Seminar: Crisis? What Crisis? A Theme Park for the Climate Change; Professor: Lukas Feireiss; Participants: Nizar Aguir, Ulrike Asamer, Sandra Bambach, Stella Baumgartner, Jürgen Fattinger,  Eveline Handlbauer, Christoph Hübner, Katharina Kloibhofer, Lukas Jakob Löcker, David Lopez Alvarez,  Nina Mahringer, Anna Pech, Evi Pribyl, Adriana Torres, Tom Vens

The workshop-seminar Crisis? What Crisis? A Theme Park for Climate Change, conducted by Professor Lukas Feireiss with students at the Institute for space&designstrategies at the University of Art and Design Linz, critically investigates spatio-pictorial constructions of the climate crisis in images of everyday culture and contemporary media ranging from literature to film and television, as part of the institute's overall annual theme entitled Nature's Fury. Everyone is Talking about the Weather. It does so by jointly developing  a master plan and designing single fun rides for an amusement park loosely based on the overall subject of climate change.

Amusement and theme parks have been the source of great attention in both architecture theory and philosophy over the last century. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas defined New York City's famous resort Coney Island in 1978 as not only a space invested with creative experimentation but also the breeding ground for Manhattan and a "foetal" urbanistic laboratory per se in his seminal book Delirious New York . Italian philosopher-novelist Umberto Eco and French socio-cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard both refer to Disneyland, on the other hand, as an exemplar of hyperreality. Hyperreality here indicating the hypothetical inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically-advanced postmodern cultures. Disneyland works within a system that enables visitors to feel that technology and the created atmosphere "can give us more reality than nature can." The "fake nature" of Disneyland satisfies our imagination and daydream fantasies in real life. 

Based on precisely these assumptions, the seminar takes the opportunity to explore the subject of the prototypical theme park as exemplified in Disneyland in correlation with the all-too pressing issue of global climate change, as an exercise in collectively developing a speculative spatial narrative about a theme park of natural forces. Because the remote European island country of Iceland, more than any other place in the world, almost naturally associates with visions of untouched planes, geysers and active volcanoes, distinguished by its popular animistic belief in elves and power spots, the country is ideal terrain for this creative exploration in three-dimensional storytelling. This choice of location was further fueled by Reykjavik’s current mayor and former comedian Jon Gnárr, who recently included in his satirical political program the promise of a Disneyland near the capitol airport of Vatnsmýri. Picking up on Gnárr's idea, which already blurs the line between parody and reality, the seminar takes his campaign promise a step further and suggests the transformation of the entire island of Iceland into one theme park of unseen scale by the Disney Corporation called The Iceland. Naturally Spectacular, against the backdrop of the country's state-bankruptcy in 2008.