MA and BA students! Need help figuring out your essays or final projects? Come by our THEORY CLINIC, May 5th, from 2 - 4 pm, in room 240 (Seminar room Baukonstruktion und Entwerfen, Konstruieren und Entwerfen), 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. Just show up, walk-ins are welcome!

All architectural workers know it. That feeling you get behind your eyes after staring at Revit or Rhino for too long. Working overtime with computer fans raging against the digital entities you manipulate, themselves shadows of the information shared on some shadowy server. Emails whizz back and forth, networking the whole globe into the ecology of architectural production as building materials and digital commodities circulate from “sacrifice zones” to architectural offices, consultant workspaces and construction sites. This moment of intensified global digitalisation offers an opportunity to re-evaluate and reflect on architecture’s encounters with, and imbrications in, digital technologies.

Format:

The conference will take place at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Karlsruhe, Germany. It is planned as a 1.5 day, single-stream in person event, structured around three thematic blocks (morning and afternoon), each combining short paper presentations with discussion.

Submissions:

Please submit an abstract of 300 words, along with one image and a short biographical note (100 words) as a single pdf, to joshua.silver@kit.edu by May 20, 2026. Acceptance notifications will be sent by early June. The conference is planned for early September.

We will work towards developing these papers toward a publication.

We are delighted to announce that YIG Prep Pro Junior Research Fellow Dr. Virginia Marano has been awarded the 2026 Scott Opler Emerging Scholar Fellowship! In her work, she takes a critical look at contemporary art from the perspective of disability studies and the history of architecture and design. In doing so, she aims to raise the visibility of these topics in research and teaching.

Created in 2002 by a gift from the Scott Opler Foundation, the award honors the memory of the late historian of Renaissance art and architecture. Fellowships of up to $1,000 each support emerging scholars whose papers have been accepted for delivery at the SAH Annual International Conference. Although not restricted by subject area, applicants must be an emerging scholar, a person who, regardless of age, is within five years of having received a terminal degree (PhD) in architectural history or a related discipline.

On 24 April 2026, Hannah Knoop successfully defended her doctoral thesis at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology! Her thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr Georg Vrachliotis and Prof. Dr Anna-Maria Meister and explores the question: How do human rights become space?

In December 1982, the UNHCR published a small blue book of 200 pages with 14 sketches — and created one of the most influential documents in humanitarian emergency relief to date. This dissertation examines the first edition of the UNHCR Handbook for Emergencies as a turning point: from context-specific, often ad-hoc organised emergency architecture towards an increasingly institutionalised, globally operating apparatus. At its centre stands the Paradox of Standardisation — for the handbook paradoxically established the very professional standardisation it simultaneously sought to avoid, while explicitly calling for local, context-specific solutions and to "involve the refugees, whose home it will be."

With her contribution, “(Re)-Evaluating Artistic Norms and Temporalities: Feminist Perspectives in Contemporary Art”, Dr Virginia Marano is one of the 17 authors who make up the book "Re-Evaluations in Feminism and Contemporary Art" published in January 2026. 

"It could be said all new research contains a “re-evaluation” of past work but these two volumes attempt a re-evaluation of feminist research in contemporary art as it has developed over the last 50 years in relation to different local/global dynamics and/or about certain artists, artworks or exhibitions. Feminism(s) aim was to interrogate existing histories and provide significant corrections to what constitutes “history”. The two volumes explore some of the ways feminism(s)’ challenges have changed museums’ curatorial practices, critical writing and art history and how feminism itself has been transformed over time and its presence in many locations. Feminism’s absence from the stories told today about the recent past and present of contemporary art represents a starting point for these essays to explore the different strategies that have been attempted in cultural and political terms and to offer fresh assessments..."

Arman Jeddi. Design: Albrecht Gäbel und Dan Solbach.

There are currently about 882,000 square meters of empty office space in Hamburg. If this space were converted to the average living space per person (38.7 square meters), it could create housing for around 22,800 people. This simple idea was the starting point for the Pop-up Wohnen project, which addresses the paradox that large areas of office space remain unused while the shortage of affordable housing worsens.

Together with the collective vonwegenleer and students from HCU Hamburg, substitute professor Sabine Hansmann established a real-world laboratory right in the heart of Hamburg last year. As part of the accompanying design course, photographs by Arman Jeddi and housing ethnographies by the participating students who temporarily inhabited the empty office space were created. This feature describes the implementation of the project and highlights the paradoxical juxtaposition of housing shortages and empty office space.

Guest editors: Leona Erdmann, Juli Sottorf, Emma Stiehle (vonwegenleer), V.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sabine Hansmann (Professorship Architecture Theory, KIT Karlsruhe)

Annette Koroll

Following a substitute professorship at HafenCity University Hamburg, Sabine Hansmann will now serve as a substitute professor of architectural theory at KIT Karlsruhe beginning in the summer semester of 2026. She is an architectural theorist whose teaching and research focus on architectural anthropology, theories of space, actor-network theory (ANT), and feminist science and technology studies (STS). She understands architecture as a socio-material practice and focuses on the networks and material processes through which spaces emerge, are shaped, and are transformed. Her methods include architectural ethnography and experimental design research approaches such as real-world laboratories—most recently with a pop-up housing project in downtown Hamburg in collaboration with the collective vonwegenleer.

A new article by Dr Tom Wilkinson was published in Apollo Magazine on 1 April. It examines the extension to the MASP, designed by Metro Arquitetos Associados in São Paulo, and explores what significance this holds for the museum. 

"Museum extensions are a seemingly unstoppable phenomenon. In London, the National Gallery is planning a whole new wing, architects to be determined. MoMA is the undisputed global leader in this field, having now grown to occupy nearly an entire city block. Whether this expansionary zeal can be justified by the quality of the works they are currently unable to display remains to be seen. The new extension to the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) is part of this tendency but also departs from it in some important ways..."

An intimate preview evening to begin the March Disabled Legacies: Beyond Access and Inclusion gathering. Join for a walkthrough of a Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) display, "Misfits: Disability as Method Through Objects" curated by Virginia Marano. Virginia will be available to answer questions and talk about the objects and ideas of the exhibition. This will be followed by an informal talk by the artist Tony Heaton, and will end the evening with a reception.

Misfits features artworks by Sarah Biffin, Lorenza Böttner, Jesse Darling, Tony Heaton, Martha Ann Honeywell, Tom Olin, Donald Rodney, Michael Stahlberg, and Kurt Weston. The display presents painting, sculpture, photography, film and archival material spanning from the early nineteenth century to the present day. This project was curated by Virginia Marano (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) as part of the spring edition of "What Is Research Now?".

If you have any questions about access or event details, please email events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk

akaMalo

The public lectures, part of a workshop organised by the Architecture-Theory-History Department at the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, interrogate colonial power relations, hegemonic structures, and inequalities and exclusions in knowledge systems and educational practices and institutions.

Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister is going to talk about "Institutionality and/or Radicality" from 16:45 to 17:30 at the event.

Date: Thursday, 12.03.2026, 13:00–20:00

Place: Aedes, Christinenstr. 18–19, 10119 Berlin

Registration for the public: www.eventbrite.de

The event will take place in english. Admission is free.

From March 2 to 4, 2026, researchers will meet at the saai in Karlsruhe to examine how slow and algorithmic metadata shape archival knowledge systems. The workshop explores how translation practices reinforce or challenge bias—and what this means for the future of “intelligent” archives.