Architecture Theory
The processes that shape large-scale built environments require critical analysis. Read through their social impact, bureaucratic and (proto-)digital design processes are understood in a multi-layered and intersectional way. This includes the critical examination of technophilic rhetoric of efficiency, rationalization, precision or function as well as the widening of actor circles or the consideration of consequences of architectural action. The urgent questions of our discipline concerning sustainability (also beyond technicist belief in progress) or diversity (as a real change of perspective, scientifically as well as in practice) are in the foreground. The questions that concern us are therefore the following: who produces which architectures with what (social, political or aesthetic) intention? At whose expense are they produced? Who and what is included or excluded? Which societal images are constructed, and what architectures are projected by societies? In teaching and research, we deepen selected questions methodologically and thematically, always closely linked to reading and writing practices through iterative text production and by approaching multi-perspective bibliographies and formats. Architectures, or better, spatial practices, shape environments in the midst of communities and societies. The responsibility this entails makes informed critical historical and theoretical engagement urgent.
Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister, 2023
This Thursday, our colleague Sina Brückner-Amin successfully defended her dissertation on "From Farms to the 'New Frontier': The Planning of UC Irvine's Educational Environment, 1932-1965".
The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister and received support from Prof. Dr. Rembert Hüser, Professor of Media Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt, as a second supervisor. The project was funded for four years as part of the LOEWE priority "Architectures of Order". Sina Brückner-Amin's work reconstructs and analyzes the thirty-year planning history of a university campus in the Southern Californian desert using multimedia "paper trails" from institutional archives. Dreamed of as an educational experiment and implemented by bureaucrats, the work tells of the attempt to shape a new generation of "educational pioneers" in - and through - a built environment.
Since February 15, Sina has been part of our department as a postdoctoral researcher with a focus on science communication and strategy for the saai archive.
We congratulate Sina Brückner-Amin on this outstanding achievement and look forward to working with her in the future!
Cooperation with the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max Planck Institute
More...
We are very delighted to welcome Grazia Tona as a guest lecturer this Wednesday in the seminar "Crossing Borders. Reading Architecture“!
More...
How to futurise the past, and curate the future? Jaap Bakema Study Centre (JBSC) annual conference; Contribution by Mechthild Ebert and Anna-Maria Meister, saai Karlsruhe
More...
