OUT OF THE WILD is an ongoing research project by the chair for architectural theory of the University of Innsbruck. In the beginning, students and staff from the Platform History, Theory and Criticism of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna were involved as well and played a crucial role in its setup. OUT OF THE WILD tries to find continuities in architectural thinking that came out of the Viennese settlers movement after the First World War. It tries to figure out if and how these ideas spread and were developed further and if they have a potential for architecture and urbanism today and in the near future. The project centres around three Austrian-born architects and theoreticians: Otto Neurath (1882-1945), Friedrich Kiesler (1890-1965) and Christopher Alexander (1936-) but also investigates personalities, ideas, projects, events and movements in their vicinity. An important tool in this research is a website, www.outofthewild.eu, which allows to visualize both direct synchronous relationships between people and events as well as relationships and developments in time. The idea and structure for this website were developed by architecture students and staff of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the University of Innsbruck. Michael Hofstädter from Ovos web design programmed it. The website consists of a database, a customized Content Management System (CMS) and a web interface, which not only allows to store and present events and contents in a range of different formats, but also to visualize the relationships between these different contents/events in history and between each other. This enables a new and more complex view of these relationships.
The book Otto Neurath – City Planning by Sophie Hochhäusl is also part of this project.