Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister
In this seminar we will discuss the transformation of architectural education after World War II and its impact on today’s challenges alongside the recently publisched book “Radical Pedagogies” (MIT Press 2022). The historical case studies and efforts to defy architecture’s status quo will serve as testing ground against pedagogical strategies we might employ today. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and, in some sense, define architectural discourse and practice. Viewed through their dissolution and afterlife as well as through their founding stories, these projects from the last century raise provocative questions about architecture’s role in the new century. The language of reading and discussion is English.

Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister
Architecture’s scales are not limited to buildings, as architecture’s effects are not limited to structure or aesthetics. Rather, the impacts and effects of built environments range from molecular particles to global logistics of extraction, from human bodies constructing and maintaining it to regional effects of demographic shifts or cultural appropriations. In this seminar, we will approach these impacts and effects by looking at different scales of modern and contemporary society. We will discuss both the emergence and the currently unfolding crisis of the established structures of globalization, solidified by economy and shattered by wars and mass displacement. To do so, we will examine six case studies ranging from community to the colony to transnational networks.

The seminar will be taught in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Alla Vronskaya, the chair of Architecture Theory and History, Kassel University. Meeting together biweekly in person (connecting online to the other group), we will discuss a text by a leading contemporary scholar or theorist of architecture, followed by an evening lecture and discussion session with the author of the respective text. The language of reading and discussion is English.

Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister, Hannah Knoop
Emergencies are everywhere: the have a global impact and are usually triggered by global ecological, economic and social factors. 

The first action in an acute emergency is a roof. It is followed by walls and other architectural elementes - acording to the UNHCR's Handbook for Emergencies, the "bible of camp planning". Even on a larger scale, architecture and urban planning play a crucial role in crisis. But how are emergencies defined? Who is involved in planning and design? Which architects have designed standards for emergency situations? 

The seminar is designed as a reading and research seminar on projects and offers a forum for intensive exchange among each other. 

Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister
In a historical overlay, we will repeat a 1999 KIT excursion to the Netherlands during the seminar week. With original slides, timetable and the original selection of built examples we will compare the aging processes, urban and demographic changes and appropriations with 1999 on site. Changes in media and mediation of architecture (slides vs. Instagram, lecture vs. TikTok) will be discussed as well as the consequences of the Superdutch wave of the 1990s, which continues to reverberate in master plans and aesthetics today.

Hannah Knoop, Eleni Zaparta, Bart Lootsma
Stereotypes, patterns, norms and standards shape environment and architecture. Whether through regulations and laws, as design tools or transferred from society's discourses, they provide order and structure. But how do stereotypes come into being? Who shapes them, on what design, social and legal foundations are they built? Architecture can reflect technical and social innovations, but it can also manifest what is long overdue. Both need to be uncovered and questioned.

The event is designed as a reading and research seminar. The aim is to critically explore the dimensions of stereotypes and to observe one's own design based on projects.

Bart Lootsma
The experimental work of Austrian architectural collectives and designers from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s has been called the “Austrian Avant-Garde.”
This seminar is dedicated to the consciousness-expanding, boundary-pushing and socially critical work of these designers.
Accepting no boundaries of definitions and disciplines, they created buildings, environments, objects, fashion, performances, furniture, and even experiences.
Works by groups like Coop Himmelb(l)au, Haus-Rucker-Co, Zünd-Up and independent designers and artists like Walter Pichler, Hans Hollein and VALIE EXPORT are a reaction to social and technological developments, but also to the Austrian context. What distinguishes the Austrian Avant-Garde from their Italian and British contemporaries is that their designs often go beyond the conceptual phase. Many works have actually been executed and allow to experience how new technologies will change the world in the near future.
Taking their lead from Hans Hollein’s saying, ‘Everything is architecture,’ he and his Austrian contemporaries shape their vision of the world in all sorts of ways: from inflatable shelters to performances, from fashion to furniture, and from television shows to cities of the future. Early on, they begin experimenting with cybernetics, space travel, drugs, media, and gender. Finding inspiration in pop culture, they often organize themselves as improvising collectives, along the lines of psychedelic rock groups.
The combination of experimentation and analysis makes the Austrian Avant-Garde one of the most radical movements of the time. Their themes are still relevant today:

The examination of the relationship between man and machine, communication versus isolation, and the desire to create personal bubbles. The visions of these activist designers were often forward-looking rather than backward-looking, forcing us to face the future once again.

