Strategies in Light of the New European Bauhaus for Resilience and Decreasing the Impact of Natural Hazards on Urban Areas

Dear Colleagues,

The early 20th century was marked by a rapid increase in the employment of new technologies in order to respond to the challenges of the time, which included affordable housing between the wars. There were several architectural currents which spanned two or maybe even only one decade, among which one of the most remembered today is the Bauhaus. These technologies were, however, not tested sufficiently and norms for more developed but less seismic countries such as Germany or France were applied in seismic countries such as Greece or Romania, rendering the buildings vulnerable. This Special Issue calls for papers on how to deal with these pre-code buildings. Generally, pre-code buildings are regarded more as those from the postwar period, which are more numerous than experimental interwar buildings, since Modernism spread then as the International Style. Also, historic reinforced concrete buildings are not always considered old enough to be subject to being listed. Contributions from the history of construction in this sense, with a view to the sustainability of the material today, when building with concrete should be decreased, are welcome. This means that the existing built substance should be refurbished instead of being demolished, with the aim of decreasing the carbon footprint. In this sense, the initiative launched in the current European framework programme after the 100^th anniversary of the Bauhaus movement might be a solution. The New European Bauhaus calls for beautiful, sustainable, inclusive solutions. Beautiful in this sense means that aesthetic qualities must be conserved when completing a retrofit intervention for natural hazards. At the beginning of this millenium, for example, research projects in engineering treated buildings with architectural value as common buildings. This is no longer the case in European programmes, with consideration given to social sciences and the humanities. Sustainable, in this sense, means resilient to natural hazards and includes also nature-based solutions. Today, climate change-related hazards are as threatening as earthquakes and the role of structural solutions as well as non-structural solutions for floods and wildfires, in particular, are not as researched as those for earthquakes. Papers on these topics are welcome. Inclusive, in this regard, means not only participation through, for example, living labs, in order to elaborate the solutions above (as they are non-structural management retrofit solutions through a change in function) but also consideration of the contribution of local cultures that renders different retrofit solutions for a diverse Modernism, meaning that within the global current learning from the vernacular might lead to regional differences.

Dr. Maria Bostenaru Dan
Guest Editor

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