Standardized, serially manufactured components define the high-tech architecture of the second half of the 20th century. The quantity of products and the associated data in technical specifications pose a huge challenge for both historical and technical evaluation. Product data sheets and catalogues of that time are barely useful today, hardly accessible and mostly only available in analogue form. Present in large quantities, ignorance and lack of understanding of these components leads to replacement and total substitution during renovations and repairs; transferable approaches to sustainable repair and preservation have been lacking up to now.
With the CONSTEMO research project, Prof. Andreas Putz from the Assistant Professorship of Recent Building Heritage Conservation at TUM is about to counteract the unnecessary disposal of recent building fabric. The ability to identify the individual building products efficiently and with a high degree of accuracy on site will be decisive for future conservation, repair and also subsequent re-use. To this end, windows in steel, aluminum and PVC from buildings built between 1960 and 1990 will first be examined. IFC-data generated from historical sources and 3D scans will be compiled in a digital archive. This collection will for the first time provide a comprehensive overview and understanding of windows in late modern architecture, and thus an essential basis for their sustainable repair and re-appropriation.
Since 2018, Prof. Andreas Putz has established the Professorship for Recent Building Heritage Conservation at TUM. In his research and teaching, he deals with questions of recording and preserving the building heritage of the recent past. In addition to further developing the basic understanding of the history and practice of building conservation since the 19th century, his work focuses on typical material groups and construction forms of the second half of the last century, not least metal and glass facades of administrative buildings.
Andreas Putz studied architecture at the TU Dresden, the University of Edinburgh and the ETH Zürich. He was initially employed as an architect in Basel and later in Dresden, where from 2009 he was in charge of the conversion of the former Schocken department store by Erich Mendelsohn in Chemnitz. He was a research assistant at the Institute for Preservation and Construction History (IDB) at ETH Zürich, where he received his doctorate in 2015. In addition to his freelance work as an architect, he subsequently worked as a research assistant at the IRS Erkner/Berlin and as a postdoc at the Institute gta of ETH Zürich. He is a member of the board of the Arbeitskreis Theorie und Lehre der Denkmalpflege (AKTLD), a member of the Koldewey Society and of the German National Committee of ICOMOS, and, among other things, active in the ICOMOS Monitoring Group for the UNSECO World Heritage Site “The Bauhaus and its Sites in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau”. Since 2022, he has been a member of the international scientific advisory board of the Leibniz Research Alliance "Value of the Past".
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