In the summer term of 2018 we welcomed Job Floris as visiting professor. The founding partner of critically acclaimed young Rotterdam office Mondanock (together with Sandor Naus) jointly taught a master studio with Andreas Lechner with the aim of designing a mixed use building at the central Graz square of Jakominiplatz.

fig. Job giving input 

Under the title of “Covering the Field”, the design was to feature a covered market that would welcome and accommodate the characteristic hustle and bustle of Jakominiplatz as a central public transport junction, and would enter into an architectural dialogue with the central historical structures around the site, beyond architectural one-liners or sculptural folly.


Located directly outside one of the city’s former gates (Eisernes Tor) of the southern city wall, Jakominiplatz today is an extension of the main shopping street (Herrengasse) in the chiefly pedestrian historic centre of Graz, which has a highly irregular form due to former fortification struc- tures. The students started with a thorough typological analysis of both historic and contemporary market halls through drawings and models. In the studio, these foundational typologies of market halls were then hybridised in order to encompass both a housing and mixed-use programme. Stacked above the hall, they prompted multiple dialogues on both urban and architectural scales.

Some programmatic considerations forming the brief for this studio understand the collective memory of a city as a physical place for deriving identity. Architecture and urbanism have an on-going urgent role in the formation of identity. Is it possible to design a spatial environment that provides this? Favourably, it would include large public and collective buildings, places of production and domestic environments — housing — and the quality of living in these areas. A second phenomenon is simultaneously taking place: a large number of cities are under the ever- increasing pressure of densification due to the explosion of urbanisation and tourism, resulting in rising real-estate prices and places of doubtful quality. This phenomenon is happening in Europe and beyond, and ur- gently requires research into the consistence of our urban environments. At the same time, this pressure might only be temporary. Therefore, it is worth engaging with the longer perspective by strategically thinking on the metabolism of a sustainable city, all of which could start with a close reading of the existing city fabric and simultaneously with the design of small-scale single objects. Current developments call for a focus on working on the city, researching the conditions of urbanity, on architecture making the city. This includes doing research on precedents, typologies and their origins, with which the students started this semester.