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 two and a half 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 design based, technology-based and environment-based perspectives on how architecture interfaces between digital/building technology and digital/natural environment.