Andreas Siess

New Challenges for Architecture in the 21st Century

The architecture of the 21st century is facing unprecedented challenges: climate change, demographic shifts, wealth distribution, resource scarcity, and, not least, the continuous urbanization of our planet. Architecture, as both a practical and social science, must engage with these pressing issues. Added to this are the varying demands placed on buildings in different regions, influenced by factors such as geology and weather conditions.

It’s clear that there’s no universal solution to such a complex web of problems. Recognizing this, I was part of an international team of scientists, designers, and architects forming the Ideal Spaces Working Group – back at the time as an independent and open collective.¹ Together, we wanted to explore how space can be used in an ‘ideal’ way—whether in terms of practical design and planning, or through lived experiences and dreamt utopias—to help shape ‘the world of tomorrow’. Our goal was not just to showcase ideas, but to invite visitors to reflect, question, and contribute their own visions for the future.

Showcasing Ideas at the Venice Architecture Biennale

How did Leonardo da Vinci envision his ‘ideal’ city? What lessons can we draw from planned cities like Karlsruhe, or from utopian concepts like Geoffrey Jellicoe’s Motopia or Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle? Can seemingly chaotic, unplanned environments such as slums reveal fragments of ideal urban living?

To explore these questions, we recreated historical concepts of ideal cities in 3D, working closely with historians and original source materials to ensure accuracy.

In total, we showed seven different imaginations of ‘ideal’ spaces:

• Reims cathedral
• Leonardo da Vinci’s Water City
• Weinbrenner’s Karlsruhe (in cooperation with members of Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences (Studiengang Geoinformationsmanagement)
• Geoffrey Jellicoe’s vision Motopia
• Tony Garnier’s planned Cité Industruelle
• Paolo Soleri’s idea Babel IIB
• Favela (in cooperation with Matt Bühler)

Concept

Our exhibition consisted of three individual parts:

• Wall 1: A huge and immersive CAVE-like projection where prerendered movies of the seven utopian spaces were shown.
• Configurator: An installation where the visitors could design their own utopia using an interactive table, a haptic sandbox for terrain generation and a short distance projector for feedback.
• World disc: A projection of a rotating disk where sigificant developments where engraved, depicting the correlations between the projection from Wall 1 with the chosen configurations at the interactive table.

Preproduction

For the complete preproduction we rented the space of the former restaurant ‘Rössle’ in Furtwangen. Here we could set up all neccessary machines and setups in order to test our concepts and ideas on the fly. This kind of space was crucial for quick development cycles.

To test the concept for Wall 1, we built a demo setup in 1:4 scale at our improvised studio.

Concept & Constraints

Producing the prerendered content for Wall 1 had some significant constraints: As always, money was severly limited and we operated on a very tight schedule. We had access to three PC workstations that we used for all rendering. Since all our spaces, that we wanted to show consisted of vast amounts of 3D geometry it was not possible to do any rytrace rendering on the GPU. (Background: The most potent GPU at the time was my GTX980 with 4GB of VRAM. This amount of memory was almost totally consumed by just displaying the mesh geometries.) That’s why we did all rendering on the CPUs, since then we could use the full 64GB of RAM the workstations provided.

Given these constraints we opted for a visual style that we called ‘Zen’. We refrained from texturing, worked with a very limited color palette and abstract geometries for vegetation. Following this pattern we could also ensure that all of our depicted world would feature a coherent visual style.

As main toolset I used Maxon Cinema 4D R16 for the complete modeling, animation and rendering pipeline. The final postproduction was done in Adobe Premiere with some minor tweaks in After Effects.

Exhibition and Location

The installation was shown in the space of Palazzo Mora (European Cultural Centre) in Venice. There is still an 360° interactive view of the space and our exhibition available here:

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=uJ3C4GTcgVg

Doing an interactive media installation in Venice has its pros and cons. On the one hand, frequent power outages slowed the progress from time to time. But on the other hand, all equipment needs to be transported by boat, which is cumbersome but also a one in a lifetime experience.

Ideal Worlds: Between Utopia and Perfection

The installation deliberately plays with the duality of the word ‘ideal’—which can signify both a personal inner vision and the pursuit of perfection. Can these two poles—technocratic flawlessness and utopian dreams—ever be reconciled? How much are we influenced by our Western worldview and cultural heritage? Can theoretical ideals withstand the reality of individual human experience? Is it even possible for large, urban populations to reach a consensus on what constitutes an ‘ideal’ city? Or must we accept that personal ideals often diverge from collective needs? And crucially, how much space is left for individuality and customization?

