News Archive

Simone C Niquille is a Swiss designer and researcher based in Amsterdam NL. Through technoflesh Studio she produces films and writing that investigate computation as the new optics. Her work is concerned with vision technologies, the images they make and the worlds they create—from computer vision, 3d animation, computational photography to synthetic training datasets. Her work advocates for non-binary technology and against machine learning as a tool to validate and instrumentalize assumptions and reduce reality.

saai | Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Werkarchiv Egon Eiermann Signatur: EE_152_N_0242

This case study examines how two buildings at the German Embassy in Washington, DC reflect changing national identity and diplomatic self-presentation through architecture. Egon Eiermann's 1964 chancery building, with its understated modernist design, embodied West Germany's post-war desire to project restraint and technological sophistication while distancing itself from Nazi-era neoclassicism. In contrast, Oswald Matthias Ungers’ 1994 ambassadorial residence, with its classical columns and grand form, represents a more confident reunified Germany, though its architectural choices sparked controversy over historical associations. The case demonstrates how embassy architecture serves as a ‘calling card’ for nations, revealing shifts in diplomatic self-image and the complex relationship between architectural style and political ideology.

Matthias Böttger studied architecture and urban planning in Karlsruhe and London. He began his academic career at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, followed by the University of Stuttgart and ETH Zurich, where he taught art and architecture. From 2012 to 2017, he was professor and head of the Institute for Space and Design at the University of Art and Design Linz. Since 2017, he has been director of HyperWerk and professor at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. Since 2021, he has been head of the IXDM there, offering BA Process Design and MA Transversal Design courses.
In 2008, Matthias Böttger curated the German contribution ‘Updating Germany’ at the Architecture Biennale in Venice together with Friedrich von Borries, and in 2013 he curated the German contribution ‘Nòs Brasil! We Brazil!’ in São Paulo. From 2011 to 2022, he was artistic director of the German Architecture Centre DAZ in Berlin.

Monika Platzer studied art history at the University of Vienna. Works at Architekturzentrum Wien as head of collections and curator. She has led national and international research and exhibition projects, including Hot Questions – Cold Storage. The Permanent Exhibition at the Az W; Cold War and Architecture. The Competing Forces that Reshaped Austria; “Vienna. The Pearl of the Reich.” Planning for Hitler; a_show. Austrian Architecture in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Monika Platzer has taught at the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology; editor of ICAM print, the journal of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums (2004–2020). In 2014, she was visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, USA. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Austrian architecture and cultural history, transnational architectural history. She lectures and publishes extensively.
https://www.azw.at/
Tracing Spaces designs exhibitions that are developed and curated within the framework of its own research focuses (including 2012–2015 Urlaub nach dem Fall, 2014–2016 Road Registers, 2020–2022 Serpentine, 2023–2024 Cargo Vienna) or commissioned by third parties (including 2022 the new exhibition collection of the Az W Hot Questions, Cold Storage, 2022 IBA International Building Exhibition Vienna, 2023 Collected at Any Price at the Volkskundemuseum Vienna). In the field of urban curating, they activate interactions in social space through medium-term on-site projects and spatial interventions. Since 2015, Tracing Spaces has been operating a project space at Vienna's last major inner-city logistics hub, since 2020 under the label Museum Nordwestbahnhof, where the social milieu of the logistics landscape is embedded and its diverse history is researched and communicated.

MA and BA students! Need help figuring out your essays or final projects? Come by our THEORY CLINIC, December 18, from 12 - 3 pm, in room 254, and we will help you get back into the flow of things! 

Four times per semester we offer our "theory clinic": stop by without an appointment to discuss your design process and where it hurts. We offer references, comments and feedback for the neuralgic points in open table critiques - completely unbiased. Walk-ins are welcome!

