Course General Description

The focus of this program is to understand a site and its context as a driving force, a material to work with, as a place of activity, and a field for action. The students concentrate on approaches that make a site the point of departure for the artistic process.

School General Description

In the heart of Vienna, the capital of the Danube monarchy, the predecessor institution of the current University of Applied Arts, the Imperial Royal Arts and Crafts School, was founded in 1867. It was closely affiliated with the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry (today the MAK), the first Arts and Crafts museum on the European continent. It was established in 1863 following the example of the South Kensington Museum in London, now the Victoria & Albert Museum, and was to serve as a collection of models for artists, industrialists, and the general public. At the time, early-industrialised England played a pioneer role in supporting a reformed Arts and Crafts movement in order to prevent its decline in the Machine Age. In the spirit of Historicism, the aim was to make it possible, also in Vienna, to study the great styles of the past by example of Arts and Crafts objects in the museum and to set up a place of advanced education for designers and craftsmen with the Arts and Crafts School in Vienna. It should train artists and teachers in equal measure to serve the demands of the art industry.