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:

Hannah Knoop, Bart Lootsma
 

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.

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.

*Arduino is an inexpensive microcontroller, like a miniature computer from the 1980s, which allows architects to create relationships between inputs (like light, heat or distance sensors) and outputs (like motors, lights, or speakers) to experiment with electronics, programming and human-computer interaction.

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, 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.

Dennis Pohl, Oliver Elser

Die Serverfarmen in denen der Alltag errechnet wird sind gegenwärtig nicht mehr weg zu denken. Doch die Orte des Rechnens haben eine eigene Architekturgeschichte, die noch nicht hinreichend erschlossen ist. Vom Rechnungshof bis hin zum Rechenzentrum – keine Rechnung geht ohne die Räume auf, in denen sich mathematische Operationen vollziehen. Das Seminar erforscht die Orte des Rechnens und befragt sie, wie darin soziale Verhältnisse kalkuliert werden. Was zeichnet diese Typologien aus? In welcher Wechselwirkung stehen sie zum Berechneten?

Die Veranstaltung ist als Lektüre- und Rechercheseminar konzipiert. Ziel ist es, sich mit Architekturen des Rechnens auseinanderzusetzen und diese mittels Lektüre aus den Medientheorien zu ergründen

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.