Städelschule Architecture Class (SAC)

16/06/2020

WEBINAR:
JETTE CATHRIN HOPP
DESIGN METHODOLOGY AND THE PREPONDERANCE OF THE CONCEPT IN SNØHETTA’S WORK

19 JUNE 2020
16:00 CET - Online

Snøhetta (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈsnøːˌhɛtɑ]) began as a collaborative architectural and landscape workshop, and has remained true to its trans-disciplinary way of thinking since its inception. Snøhetta’s work strives to enhance our sense of surroundings, identity and relationship to others and the physical spaces we inhabit, whether feral or human-made. Museums, products, reindeer observatories, graphics, landscapes and dollhouses get the same care and attention to purpose.

Jette Cathrin Hopp is part of the executive management of Snøhetta. She has extensive experience in complex both Norwegian and international projects, leading major international project developments and competitions. She regularly lectures at architectural symposia, conferences and international institutions, sharing Snøhetta´s philosophy and design ideas. Jette Cathrin Hopp is also a jury member for several architecture competitions and prizes. She is regularly invited as a critic to international architecture universities.
She worked as a team leader for building the museum in the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, Dhahran in Saudi Arabia and as project leader for a large hotel and resort development of Hvar in Croatia. Further, she has led major international developments with focus on sustainability such as Astana Expo 2017 "Future Energy", Kazakhstan; and Lingkong Soho Shanghai, China; innovative environmental projects in Norway as Powerhouse One in Trondheim and Powerhouse Kjørbo concept phase in Sandvika which is the world first rehabilitated energy-positive building.

portrait © Pepe Lange
Norwegian National Opera and Ballet © Jiri Havran
Skur 39 © Mars Goodwin

08/06/2020

WEBINAR
LYTLE SHAW
THE MOLLINO SET

08 JUNE 2020
16:00 CET - Online

The Mollino Set (forthcoming, 2020) is the third in a series of architecture-centered prose works that began with The Clifford Chadwick Clifford Collection (2011) and The Moiré Effect (2012).
Beyond this architecture series, Lytle Shaw’s books include two books of poetry—Cable Factory 20 (1999) and The Lobe (2002), two books documenting his collaboration with the artist J. Blachly—The Chadwick Family Papers: A Brief Public Glimpse (2008) and Selected Shipwrecks (2012), and three critical monographs: Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006), Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (2013) and Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (2018). Shaw is professor of English at New York University, and a contributing editor for Cabinet magazine.

05/06/2020

STÄDELSCHULE ARCHITECTURE CLASS
LECTURE AND WEBINAR PROGRAMME
Summer Semester 2020

Space Popular
TWEETING OUT LOUD IN THE SQUARE: THE NECESSITY FOR
METAPHORS IN TRANSITIONING TO AN AUGMENTED WORLD

Holger Hoffmann
CONTEXT AS DEVICE. THE ESTRANGED STRANGE

Curtis Roth
SELF MODELLING AND OTHER SYSTEMS OF USER DESIGN

David Ruy
MODELS AND DATA

Tom Wiscombe
OBJECT MODELS WORLDS

Marrikka Trotter
THE OTHER SHAPE: ARCHITECTURE BEFORE FORM

Zeynep Çelik Alexander
A TECHNICAL HISTORY OF FORM

Philip Ursprung
ARCHITECTURE AND ARMCHAIR TRAVEL

Hélène Frichot
THE QUESTION OF AFFECT

Jette Cathrin Hopp
DESIGN METHODOLOGY AND THE PREPONDERANCE OF THE CONCEPT IN SNØHETTA’S WORK

Lytle Shaw
THE MOLLINO SET

November 5
Sir Peter Cook
DEAN’S HONORARY LECTURE*

NOVEMBER 5-6
END-OF-YEAR REVIEWS

NOVEMBER 7
SAC GRADUATION CEREMONY
AIV MASTER THESIS PRIZE**
GÜNTER BOCK PRIZE***

03/06/2020

03/06/2020

WEBINAR
HÉLÈNE FRICHOT
THE QUESTION OF AFFECT

03 JUNE 2020
10:00 CET - Online

Affect theory, or affect studies, intersects with diverse disciplines, travelling between art, the humanities and the sciences.

What has affect to do with architecture and urban environments? Doug Spencer draws attention to the dangerous and uncritical uses of affect in architecture (2016). Affect, Spencer argues, is too readily uses by architects as an excuse to avoid difficult political questions beneath the atmospheric effects aroused by the circulation of architectural affects. Nigel Thrift has long argued that we underestimate the role that affect plays in cities. Affect, it seems, while slippery may nonetheless lend itself to control, at worst enabling the means of producing a docile body politic.