Ana Neiva holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP), with a dissertation titled Exhibiting Portuguese Architecture: Twentieth-Century Curatorial Strategies. She is an invited Assistant Professor at FAUP—where she is also an integrated member of the research centre CEAU—and at Universidade Lusófona. Her research explores the intersections between architecture, curatorial practice, and contemporary societal challenges, with a special focus on health, well-being, and memory.
Her curatorial work reflects this engagement across contexts: from Porto – The City, the School, and the Masters (UABB Shenzhen, 2015), to Lo Studio Ginoulhiac – 10 Anni. 10 Case. 10 Temi di Architettura (Bergamo and Porto, 2019), and Fertile Futures, Portugal’s official representation at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale (2023), where she served as deputy curator. She currently co-curates O que Faz Falta: 50 Years of Architecture in Democracy, on view at Casa da Arquitectura, Matosinhos.

Michał Sikorski is an architect and urban planner, educated in France. He worked with Xaveer De Geyter Architects in Brussels for a decade and later headed the Office of Innovation at the University of Warsaw. He has taught and conducted research at several European architecture schools, including ETH Zürich and WAPW in Warsaw and wrote a book about campus planning. In 2021, he founded TŁO – meaning background or backdrop in Polish – a Warsaw-based architecture and urban planning office. The team of ten architects works mainly on the transformation and extension of existing buildings, with a strong focus on material reuse. TŁO designs for both public institutions and private clients, approaching projects as processes of transformation. The office was awarded the main medal at the London Design Biennale in 2023, and in 2024 won the competition for the extension and transformation of the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław, a project currently under development.

saai | Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau

Mechthild Ebert, Manuela Gantner, and Sina Brückner-Amin will speak on November 20 in Antwerp at the Archive Research Day of the Vlaams Architectuurinstituut (VAi) about the Conrad Roland Work Archive, a collaborative project of the saai Archive and the Wüstenrot Foundation. Anna-Maria Meister participates as keynote speaker.The 2025 edition is titled Hors Catégorie and examines how archival classifications both shape and limit our understanding of designs and design processes. How do archival institutions categorize objects, disciplines, and forms of authorship, and what blind spots arise as a result of these systems? How can we consider what evades, transcends, or challenges conventional institutional and historical classification? What do we do with hors catégorie practices?

What kind of practice is exhibiting architecture? Since 1970s, architecture has increasingly moved into galleries: with models, sketches and plans, architecture began to populate exhibits and biennials, museums and shows. Some of the biggest shifts in architecture discourse have started in and through an exhibition: where people meet, show and talk about architecture, things can be transformed on all scales. But in a discipline where you rarely exhibit the “real thing” - a building or space in 1:1 scale - what is it really that we get to see, show, or experience? Is a model able to represent a space? What about the space that surrounds the exhibits? How are architecture narratives constructed, and what material is used? Whether or not architecture has become “art” (an old discussion), questions of scale, media, and translation are the core of architecture’s exhibitionism. We have invited makers and thinkers - curators, exhibition architects, historians of exhibitions or institution makers - to tell us about their architecture practice through and with exhibitions.

AHRA

 At the 22nd Architectural Humanities Research Association Annual International Conference entitled “Conceptualizing Environment(s): Continuity and Change,” taking place in Liverpool (UK), Sina Brückner Amin, together with Chelsea Spencer (Columbia University), and Maryia Rusak, will be panel hosts. In the “Controlled Environments” strand, Brückner-Amin and Spencer will hold the session “Property Claims: Legal Fictions of Environmental Control,” while Rusak will hold the session “The Ecologies of Aid and Activism” in the “Natural Environments” strand. Virginia Marano of the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects” (KHI Florence) will speak in the session “Environments of Disability” on “Misfitting Environments: Reframing Access through Spatial Friction.”

Am 6. November präsentiert Sina Brückner-Amin ihre Forschung zu bürokratischen Planungsökologien der 1950er Jahre in Kalifornien auf der Tagung "Architecture and the Power of Bureaucracy" in Wien. Die Tagung, gemeinsam organisiert durch das Institute of Art History der Czech Academy of Sciences und der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ist Teil des FWF Projekts "Invisible Agents".

AISU

On 11 September 2025, Hannah Knoop will present her research on the standardization of architecture in emergencies at the 12th International Congress of AISU in Palermo. Under the title “The Crossroad City”, the conference explores the many meanings of the city as a site of exchange, migration, and cultural intersections. In the session “Interior Spaces of Migration: Dwelling, Displacement, and Identity”, organized by Min Kyung Lee (Bryn Mawr College) and Robin Schuldenfrei (The Courtauld Institute), she will present her paper “Standardized Care and the Interior of Emergency: Migration, Domesticity, and Spatial Adaptation”.

