On Monday, 15th April 2024, the first project week of the 2024 summer semester began at the Faculty of Architecture and Design at Hochschule Wismar, University of Applied Sciences. Students from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE for short, the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, private university in Quinto) are also guests. They will take part in the workshop on "Sustainable and climate-friendly building with traditional and innovative construction methods and technologies" with Prof Jan Blieske from the Master's degree programme in Architectural Lighting Design. As part of the workshop, solutions for this type of construction will be developed and realised in the university's own workshops. Lecturers from Ecuador will also be guests. These include Prof. Jorge Andrade Benítez and Assist. Prof Esperanza Muñoz. The two Ecuadorian lecturers were received together with Prof. Blieske by the Rector of Hochschule Wismar, University of Applied Sciences, Prof. Dr Bodo Wiegand-Hoffmeister, for the signing of the new cooperation agreement.
Collaborative, interdisciplinary work is nothing new. Just last year, five universities from Chile, Germany and Ecuador launched the DesignBuild project "Environmental Science Lab - Environmental Sciences Learning Pavilion for rural secondary students" in Ibarra, Ecuador, with a symbolic laying of the foundation stone. In the time that followed, they realised a prototype. The Technical University of Berlin, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador/ Sede Ibarra and the Faculty of Architecture and Design at Hochschule Wismar, University of Applied Sciences, were all involved. The project was supervised from our side by the lecturers Prof. Rubén Jódar and Prof. Jan Blieske. At the end of March 2024, the joint project to develop a school laboratory for environmental sciences on the campus of the Universidad Católica del Ecuador in Ibarra was recognised as one of the five winners of the dbXchange competition.
Competition to promote DesignBuild projects – The call for submissions was open to DesignBuild projects that have been realised within the last three years (2020 to 2023) and published on the dbXchange website. Technology, sustainability, circular economy and scaling were the focus of the seven-member, German-speaking jury alongside social justice, interdisciplinary work and pedagogy as well as new insights into financing, ethics and project evaluation. Five equal prizes and four special mentions were awarded in 2024. The competition was organised by the non-profit association dbXchange e.V., which is registered in Berlin. The dbXchange platform is a tool that was originally developed as part of the European research project "DesignBuild Knowledge Network" from 2013 to 2016 to promote the DesignBuild methodology.
If you have any questions, please contact
Prof. Dipl-Ing. Jan Blieske, Faculty of Design at Wismar University of Applied Sciences
Field of appointment: Lighting applications in architecture, building climate and design
Mail: jan.blieske@hs-wismar.de
Phone: 03841 753-73 56