Design Studio Bachelor Thesis: Style as imitation and excess
Giacomo Pala & Marco Russo
This studio will explore architecture through the lens of style and folly. Follies—pagodas in gardens, ornamental towers on estates, extravagant pavilions—have always been playful and excessive, yet also serious: small enough to serve as experiments, symbolic enough to stage big questions. From the pagoda at Kew Gardens to Coop Himmelblau’s deconstructivist folly in Osaka, they define the spectrum of folly as an architectural idea, up to the present.
In the first semester, each of you will work with two follies, changing their styles on a rotating basis: deconstructivist and modernist, postmodernist and sustainable. Through this process, you will create an atlas of contemporary styles producing drawings and a series of models. Alongside your design work, and as important, you will write an essay on style, tracing its shifting meaning from eighteenth-century theory to its roles in fashion, pop culture, and identity today.
In the second semester, our focus will move from isolated follies to the landscapes that hosted them: gardens, castles, estates, cemeteries. You will study the political, social, and cultural conditions that generated these places, how those conditions have changed, and how they have transformed into markets, malls, places for tourism, and new infrastructures. Working in pairs, you will reimagine these sites through speculative visions expressed in conceptual models and drawings according to today’s issues. Each pair will define its own focus—political, ecological, or aesthetic—and rethink the chosen site from a contemporary perspective, developing both a speculative vision (drawing, model) and a research book, looking into the specificities of the site, its transformations, its political and cultural implication on a wider scale. For example, if you work on a garden, your research questions may be: how has the garden changed? how has our relationship to nature changed? How can we rethink it?
The book will contain the atlas of follies and the essays on style; and a developed research thesis that reimagines a historic site through the lens of contemporary concerns and your own research interests.
Design Studio E1: A Piece of Fiction (Grounded in Reality)
Andreas Rumpfhuber
The design studio follows the assertion that architecture produces a fictional work that is based on and anchored in real events and concrete situations. This work can span a wide range (as in the other arts): Sometimes it is a fantastic explanation of the world, sometimes it offers everyday, pragmatic solutions. In any case, architecture reacts to current discourses and intervenes in them.
If we understand the practice of architecture in this sense, competences become important that extend beyond the disciplinary and traditional craft and are associated in the broadest sense with theory and research, with observation and with analytical thinking and reflection.
In the design studio "A Piece of Fiction (Grounded in Reality)", students are taught the basics of a methodical approach. Using the tools of architecture - drawing, modelling, writing, etc. - the first step involves precise observation, comprehensive research and precise analysis. In a second step, fictions are extrapolated from this, which are shape-shifting between aesthetic, political, social and scientific knowledge.
The starting point for each project is a - more or less - surreal, fascinating image (of some kind of reality) that cannot be fully grasped, or is incomprehensible at first glance. In a first step, the students are asked to describe and analyse what they see in words and drawings, possibly also in models, and parallel to this to research the content of the image. This first phase ends with an interim presentation at the mid-terms. In the second phase of the project, the findings about the very reality of the picture are extrapolated into a design that recursively intervenes in the reality of the picture.
Peter Volgger
Cultural studies are interested in phenomena that arise in everyday life or are appropriated as “popular texts.” They seek to eliminate the distinction between “high culture” and “everyday culture,” with the banal and kitsch becoming important. The focus is usually on everyday objects (e.g., tennis rackets, fashion, smartphones, etc.), from which the context is explored. Architecture is a cultural discipline, i.e., a field in which power relations are negotiated and identities are created. Cultural studies do not do this by conveying trivialities, but rather by orienting themselves toward the latest theories. Those who engage with it learn about arguments from the fields of sociology, media studies, political theory, aesthetics, ethics, natural philosophy, etc. The lecture series develops the meaning of architecture using examples from people's everyday experiences. In the second part, the lecture series addresses the mainstream phenomena of individualization, globalization (Americanization), and medialization.
