Think Big!
Great Ideas, Large Scale Projects and Disaster

11–12 April 2019
Munich

CAPMO, Munich

With their startup Capmo, Dr.-Ing. Patrick Christ (*1988) and his three co-founders want to eliminate paper from the construction site. Through artificial intelligence and modern web technologies, the software brings added efficiency to construction documentation and defect management – 80 percent of all building projects in Germany are currently over budget. On the market since early 2018, Capmo has attracted strong investors and already has its first reference projects. These include branches of Aldi and Rossmann as well as the renovation of the Oberpollinger department store.

www.capmo.de

SIGNA, Vienna

Jürgen Fenk has been a member of the SIGNA Group Executive Board since October 2017. Prior to that, he was a member of the management board of Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen. He brings years of experience in banking, capital markets and real estate. In addition to his primary focus at SIGNA on banking, capital markets and capital sourcing, he is also taking the firm into new fields of business, such as proptech, debt fund and insurance business.

www.signa.at

© Julie Brass (portrait photo)

Fiduciary Capital, Munich

Michael Gerlich is the founder and sole managing partner of Fiduciary Capital, a Munich-based real estate project development and investment group. The focus of the group is on the Munich metropolitan region, where it is currently developing a total area of approx. 200,000 m2. Previously he was a managing director for the US real estate private equity firm Rockpoint Group, for General Electric Capital Corporation, and for Lend Lease Corporation, a construction, property and infrastructure company headquartered in Australia.

Michael Gerlich is one of the moderators of our speed dating sessions for young architects and developers, which take place on 12 April 2019, 10:00–12:30.

www.fiduciarycapital.de

war photographer, Copenhagen

Jan Grarup is a Danish war photographer. Since the 1990s he has travelled to crisis regions around the world, covering the Gulf War, the genocide in Rwanda, the siege of Sarajevo, the war in Chechnya, Dafur, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, and more. Beyond the mere documentation of events, his greater interest lies in the people. Honestly, intensively and with great empathy, he tells the stories of those who have no voice of their own. Widely recognized for his work, he was awarded the World Press Photo Award eight times, the first time for his coverage of the war in Kosovo. Grarup co-founded the Noor photo agency and has published several books, most recently “And Then There Was Silence”, a compelling, five-kilo compilation of photographs he has taken since the 1990s.

www.andthentherewassilence.com
www.jangrarup.photoshelter.com

Chief Planning Director, Hamburg

Since November 2017, Franz-Josef Höing has been Chief Building Director of the Urban Development and Housing Authority of Hamburg. He succeeds Jörn Walter, who held this office for 18 years. Höing knows Hamburg well. From 2000 to 2004, he was personal advisor to the Chief Building Director and led the Hafencity project group. He then served as Senate Building Director in Bremen and as Head of Urban Development, Planning, Construction and Transport in Cologne. His challenge now is to shape Hamburg’s further growth – the senate’s housing programme envisages 10,000 new apartments a year, plus major projects such as the Elbtower in HafenCity.

www.hamburg.de

ingenhoven architects, Duesseldorf

One of the core competences of ingenhoven architects is the planning and implementation of high-rise buildings. In 1985 at the age of 25, Christoph Ingenhoven founded his office, which went on to become an international leader for sustainable, ecological architecture. Since 1997, ingenhoven architects have overseen the planning of the underground Stuttgart Central Station as the core of the Stuttgart 21 traffic and urban development project. Their largest project to date is Marina One, a multi-award-winning, 400,000 m2 high-rise complex in Singapore, which was completed in 2017. Two high-rise buildings are currently under construction in Tokyo.

Headquartered in Dusseldorf, ingenhoven architects has further offices in St. Moritz, Sydney, Singapore and Santa Clara, USA. Christoph Ingenhoven is a founding member of the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) and the Federal Foundation for Building Culture (Bundesstiftung Baukultur).

www.ingenhovenarchitects.com

© Jim Rakete (portrait photo)

Building Radar GmbH, Munich

Paul Indinger (*1988) founded Building Radar together with two of his colleagues in 2015. Before that, he studied economics in Munich, China and at the London School of Economics. Building Radar is a digital search engine that uses artificial intelligence to detect new building projects around the world at a very early stage. The team now has just under 40 employees and works with over 120 customers. These include global market leaders such as Bosch, Siemens and Linde as well as medium-sized companies such as Vitra and Schüco.

www.buildingradar.com

Chief Planning Director, Berlin

Architect and urban planner Regula Lüscher has been Senate Building Director and State Secretary of the Senate Administration for Urban Development and Housing in Berlin since 2007. The Basel native previously served as Deputy Director of the Office for Urban Development in Zurich, where she was responsible for the successful redevelopment of the Zurich West industrial district, among other things. Her aim is to develop Berlin further in its wild beauty. Europacity is one of the large central-urban areas that she has helped to shape from the very beginning. Currently she is working on a new mission statement on high-rise buildings in the German capital. Since 2011, she has also taught as an honorary professor at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).

www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de

© Anne Schönharting (portrait photo)

architectur critic and author, Berlin

Dr. Niklas Maak is an author, architecture critic and, together with Julia Voss, heads the Arts section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. He currently teaches architectural theory at Harvard and is co-curator of Rem Koolhaas’s exhibition “Countryside, Future of the World”, which opens in 2020 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. His recent publications include “Fahrtenbuch: Roman eines Autos” (Driver’s Log: A Novel about a Car), “Durch Manhattan” (Through Manhattan), and “Living Complex: From Zombie City to the New Communal”, a cultural history of living and call for new collective forms of living beyond the traditional single-family unit.

