Counterintuitive Building Types – Innovation Potentials for Sustainable Transformation of Commercial and Retail Locations

Synopsis
Selected commercial retail and properties provide existing resources for this project’s case studies that will convert and further develop them towards more positive energy, use, and life cycle balances. The  currently underperforming properties will be transformed into more active and attractive places of higher experiential density and environmental relevance through multiplication of space and uses in the interior and exterior areas, demonstrating opportunities for more sustainable development of these understudied building typologies. Buildings and construction processes cause about 40% of all CO2 emissions and can therefore make a significant contribution to tackling the biggest problems of our time - climate collapse and loss of biodiversity. This requires multiple paradigm shifts, which this project addresses in a little-researched segment of the planning and real estate sector: the countless retail, retail park and commercial properties that have been built on greenfield sites and connected to individual transport in recent decades. Can remodeling and rebuilding these substantial building inventories integrate more circular economy approaches? This approach seems counterintuitive at first, since for most of these properties only demolition, recycling, and renaturation seem reasonable, yet this project would like to use selected properties to develop scenarios that build on these existing resources and their infrastructure connections and think them toward more sustainably positive energy, use, life cycle, and social balances. Through the multiplication of space and uses - communal, logistical, sports and leisure-related programs, temporary/experimental residential and office uses, etc. - these properties could not only be structurally redesigned and further developed and equipped with state-of-the-art technologies, but also create socially sustainable, identity- and community-creating "third" places with the corresponding quality of stay and long-term profitability for society as a whole. In this cooperative R&D project, possible building and energy solutions for the climate-neutral city will be developed based on these monofunctional and underperforming building stock of the last decades. Based on architecturally and urbanistically sophisticated conversion and further development scenarios, existing buildings, conversions and extensions will be designed, modeled and computationally verified as an integrated and combined system for climate-neutral buildings and neighborhoods. The project connects key sustainability goals by building on extensive existing resources, designs the transformation and rebuilds them into more socially valuable "third" places, and provides key data on cost, energy, and sustainability.

Project duration:
November 2022 – October 2025

Funding:
The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)

Project team:
Institute of Design and Building Typology: Andreas Lechner (Project leader)

Project and Cooperation partners:
Graz University of Technology, Institute of Design and Building Typology
Graz University of Technology, Institute of Structural Design
Graz University of Technology, Working Group Sustainable Construction
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU), Department of Landscape, Spatial and Infrastructure Science; Institute of Spatial Planning, Environmental Planning and Landrearrangement
WMV Immobilien AG