Lecture notes, texts, and a detailed summary of the individual lectures can be found at https://archtheo.eu/lehre/cultural-studies-ws-2025_26
Bettina Schlorhaufer
In the lecture series of Architecture Theory 1 (AT1 for short), students gain insight into the political, ideological, artistic, and philosophical contexts of architecture, urban planning, and landscape design from the late 19th century to the interwar period.
SE Discourses in Architecture Theory
Marco Russo
Convivial Tools - Architecture and Viticulture as Cultural Techniques
Wine fosters conviviality and functions as a social binding agent. Already in the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, the enjoyment of wine was associated with ritual and cultic practices. In ancient Egypt, wine formed part of burial offerings and was considered the drink of the pharaohs in the afterlife. In Greece and the Roman Empire, wine was consecrated to the gods Dionysus and Bacchus, respectively, and was a central element of the banquet (Symposium/Convivium). Finally, the drinking of wine also plays a central role in Judaism and Christianity, namely in the celebration of the Passover meal and in the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper. Despite differing connotations, a common thread can always be identified: wine is a cultural technique of conviviality.
The seminar is dedicated to the theme of “conviviality.” In his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich defines conviviality in conscious contrast to the technocratic modern age and develops it as a foundation for a free and solidaristic society. For Illich, conviviality is a way of life in which people use their tools—as well as their social and spatial structures—autonomously, collectively, and in moderation. Building on Illich and other authors, conviviality will be considered in an interdisciplinary manner and discussed in terms of the practice of cooperative spaces.
The practice-oriented component of the seminar addresses conviviality from a historical and cultural-theoretical perspective and examines this aspect in the context of viticulture in South Tyrol—a field in which traditional forms of communal action, local resource use, and moderate application of technology are evident. Particular attention will be paid to architecture as a tool of communal life (courtyard/parlor/cooperative) and to the question of how spaces can both enable and hinder conviviality.
SE Architecture and Philosophy
Marco Russo
Creation and Exhaustion
Breath and breathlessness, creation and exhaustion.
“I can’t breathe” is no longer merely the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter; it has become a metaphor for our present – a time in which a planetary sense of suffocation prevails: in cities besieged by heat waves and air pollution; among people crowded into refugee camps or boats; on enclosed and besieged territories; in the lithium mines of the southern hemisphere.
Breathlessness also manifests inwardly: in burnout, in the persistent feeling of fatigue, and in the inability to recover. In other words: everything and everyone around us is exhausted. Exhausted are human beings, the collective psychosphere, and natural resources; exhausted, in the face of ongoing crises and catastrophes, are both our ideas and our humanity.
Against this backdrop, the question arises: What does it mean to practice architecture in times of exhaustion? Or, to put it differently: What meaningful contribution can architecture still make in the face of exhaustion?
This seminar is based on an understanding of architecture that goes far beyond the mere erection of buildings. Architecture is an act of imagination, of the organization of space, time, and material – and, metaphysically speaking, an act of creation.
We will engage with philosophical positions that place the tension between creation and exhaustion at their center. How can architecture respond to an exhausted world without itself becoming exhausting? What modes of thought and design might open up – in a figurative sense – between the breath of creation and the breathlessness of the present?
We engage with philosophical positions that place the tension between creation and exhaustion at their center. Franco Berardi, in Respirare, develops the image of breathlessness as the signature of an exhausted world and asks how poetry might open up new rhythms of life. Gilles Deleuze, in The Exhausted, describes the state in which all possibilities have been played out – and how it is precisely from this that something radically new can emerge. Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace, interprets creation as an act of withdrawal, one that creates space for freedom and renewal. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, shows that creative action can renew the world, yet is also endangered by mechanized production and continuous operation. Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, analyzes how technical reproduction can exhaust and transform the creative aura. Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter, develops the idea of a living materiality that conceives of design as a collaboration between human and nonhuman actors. Giorgio Agamben, in Creation and Anarchy, emphasizes that creation need not always aim at realization, but can also consist in keeping possibilities open. How can architecture respond to an exhausted world without itself becoming exhausting? What modes of thought and design might open up – in a figurative sense – between the breath of creation and the breathlessness of the present?