ZhdK

On August 20, 2025, Teresa Fankhänel will speak at the AA Visiting School Symposium: Traces in Formation at Zurich University of the Arts. The symposium Traces In Formation examines how traces can be used as material and as a concept in curatorial practice to make hidden structures, power relations and social systems visible. Artists, architects, curators, theorists and activists will come together to understand exhibitions as spaces of disclosure and counter-investigation. The event is part of the Building Information series, which has been organizing international exhibitions, workshops and discussions on information infrastructures since 2022.

MA and BA students! Need help figuring out your essays or final projects? Come by our THEORY CLINIC, July 10, from 1 - 4 pm, in room 254, and we will help you get back into the flow of things! 

Four times per semester we offer our "theory clinic": stop by without an appointment to discuss your design process and where it hurts. We offer references, comments and feedback for the neuralgic points in open table critiques - completely unbiased. Walk-ins are welcome!

On July 3 and 4, 2025, Sina Brückner-Amin will take part in the workshop “The Report: History and Theory of a Procedural Text Form” at the University of Bremen. The workshop works at the interface between the history of science and the history of bureaucracy. Paper drafts will be discussed and the conception of an interdisciplinary joint book will be worked on. During the workshop, Sina Brückner-Amin will present her research on the “Master Plan for Higher Education” in California in the 1950s.

On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the Architektur Galerie Berlin invites you to a special exhibition that deals with the future of exhibiting architecture: How is the presentation of architecture changing in the age of digital communication? What role do analog formats play and how can new media possibilities be meaningfully integrated? In collaboration with curators, including Teresa Fankhänel, and architects, the gallery takes a look ahead: the focus is on new forms of communication, changing viewing habits and the question of what exhibitions could look like in the future - from mobile formats to greater integration of public space. The exhibition is part of the anniversary program and invites visitors to think, discuss and discover.

The opening with an introductory speech by Teresa Fankhänel is on July 10, 7 pm at the Architektur Galerie Berlin

Newly published, also in Open Access: In his article “Siegfried Kracauer, Architectural Employee”, Tom Wilkinson examines how Kracauer's early professional experience as an architect shaped his later works of cultural criticism. The focus is on the year 1930, when Kracauer took a materialistic look at the precarious realities of life in the urban middle class with The Employee. The thesis is that it was not only his training, but also his frustrating practice as an architect that prepared the ground for his political thinking. Against the backdrop of today's labor struggles of young architects, Kracauer's analysis is once again gaining topicality.

Melissa Malzkuh, Metaverse Deaf Club, 2023.

WORKSHOP

Normative ways of seeing and moving through spaces have long dominated the discourse in art and architecture history despite their fictitious and exclusionary nature. And in architecture practice, accessibility is often treated as a construction checklist or a compliance measure. But what if access were instead a creative, disruptive, and transformative force? How would places, spaces, and the value of interpersonal relationships change with the embrace of the entire spectrum of experiences and perceptions taking place?

With Sudeep Dasgupta, Friederike Eyssel, Lindsey D. Felt, Laura Forlano, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, David Gissen, Louise Hickman, Natalie Kane, Rose Powell, Alexa Vaughn.

This event will be hybrid (see Zoom-Link below) and take place in person at Casa Zuccari, Via Giuseppe Giusti 49, 50121 Firenze.

https://eu02web.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/MpjPHk6ISR2fErFRvGCInw

For further information please see:

MA and BA students! Need help figuring out your essays or final projects? Come by our THEORY CLINIC next week, February 21, from 1 - 4 pm, in room 254, and we will help you get back into the flow of things! 

Once a month, the Professorship of Architectural Theory introduces itself in front of our office: as an “open-door theory clinic.” Anyone with questions about the design process, looking for references, or wanting to do a test review is welcome to stop by. Through open discussions and table reviews, we address the relevant questions and critical points - in a relaxed atmosphere. Just come on by!

