The Austrian architect Gabu Heindl’s lecture “Planning Ethics” took place on Tuesday 2. 10. 2018 at 17:00 in the Brno Gallery of Architecture. This talk was part of the accompanying program of the exhibition “Dear architects… — Ethics in Architecture” and was organised as part of the festival The Day of Architecture.
How to deal with the dilemmas of architecture and what are its ethical questions? Is critical planning possible? What can architecture do? For whom are planners there? – A talk on the basis of Viennese housing and urban planning policies.
Gabu Heindl will present, from her forthcoming book on radical-democratic urban planning, the chapter on political planning ethics – a topic with which she has been dealing in her practice as well as research for a long time. Her architecture projects take their position in the urban cultural setting of film, art or music but also include kindergartens, schools and social housing. She does not understand architecture merely as a service but rather as the shaping of the environment, underpinned by analysis and extending to research projects undertaken on her initiative, lectures and publications as well as to productive discussions of an informal nature, in public debates and teaching contexts.
In her practice, she follows basic (ethical) rules: she says “yes” to the design of public buildings and cultural, educational and infrastructure facilities; she says “no” to chauvinist, racist or discriminating architecture, exploitative project proposals, suburbanising single-family homes or speculation ventures.
Gabu Heindl is an architect and urban researcher/planner in Vienna. She is the director of GABU Heindl Architecture, a studio specialising in public interventions, cultural and social buildings, and urban research/planning. She is the curator of exhibitions, lectures and symposiums on issues of politics in architecture and urban planning. Gabu is currently Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield, Britain, and also teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She studied architecture and urban design in Vienna, Tokyo and Princeton. Gabu is the author of several publications in books and architectural journals (JAE, Umbau, GAM, dérive a.o.), editor of Just Architecture (ERA21, 2012), Arbeit Zeit Raum: Bilder und Bauten der Arbeit im Postfordismus (turia+kant, 2008) and co-editor of position alltag – Architecture in the Context of Everyday Life (HDA Verlag, 2009). From 2013 until 2017 she was Chairwoman of the Austrian Society for Architecture (ÖGFA).
www.gabuheindl.at