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