Felix S. C. Wong

At the ICAM (International Confederation of Architecture Museums) conference in Hong Kong in December 2024, saai co-director and professor of architectural theory Anna-Maria Meister was elected to the ICAM board. She is looking forward to working with Martien de Vletter, Co-President (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal) and Ikko Yokoyama, Co-President (M+, Hong Kong) as well as Zoë Ryan, Vice President (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Alison Fisher, Secretary General (The Art Institute of Chicago), David Peyceré, Treasurer (Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Paris), Birgitte Sauge, Membership Secretary (Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, Oslo), Antonello Alici (Dipartimento di ingegneria civile, edile e architettura, Università politecnica delle Marche, Ancona), Deniz Ova (SALT, Istanbul), Saman Quraishi (CEPT Archives, Ahmedabad) and Shayari de Silva (Geoffrey Bawa Trust, Colombo).

The virtual launch of TAD 8:2 Coding takes place on Thursday, February 6, at 1:30 pm ET. The event will feature Op/positions authors Anna-Maria Meister, Peggy Deamer, Bernard Geoghegan, Vernelle Noel, and Adam Marcus in lively conversation on the critical and generative dimensions of coding for architecture and design. The launch will also include a discussion with editorial board members and questions from the audience. Registration is possible through the following link.

New issue alert: The Architectural Exhibition Review No. 3 – out now! Teresa Fankhänel is the editor-in-chief of aer, a grassroots, self-funded platform that nurtures a long-lost art form, architecture criticism. aer provides a much needed independent public forum for thoughtful discussion—without a subscription, paywall or the need to be in a particular location. Borne out of a common frustration with the quality of commercial architecture writing and its lack of independent and truly critical analysis, this ongoing online and print experiment solicits and collects short-form writing on a global scale

Mathias Joseph Alten, Michigan Pasture with Cows, 1914, Broad Art Museum, MSU, gift of the Alten and Gilleo Families, 99.16

Teresa Fankhänel (formerly Associate curator, Broad Art Museum) and Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez (Assistant curator, Broad Art Museum) co-curated the exhibition “Farmland. Food, Justice, and Sovereignty” at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, which will open on January 18, 2025. The exhibition is centered around questions of food knowledge, production, scarcity, and consumption against the background of Michigan State University’s 170-year history of agricultural tradition. For further details, visit the museum's website below.

In February 2025, Sina Brückner-Amin will present her research on the planning of UC Irvine and the Social Science Farm in the 1960s at the University of Copenhagen at the international conference "The Counter University". Participation is funded by the DAAD Congress Travel Program.

Three AT team members are presenting at the SAH Annual Conference in Atlanta: Anna-Maria Meister is co-chair of the session "Architectures of Precarity: Designing the Existenzminimum", Hannah Knoop is presenting in the session "Building Manuals as a Global and Local Medium of Development" and Sina Brückner-Amin is presenting a paper in "Masculinities, Gardens, Landscapes: Negotiating Gender and Nature." Hannah Knoop's participation is funded by the DAAD, Sina Brückner-Amin receives the SAH Scott Opler Emerging Scholar Fellowship.

Sina Brückner-Amin

Sina Brückner-Amin is awarded the 17th KIT Doctoral Prize! Her thesis "From Farms to the "New Frontier": The Planning of UC Irvine's Educational Environment, 1932-1965" was supervised by Anna-Maria Meister between 2020-2023 as part of the LOEWE Cluster "Architectures of Order". With this award, KIT honors outstanding doctoral candidates and thus underlines the high value of young scientists at KIT. The award ceremony will take place during the President's Banquet 2025.

,Housing. Problems. Houses. Beauty!'

Hannah Knoop is the moderating chair of the first "International Talks on Architecture" at HBC Biberach on December 5, 2024. Join her and many exciting speakers on thursday.

05-12-2024, 2-8pm

On November 27, 2024 we invite you to this year's saai Lecture with Marina Otero Verzier (Columbia University GSAPP). In addition to her lecture “Zone of Potential Insufficiency”, our new research center iaas [international architectural archive studies] and our podcast “Archive Gossip” will be presented during the event. 