Importantly, the historical urban plans showcased in the installation were never intended to be sterile frameworks reluctantly populated with life. Instead we chose to transform these visionary designs into an immersive, walkable projection, where visitors could experience first-hand what it might have felt like to live in these cities.

As they wandered through, they were encouraged to reflect: Would I feel comfortable here—or not? This experience often challenged preconceived notions of what ‘ideal’ really means.

Intuitive Participation: Building Your Ideal City

At the heart of the project lies one fundamental question:

How do we want to live together?

To explore this, visitors were invited to design their own ideal city using intuitive, hands-on tools—no prior planning knowledge required. Two interactive tables, connected to a shared projection wall, formed the centerpiece of the experience.

At the first table, visitors could sculpt the digital terrain of their city using quartz sand. Whether they envisioned a coastal city, an archipelago, or a classic “greenfield” development, they could shape the landscape with their own hands in real time.

The second table allowed users to place, move, or rotate physical objects on a glass surface to define the locations of key buildings. Through simple gestures, they could also control factors like housing density or the placement of parks and green spaces. A 3D model of the city updated instantly, reflecting each visitor’s unique vision.

This tactile interface was a conscious departure from the complexity of conventional planning software. The goal was to remove technical barriers and make city design accessible—even for those who might shy away from traditional digital tools. No specialized knowledge was necessary; anyone could give form to their personal idea of an ideal living environment.

Award nomination

The exhibition was on the shortlist for the GAA foundation prize 2016.

Press coverage

• https://theconversation.com/leonardo-da-vinci-designed-an-ideal-city-that-was-centuries-ahead-of-its-time-111884
• https://www.tomorrow.city/the-city-designed-by-leonardo-da-vinci-that-was-centuries-ahead-of-its-time/
• https://www.openculture.com/2021/05/leonardo-da-vinci-designs-the-ideal-city-see-3d-models-of-his-radical-design.html
• Horizonte: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317209482_Ideale_Stadte_-_Furtwanger_Studierende_prasentieren_ihre_Arbeiten_auf_der_Architektur-Biennale_in_Venedig_2016
• Google Arts and Culture: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/time-space-existence-palazzo-mora-time-space-existence-biennale-architettura-2016/owXhD54Bqm0PLA?hl=en

Academic research & dissemination

Ulrich Gehmann, Michael Johansson & Andreas Siess
Abstraction and Resilience: Symbolics and Space.
Book chapter (double blind peer-reviewed) in: Nicholas N. Patricios, Giulia Pellegri, Clara Goncalves, Fatih Rifki and Jesus Lara (Eds.): Representation in Architectural, Landscape and Urban Design. Athens: ATINER. S. 103-118. ISBN: 978-960-598-530-1 (derived from our presentation at the Italian Pavilion at the 17^th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 30 May, 2021)
Link to the publisher

Ulrich Gehmann, Michael Johansson, Andreas Siess
Utopia
Essay and discourse input for the Malmö Fotobiennal 2021, supported by Malmö stad.
Fulltext (Wayback Machine)

Andreas Siess, Daniel Hepperle, Matthias Wölfel, Michael Johansson
Worldmaking: Designing for Audience Participation, Immersion and Interaction in Virtual and Real Spaces
Conference article (double blind peer-reviewed) for: ArtsIT 2018 – 7th EAI International Conference: ArtsIT, Interactivity & Game Creation, Braga, Portugal. Published as book chapter (double blind peer-reviewed) in In: Brooks, A., Brooks, E., Sylla, C. (eds) Interactivity, Game Creation, Design, Learning, and Innovation. ArtsIT DLI 2018 2018. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 265. Springer, Cham. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-06134-0_7
fulltext PDF

Ulrich Gehmann, Matthias Wölfel, Michael Johansson, Andreas Siess, Daniel Hepperle
Ideal Spaces
Book chapter in exhibition catalogue in: GAA Foundation i.c.w. European Cultural Centre (eds.): Time Space Existence — La Biennale di Venezia 2016. Bonn: Global Art Affairs Publishing. pp. 120-125.
fulltext PDF

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Footnotes

1. As of today, the Ideal Spaces Working Group has transformed into a non-profit foundation. More info here: www.idealspaces.org ↩︎
2. Time-Space-Existence at the European Cultural Centre. ↩︎