The "Stuttgart Research Center for Architecture: Integrative Design and Adaptive Building” serves cross-faculty and interdisciplinary research and teaching in the university’s research priority area “Architecture and Adaptive Building”. It aims to synthesize scientific insights of the related research programmes in order to develop comprehensive approaches for addressing the ecological, economic and social challenges the building sector is facing. These challenge primarily relate to the exorbitant energy and resource consumption of the building sector, the dramatically increasing need for built space caused by urbanization and population growth and the severe lack of productivity of the building industry, which is related to a very slow adoption of digital technologies. Thus the main scientific goals of SRC ArchIDA are:
- to harness the full potential of digital technologies for pioneering innovation in the design and construction of architecture in order to push the building sector beyond the mere digitisation of established processes and related incremental improvements towards groundbreaking advancement,
- to research fundamental approaches of integrating adaptive elements in loadbearing structures and building skins and to uncover the related benefits and significant potentials for saving energy and resources
- to analyze, simulate and model design and construction principles of living nature and investigate the possible transfer to novel applications in architecture
The SRC ArchIDA also aims to strengthen research activities in the fields of architecture, civil engineering and building construction, and to interlink them with relevant university-wide competencies. Therefore its main tasks are:
- conceptualizing and coordinating research projects and programmes in architecture, civil engineering and building construction
- fostering knowledge transfer to stakeholders from industry, culture and society
- ensuring cross-faculty coordination of appointment measures for new professors in the field of ArchIDA
- support early career researchers and establish junior research groups in the field of ArchIDA
- organiszing conference and symposia to share and exchange knowledge