Hannah Knoop, Bart Lootsma
Architecture is a geostrategic and politically contested space. Representative buildings, infrastructure projects or residential and urban space are both the stage and the subject of diverse negotiation processes. Current debates on displacement, war and the climate crisis bear witness to this. What role does the discipline play for political aims such as defense, territory and occupation, as well as for spatial justice and questions of citizenship? How can architecture be understood not only as plaything of geopolitical strategies and more as an active player in the context of human rights?

The seminar is designed as a reading and research seminar on projects and offers a forum for intensive exchange among each other.

Nathalie Bredella, Hannah Knoop
Is architecture still designed 'by humans for humans', or have we long since entered the age of posthuman design? Digital design tools, algorithms and the collection and interpretation of data are increasingly shaping and determining the design process: from the first sketches to realisation and object monitoring. The human factor flows into this as a set of data. The seminar addresses this process and the closely related concerns about the limitation of creativity and the diffuse fear of losing autonomy.

The course is structured as a reading and research seminar. The aim is to use examples to take a critical look at digital design tools and their cultural history.

Nathalie Bredella, Dennis Pohl
Today's smart cities realize the metacities of the 1960s and 1970s. User data, movement flows, and adaptability are not only the demands of new smart city designs but already a fundamental part of earlier meta-city planning. In the 60s and 70s, the social itself becomes value and commodity for the built environment. What media, and methods impact architecture from this era until present day? What are the origins of the economization of the social in cybernetic urban planning?

The course is structured as a reading and research seminar. The aim is to take a critical look at the history of the digitalization of smart cities, and to question the effects on today's urban planning.

Nathalie Bredella
Urban games imagine alternative futures, while experimental designs (Metastadt, R. Dietrich) use game rules and playful processes in the context of planning. This seminar explores the interplay of gaming and planning and deals with ideas of architecture and the city that are inscribed within game systems and are 'enacted' through gameplay. Together we will explore game mechanics (using Arduino) and develop interactive electronic installations that test the feedback between design and play.
Works will be exhibited at the Architekturschaufenster.

Rixt Hoekstra
Archives are neither neutral nor stable institutions but political entities themselves. The writing of architectural history, in turn, is dependent on material found in archives. Categories of archiving thus contribute to the marginalization of female architects in architectural history, as their designs and texts have not been systematically collected. This is the point of departure for this research seminar. We will visit several archives, and ask which criteria are in place when collecting data about architects, and how to discover data about female architects and their activities. We propose to think of archival work as a potential form of activism within architectural discourse.

Nathalie Bredella
The research seminar deals with selected subjects on the topic of architecture and digitization. Topics reflect on the tools and materiality of computational design, situating them in a historical context.

Nathalie Bredella, Hannah Knoop
Architecture is a material witness. Its interrogation reveals social structures and provides crucial evidence for conflicts and progession of events. Investigative research of built objects combines spatial strategies from architecture with forensic and journalistic methods. They serve to uncover and reveal power relations and power structures, as shown in works by Forensic Architecture, Alisson Killing among others. The course is designed as a reading and research seminar. The aim of the seminar is to engage with the new forms of collaborative truth-finding and architecture as investigative practice, to question them critically and to classify them historically.

Nathalie Bredella, Dennis Pohl
Architecture plays a key role in the design of outer space. Satellites, space capsules or space colonies are not only objects of science, but also the planned artificial environments by designers. Beyond providing ideas about space, as an emergency exit, metaphor or utopia, these designs convey how the earth is understood in ecological, technological and political terms. How can a life be considered outside of earthly conditions? The aim of the intensive reading and research seminar is therefore to deal with the interactions between architecture and outer space using selected spatial theories from the history of media, science and arts.

