture can no longer ignore nature; on the contrary: it must act as a prosthetic device for it towards the creation of an architecture 2.0 – a new kind of synthetic ecosystem where the natural domain and the artificial domain coexist. For twoandahalf years, the Unit Hochbau at the Institute for Experimental Architecture of the University of Innsbruck has operated under the umbrella theme ‘Meeting Nature Halfway’. The resulting research gathers a multitude of designbased, technology-based and environment-based perspectives on how architecture interfaces between digital/building technology and digital/natural environment.