MVRDV, Rotterdam

Celebrating his 60th birthday this year is Winy Maas, who co-founded MVRDV in 1993 together with Nathalie de Vries and Jacob van Rijs. Today, MVRDV is one of the most successful international offices for architecture and urban planning. They have realized numerous eye-catching buildings, such as the stacked landscapes of the Dutch pavilion for Expo 2000 in Hanover; the Glass Farm in Schijndel; a market hall in the form of a triumphal arch in Rotterdam; the Chrystal Houses in Amsterdam, whose Chanel flagship store has a glass brick façade; and the Tianjin Binhai Library in Tianjin, China. The new public art depot of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam will open in 2020. A master plan to develop “Grand Paris” and many more are underway. Maas also has a special relationship with Albania. This spring, renovation begins on the Pyramid of Tirana, a former museum once dedicated to the legacy of the (late) Albanian dictator, Enver Hoxha.

Winy Maas is Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the TU Delft and has taught at numerous other institutions, including the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London, MIT, Yale, Columbia in the US, and at the Strelka Institute in Moscow. This year he is also guest editor of the architecture magazine Domus.

www.mvrdv.com

© Barbra Vries (portrait photo)

Urban Development Councilor, Munich

In November 2018, the Munich City Council unanimously confirmed Prof. Dr.(I) Elisabeth Merk as head of its Department of Urban Planning and Building Regulations for a further six years. She first took on this role in 2007, as successor to Christiane Thalgott. After gaining her doctorate in Florence and working as a freelance architect, she was responsible for planning, landmark preservation and special building projects in Munich and Regensburg from 1995 to 2000. Subsequently she was in charge of urban planning in Halle/Saale until 2006. She has been a professor at the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences since 2005, and President of the German Academy for Urban and Regional Planning since 2015.

www.muenchen.de

Certain Measures, Berlin–Boston

Certain Measures, founded by Tobias Nolte and Andrew Witt, is a research-based design studio. Using machine vision and Big Data, they are transforming leftovers into new creations. Redistribution instead of recycling. Scrap concrete is repurposed for new facades, while city plans are scanned for building gaps for possible densification. An architect by training, Tobias was a research fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design and a director at the offices of Gehry Technologies in Paris and New York. The installation “Mine the Scrap” by Certain Measures has become part of the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

www.certainmeasures.com

SIGNA, Vienna

Tobias Sauerbier has been Managing Director of SIGNA Real Estate Management Germany GmbH since March 2019 and is a member of the Managing Boards of SIGNA Prime Selection AG and SIGNA Development Selection AG. Together with Timo Herzberg, he is currently responsible for all of SIGNA’s real estate activities in Germany.

Founded in 1999 by entrepreneur René Benko, the SIGNA Group is a privately held industrial holding company in the real estate and retail sectors. With real estate assets of over twelve billion euros and an additional development pipeline of around eight billion euros, the company is one of the most ambitious real estate investors in Europe. In metropolitan hubs such as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Vienna, it owns and develops numerous striking buildings in city-centre locations, including KaDeWe and the Upper West Tower in Berlin, the Golden Quarter in Vienna, the Alte Akademie in Munich and the Alsterhaus, Alsterarkaden and Elbtower in Hamburg.

The SIGNA Retail Group is one of the leading trading platforms in Europe with more than seven billion euros in sales, around 45,000 employees at 320 locations and over 100 web shops in 20 countries. In 2014, SIGNA acquired the retailer Karstadt. Last autumn, Karstadt and Galeria Kaufhof, two of the last major German department store chains, were merged under the management of the SIGNA Group.

www.signa.at

Archilyse AG, Zurich

Dr. sc. Matthias Standfest is founder and CEO of Archilyse AG, one of the top 25 proptech startups in Europe. A research-driven spin-off of ETH Zurich, Archylise offers project developers, architects and property owners a software-as-a-service solution to assess the quality of buildings. It’s a kind of “DNA test for architecture”. Matthias Standfest has a broad academic background in architecture, mechanical engineering and philosophy.

www.archilyse.com

Urban Development Councilor ret., Munich

From 1992 to 2007, over three terms of office, Prof. Dr.-Ing. E.h. Christiane Thalgott was Planning Commissioner for the city of Munich. Important decisions were made during her tenure, such as the reconstruction of the main station, the extension of the Mittlere Ring (Middle Ring) highway and the construction of the Jewish Cultural Centre. Even after her retirement as head of the Department for Urban Planning and Building Regulations, she remains involved in issues such as land law. She has been an honorary professor at the TU Munich since 2003 and a member of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin since 2013.

Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, London–Los Angeles

With his London-based think tank, Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, Liam Young develops scenarios for our urban future – fantastic hybrid worlds for which he investigates and extrapolates on current technological developments. His speculative design fictions are based on expeditions to the ends of the earth undertaken by his nomadic research studio, the Unknown Fields Division. In places such as Chernobyl, Area 51 – a highly restricted military area in Nevada – or on the frozen Arctic Sea, he searches for moments in which our present condenses to offer a glimpse into the future. His work has been widely acclaimed by the BBC, NBC, Wired, Time Magazine, and many more.

His new installation “Planet City” presents a high-density urban scenario for the entire world population, based on the population density of Manila – currently the most densely populated city on earth. The area of this extreme megacity would only cover that of an average-sized US state.

www.tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com