Josef Albers, Scherben im Gitterbild, ca. 1921

© 2024 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

From the vantage point of twenty-first century ecological crisis, modernism has often appeared compromised by its dependency on wasteful and extractive practices. In many instances, this criticism is justified; however, there is also a neglected history of modernist engagements with the problem of waste. In this project, several case studies will be assembled to explore its significance to designers, writers and artists, contributing to an atlas of modernity’s waste spaces. Amongst these are the figure of the ragpicker, a central metropolitan protagonist in the works of Baudelaire and Manet. The drains that feature repeatedly in representations of city streets in the 1920s, dirty modernist grids that function as interfaces between abject subterranean space and the rational day-lit space of the street, are another. Schwitters’ Merzbauten and Albers’ stained-glass assembled from shards taken from Weimar’s dump will also be considered, illustrating the utopian possibility of waste as a construction material following the First World War. The enduring and essential presence of servants within villas, without which these supposed machines for living would not have functioned, will be explored as an example of the penetration of modernist space by waste space.

This hidden history has been noted in various places, for instance in David Haney’s work on designer Leberrecht Migge’s circular economies of human waste during the Weimar Republic and Daniel Abramson’s re-reading of postwar modernism as a reaction to architectural obsolescence. In this project, key reference points are Walter Benjamin, whose theory of the outmoded – responding primarily to the obsolescence of the first consumer architecture, the arcades – remains under-explored in this connection; likewise Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s contemporaneous essay on Naples, ‘Ideal of the Kaputt’. Pierre Klossowski’s ideas will also be brought to bear on this material: his elusive claim that ‘constructions themselves become expressions of waste’ is a provocative description of the design process in the context of our present discourse regarding sustainability. 

Section of the Stackable Dishware Series TC100 by Nick Roericht at the HfG Ulm, 1959. Image by Nick Roericht.

The Lise Meitner Group "Coded Objects" will investigate the form of processes and the objects they produce. At a moment when the design and distribution of information has become a dominant driver of world politics and economy, the formal and material implications of “codes” often remain unnoticed or unchecked—as do concurrent shifts of agency in the object world. What would it mean to take Coded Objects not as stable denominator, but as a methodological investigation of form-giving operations and the matter of design? Coded objects as method of refraction will question any assumptions of "neutral" technology or immaterial bureaucracy: addressing the forming of values through aesthetic and material means promises to unveil uncomfortable friction and productive affinities necessary for this research to bear on the present.

For further information visit the project website.

If you were to browse through the complete catalog of the saai - one of the largest architecture collections in Germany with estates by Frei Otto, Egon Eiermann and Günter Behnisch, to name just the best known - you would find works by over 200 offices and architects. They would be sorted by name, referenced by material and medium, size and date, cataloged according to predefined categories and saved for future visitors. You would not find many women, their practices or spaces for or by marginalized groups or diverse practices. Like many institutionalized archives in the Western world, this one speaks to the long-standing conventions of a discipline constructed by so-called canonical figures - and their work. However, the metadata of the archival catalog does not consist of objective, stable categories. This paper is therefore concerned with exploring the power of metadata as a verb: the active use of archival methods and techniques to uncover lost histories and write alternative histories to those that dominate discourse.Because if you look more closely at the photos, plans and folders in the saai archive, you will discover women like Maria Verena Gieselmann, whose work was noted in her father's estate and later in that of her husband, although only her travel diary is marked as her own work. One discovers office partners such as Robert Hilgers, whose partnership with Eiermann was erased from the latter's estate. They are temporarily noted on drafts or recorded by cameras, mentioned in letters or on letterheads - all people who played a significant part in the work and success of those who established the signature. Unfortunately, if they are not consistently recorded in the metadata, these supporting actors (some of whom play a leading role) gradually disappear from the historical narratives. In the feminist tradition of building on existing structures, this paper (and our work at saai) seeks to explore steps that can be taken to not burn down (or otherwise undo) the archive entirely, but to intentionally annotate it with more diverse voices. How to write other histories in a German (male-run) archive at a technical university by working subversively and productively within the logic of the archive? How to mobilize archival activism within the complicated and paralyzing bureaucracies of public institutions? By bringing together and cross-analyzing collections and convolutions against the dictum of the personal (male) estate, we argue that by harnessing the power of metadata, one can create, write and design other, more inclusive archival structures for an alternative architectural history.

^{Sketch by Ludovic van Essche, UNHCR Handbook for Emergencies, 1982, p.22.}
In December 1982, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) published a small blue book of 200 pages and 16 sketches. It became one of the most influential guides to the architecture of settlements in emergencies to this day, the UNHCR Handbook for Emergencies. In the 1980s, other organizations such as the United Nations Disaster Relief Organization (UNDRO), Oxfam, and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), among others, also initially published guidelines for emergencies. The UNHCR Handbook is notable in this regard for its numerous authors and consultants, the complexity of its use, and its influence as a primary object of study.
Established in 1950, UNHCR's mandate is to protect the human rights of refugees and stateless persons as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). But how does a claim to rights arise from the Declaration (1948) and how does it materialise? How is Article 25 (1) of the UDHR and the basic human right to shelter spatially defined and respected in an emergency situation? My hypothesis is that the written form of the handbook should be recognised as an act of design. In addition to the United Nations, several Euro– and US-American organisations played a central role in the drafting and circulation of the Handbook. They thus sought to define standards for the design of the Human Right to Shelter. It is time to examine how those seeking protection as a target group have likewise shaped the context of the Handbook.