Nathalie Bredella
As universities move classes online, questions are raised about the interrelations between the university’s infrastructures and forms of knowledge production. Rethinking the mandate of education through the media, the seminar discusses the discursive spaces that condition the reading, thinking, and perception of knowledge: the constellation of lecture halls, laboratories, and libraries, which increasingly intertwine with technical networks since the 1960s. Using case studies and reading architectural theory, we will explore how the entanglement of digital and built space conditions the self-understanding of the sciences and speculate about future media constellations in the context of the university.

Rixt Hoekstra
Architecture affects everyone. But while societal calls for an open debate about feminism, gender, race, and class have come to the fore, German architecture faculties remain (suspiciously) quiet. Taking this situation as a starting point for discussion, this seminar focuses on the history of feminist’s critiques, and methods of “doing” and activism. We will examine feminist movements in the Netherlands and Germany that were questioning mass housing standards during the 1980s: visiting archives in Berlin, Karlsruhe, and Rotterdam, conducting oral histories, and asking what "doing gender" means today.

Nathalie Bredella
The research seminar deals with selected subjects on the topic of architecture and digitization. Topics reflect on the tools and materiality of computational design, situating them in a historical context.

Oliver Elser, Hannah Knoop
Architecture forms global society. The Palace of Nations in Geneva and the UN headquarters in New York are not only architectural icons, but also symbols of a global community. But the UN is in a crisis: it has to assert itself in a planetary society and stand up to nationalism and populism. How can transnational political aspirations be represented architecturally today? What does it mean to design for a transforming global world community?
The course is designed as a reading and research seminar. The aim is to engage with the aesthetics of global architecture in order to investigate the power and powerlessness of an architecture as global governance.

Oliver Elser, Dennis Pohl
Server farms that calculate everyday life became ubiquitous and indispensable. But the places of calculations have their own architecture history, that remains largely unconsidered. From the court of auditors until the data centers, no calculus can deal without the spaces where mathematical operations happen. This seminar analyzes the places of calculating regarding their impact on social relations. What characterizes these typologies? Which mutual relation exist between them and what is calculated?
This event is conceptualized as a reading and research seminar. It consists of engaging with the architectures of the calculus and revise these with literature from media theory.

Oliver Elser
What has a wider impact on architecture: The discussion about tax reliefs for commuters? An engaging article in the culture section? Or the reactions to the squatter movement?
In this 4-day block seminar we will explore the relevance of architectural discourses by reading newspapers together, unfortunately only in online archives due to the pandemic. The frame of reference is the 1970s, a time of upheaval. Criticism of mass housing, the reassessment of the old building stock by a broad protest movement, the first signs of the ecology movement: We trace all this in newspaper archives. Goals are: 1. collectively create a collection of key terms, 2. locate key texts, and 3. briefly classify the key texts.

Georg Vrachliotis, Hannah Knoop
Software determines the production of architecture – whether as design tools, methods of rendering and simulation, methods of digital fabrication or management and optimization of complex building processes. Software must therefore be understood in architecture as a cultural and collective phenomenon of world design, in which technical knowledge is less important than a critical examination of the creative, artistic and political potential.
The course is structured as a reading and research seminar. The aim is to take a critical look at the cultural history of current software in architecture and to ask about the power of digital design tools.

Georg Vrachliotis, Hannah Knoop
Everything seems deliverable: whether books from Amazon, shoes from Zalando or the menu from Deliveroo. Things and food are ordered and delivered to the front door. Goods, capital, platforms and people merge into a digital superstructure in which wishes are transformed into orders: “The Delivery Complex”. What effects does this have on the city and architecture? And what does it mean to design for such a service-oriented society?

The event is organized as a reading and research seminar. The goal is to explore interdisciplinary theories of space and time in order to take a new look at the consequences of the digital service society.

Georg Vrachliotis, Dennis Pohl
Architecture shapes our earth. How buildings are produced and constructed worldwide is a process that no longer takes place only on the surface of the earth. The earth has long since been digitally re-mapped in order to extract sandstone, iron, copper or lithium using complex processes and prepare them for the building industry. Raw materials are becoming a politically contested geological capital of global architecture. But how are architecture, raw materials and digitization related? And what is the geological footprint of architectural production?

The event is organized as a reading and research seminar. The aim is to explore the spatial, material and media theories of current ecological discourses.