Join our colleague Rebecca Carrai of Lise-Meitner-Group “Coded Objects” for a reading session featuring “The Organizer’s Guide to Architecture Education” (Routledge, 2024), co-authored by Kirsten Day, Peggy Deamer, Andrea Dietz, Tessa Forde, Jessica Garcia Fritz, Palmyra Geraki and Valérie Lechêne, in collaboration with Renzo Dagnino. The publication serves as a timely call-to-action for transforming architecture education to meet the monumental environmental and social challenges of our time. 
This event will take place in person at Casa Zuccari and online. There is no need to formally register to participate.

From 17–19 October 2024, our collaborators of Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects” host the international symposium Objects. Between Absorption and Isolation in Florence.

This event will be hybrid and take place in person at Palazzo Grifoni. For a Zoom registration, please follow the instructions at the KHI website below.

Tom Wilkinson will be launching his new book at the Warburg Institute in London on 17 October. Published by MIT Press, the book, titled Emergency Money: Notgeld in the Image Economy of the German Inflation, uses these peculiar objects to explore the relationship between economics and the visual in a moment of crisis.

17 October 2024, 6:00PM - 7:30PM
Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London

Anna-Maria Meister will speak about "Coded Objects" in her inaugural lecture as Professor of Architectural Theory and Co-Director of SAAI on 10.7.24. This is not about the question of analog or digital, but about the design of our environment as aggregation of many things, whose form and impact we must critically question. Because the design of things, which in turn form architectures, is always also about shaping values - through aesthetic and material means. This means understanding them as the result of social, ecological, economic and aesthetic negotiations. This necessarily calls into question any separation between design and bureaucracy, as well as the assumptions of a "neutral" technology or innovative processes. Rather, it is about the substance of the narratives that have shaped and continue to shape such "coded objects"

Wednesday, July 10th, 7 pm
Fritz-Haller-Hörsaal, KIT

Are You a Model? explores the model as architectural tool and practice. The volume approaches architectural models not as categorical objects but through questions such as: What determines a model’s functions and agencies? When in the design process does it unfold its power and when has it served its purpose? Based on nine overarching questions, the book brings together interdisciplinary voices from architecture, art history as well as architectural and curatorial practice, and software engineering. 31 contributions interweave perspectives from various disciplines and geographies, and reveal surprising affinities rather than seeking conclusive answers. Models are thus not classified according to time of origin, genre, or material, but rather understood as an epistemologically diverse practice.

We want to make architectural theory more tangible by exhibiting it, discussing and presenting it in Karlsruhe's urban space! To this end, we are once again inviting you to the Architekturschaufenster for "AT goes A SF": an evening in which we want to discuss insights, questions and ideas from our courses with students and guests. We move through diverse scales, categories and contexts: we will work on key terms of architectural theory, read critical theory, examine the different scales of architectural objects, examine the culture of bathing facilities, analyse architectures of political decision-making and visit the Federal Court of Justice, and, while "annotating" another study trip live in Italy, we will look into Florentine archives. In doing so, we understand architectural theory as a unifying critical practice – and look forward to a lively exchange!

Karlsruhe, July 9th 2024, 5-8pm

Tom Wilkinson will be presenting a paper titled 'Healing the landscape with shit and money: Wenzel Hablik's Notgeld' at Counter-Image Conference in Florianópolis, Brazil. The conference, organised by the Federal University of Santa Catarina Florianópolis and NOVA University Lisbon, is subtitled ‘Visual Culture and Ecological Thinking: reimagining relationships in the world’. 

Florianópolis, 7-9 August 2024

At this year’s EAHN international conference in Athens, both Anna-Maria Meister and Sina Brückner-Amin discuss materials as part of the roundtable “Data Narratives of Architectural Modernity,” chaired by Theodora Vardouli and Eliza Pertigkiozoglou (McGill University). Our collaborators of the Lise-Meitner-Group Coded Objects (FHI Florence) are present as well: Rebecca Carrai chairs the session “Media and Object of the Home” of the Interest Group “Building Word Image.”

Athens, June 19-23 2024

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

We are very delighted to welcome Grazia Tona as a guest lecturer this Wednesday in the seminar "Crossing Borders. Reading Architecture“!

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