What does it mean to call something a model? Which implications, projections or desires are called to the table? With architecture as a discipline working with substitute media and through displaced methods (architects, in fact, do not build buildings), this project puts the model front and center in an assessment of architectural thinking and doing. Where the introduction of BIM (building information modeling) has presented a key change in architectural praxis and hence, its future archives, an historical and epistemological investigation into modeling is necessary. It is precisely such technological shifts and new practices that call the architectural model as seemingly stable object into question. Rather than placing the model in categories lodged on either side of dichotomies such as analogue vs. digital or representational vs. conceptual, this project investigates the role of the model precisely on and between such dividing lines—there is a renewed urgency to discuss this when much hope (and investment) is placed in seemingly perfect simulation models, be it economic, meteorological or medical. After the international conference at TU Darmstadt in November 2022, we are now working on an edited volume to be published by Jovis Verlag in the spring of 2024. By looking at architectural models, this volume analyses model-making, model-seeing and model-being as epistemological processes: models both project and confirm, speculate and simulate. Through models, spatial imagination becomes manifest in different scales, travels through different textures and materials in a cyclical series of translations, tests, and (partial) reproductions. In short, it is through models that architecture materializes its expression of the possible.

Located in the seams between what conventionally gets called “architecture history” (monographic accounts or analysis of large-scale buildings) and history of science and technology, this project benefits from its disciplinary overlap. Treating algorithmic thinking as inseparable from an aestheticized rationalism uncovers a profound aesthetic and epistemic convergence between seemingly opposed historical movements and actors. At the same time it investigates the question of "paper architecture" not as radical revolution of representation, but as the (equally radical) formation of bureaucratic administrative processes on standardized paper sheets. This project brings to the fore the urge to question a ready dichotomy of design and bureaucracy, and of “neutral” technology and morality. Placing a history of algorithmic thinking in spatial vicinity to the making of architecture and the history of science promises to unveil uncomfortable friction and productive affinities necessary for this history to bear on the present.This research project aims to construct a portrait of algorithmic thinking as a set of both human and aesthetic negotiations alongside the technical collection and commutation of data points through prescribed programs. We investigate several case studies of the 19th and 20th century, where architects together with bureaucrats tried to devise methods to automate design. This project employs three modes of scholarly expertise: rigorous, in-depth individual archival research to prepare the case studies, intensive interdisciplinary exchange in an international symposium to work out shared terminology and test methodologies with other scholars, and, lastly, a series of publications as public contribution to a discourse that urgently needs historical scholarly attention.

Prof. Dr. Sophie Hochhäusl is Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at Princeton University and Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at our department .

For her book Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Art of Collective Dissidence, 1919-1989, she will make Schütte-Lihotzky's writings from her time in the resistance available to an international readership for the first time. In addition, we are establishing a long-term working group on the question of "Architecture of Resistance" together with the NS Documentation Center in Munich under the direction of Dr. Mirjam Zadoff. We are investigating the spatial and architectural dimensions of resistance-a field of research that is only slowly forming. We see this topic as a foundation for both strengthening academic transatlantic ties and engaging in conversation with a broader public about the role of architects in times of political oppression.

Radical Pedagogies is a multi-year international collaborative research project. After exhibitions at the Lisbon Triennial 2013 and the Venice Architecture Biennial 2014 (where it received a Special Mention from the Jury under Rem Koolhaas) the eponymous book with more than 110 global case studies was published with MIT Press in 2022. Currently an installation at MUGAK San Sebastian and an extended database are in the works. Edited by Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University), Ignacio G. Galán (Barnard College/Columbia University), Evangelos Kotsioris (MoMA New York) and Anna-Maria Meister, the project explores a series of pedagogical experiments that played a crucial role in shaping architectural discourse and practice in the second half of the twentieth century. As a challenge to normative thinking, they questioned, redefined, and reshaped the postwar field of architecture. They are radical in the literal meaning stemming from the Latin radix (root), as they question the basis of architecture. These new modes of teaching shook foundations and disturbed assumptions, rather than reinforcing and disseminating them. They operated as small endeavors, sometimes on the fringes of institutions, but with long-lasting impact until today.

Nathalie Bredella: The Architectural Imagination at the Digital Turn, Routledge, London, 2022.
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ARCH+ Nr. 239: 
Infrastrukturen der Externalisierung                       Guest -Editing by Dennis Pohl
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Hannah Knoop: Beyond a Game of Tetris Thoughts on Labour, Work and Action in Architecture, in OASE #106, Table Settings. Reflections on Architecture with Hannah Arendt, 2020, 96–103.

Georg Vrachliotis: Geregelte Verhältnisse. Architektur und technisches Denken in der Epoche der Kybernetik, Bauwelt Fundamente, 162, Birkhäuser, Basel, 2020.