This seminar will discuss the relationship between architecture and affect with an emphasis on infrastructure understood as distributed spatial support system. By reframing architecture as ‘organisation space’, to borrow a term from Keller Easterling, an account of the circulation of affect will lead the way to an understanding of architecture as always more than discrete, self-isolated and autonomous form, toward an apprehension of the complex entanglements architecture inevitably participates in, for better and worse.

photo © Mikael Olsson

02/06/2020

WEBINAR
PHILIP URSPRUNG
17 VOLCANOES: ARCHITECTURE & (ARMCHAIR) TRAVEL

02 JUNE 2020
16:00 PM

Architecture and travel are deeply intertwined. In Medieval times builders were trained during a journey of several years. Early Modern architects moved from court to court, from North to South, and East to West, eager to learn from each other. In the Modern era architects such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Le Corbusier or Robert Venturi educated themselves by traveling. What about today? While travel became an accessible commodity and has moved center stage in the industrialized societies, it has lost its former role in architectural education. In the education of architects, the exchange semester has replaced the long journey. The defined research project has replaced the expedition into the unknown. The commute has replaced the road-trip. The pandemic has brought real travel to a halt. Can it be replaced by armchair travel?

Based on the research project “17 Volcanoes: Tourism and Cultural Heritage” at Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore (a series of expeditions to the island of Java), the lecture raises the question how travel can be reactivated as a method of learning and teaching.

Philip Ursprung is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. From 2017 to 2019 he was Dean of the Department. He is principal investigator of the research project “Tourism and Cultural Heritage” at Future Cities Laboratory of the Singapore-ETH Center in Singapore. He earned his PhD in Art History at Freie Universität Berlin after studying in Geneva, Vienna and Berlin. He taught at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, Columbia University New York, the Barcelona Institute of Architecture and the University of Zürich. He is editor of Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History (CCA Montreal, Lars Müller Publishers, 2002) and Caruso St John: Almost Everything (Barcelona, Ediciones Poligrafa, 2008) and author of Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art (University of California Press, 2013). His most recent books are Brechas y conexiones: Ensayos sobre arquitectura, arte y economia (Barcelona, Puente Editores, 2016), Der Wert der Oberfläche (Zurich, gta Verlag, 2017) and Representation of Labor / Performative Historiography (Santiago de Chile, Ediciones ARQ, 2018).

Image: © Armin Linke: Kawa Ijen Volcano, Biau (Jawa Timur), Indonesia, 2016

22/05/2020

WEBINAR
ZEYNEP ÇELIK ALEXANDER
A TECHNICAL HISTORY OF FORM

22 MAY 2020
16:00 CET - Online

Countless scholars have meticulously traced the emergence of the modern concept of “form" from Kantian aesthetics to twentieth-century modernism. But what if the concept’s salience in modernist discourses also had to do with more mundane—what might perhaps be called “technical”—concerns? Might such a technical history offer an account of concept that numerous others written in the disciplines of philosophy, intellectual history, or art and architectural history have not already? This talk excavates an alternative history of form from the late nineteenth century onwards, an history in which technologies of scanning and practices of reading play as important a role as familiar milestones of aesthetic modernity.

Zeynep Çelik Alexander is an architectural historian who teaches at Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. After being trained as an architect at Istanbul Technical University and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, she received her Ph.D. from the History, Theory, and Criticism Program at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alexander is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), a history of an alternative mode of knowing—non-propositional, non-linguistic, and based on the movements of the body—that gained saliency in the nineteenth century and informed the epistemological logic of modernism in the German-speaking world. She co-edited with John J. May (Harvard University), Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), a collection of essays that examines the histories of techniques that have come to dominate contemporary design disciplines. She has also published in numerous venues, including Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, New German Critique, Harvard Design Magazine, Log, e-flux, Grey Room, Journal of Design History, and Centropa as well as several edited volumes. Zeynep Çelik Alexander is a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, an editor of the journal Grey Room, and a co-director of Columbia’s Center for Comparative Media. She is currently at work on new book that explores nineteenth-century architectures of bureaucracy from the Kew Herbarium to the Larkin Administration Building.

Image © Telegraphic notations by Reizen from Edward Highton, Electric Telegraph: Its History and Progress (London: John Weale, 1852), 63.

14/05/2020

WEBINAR
MARRIKKA TROTTER
THE OTHER SHAPE: ARCHITECTURE BEFORE FORM

13 MAY 2020
20:00 CET - Online

When Edmund Burke set out to codify the sublime, the aesthetic category of ego-overwhelming encounters ranging from the awesome to the eerie, he turned to a famously unsettling passage from John Milton's description of Death in Paradise Lost: "The other shape / If shape it might be called, that shape had none". The silhouette standing at the mouth of Hell could be perceived (dark, and with edges) but not apprehended: it resisted the cognitive categorization that would tame its shape into a form. The definition of "shape" as something prior to or outside of form - not yet susceptible to consumption, mysterious, difficult, even frightening - has occasionally been explored in art theory and perceptual psychology if not in architectural discourse, where Bob Somol's sunnier version of the concept has been widely influential. Here the discourse has fallen behind the work. This talk examines several contemporary projects by Tom Wiscombe Architecture, Asif Khan, and others to reimagine the concept of shape in architectural theory.

Marrikka Trotter is a Los-Angeles-based architectural historian and theorist. She is co-editor of the contemporary architectural theory collection Architecture is All Over (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City: 2017), and her writing has appeared in publications such as Harvard Design Magazine, Log, AD, and AA Files. She holds a PhD in Architecture, Landscape and Urbanism from Harvard University, and her work has received funding from the Paul Mellon Centre, the Graham Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Sir John Soane's Museum, among others. Recent projects include a fresh take on Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Diversi maniere d'adornare i cammini, an examination of the geological significance of Robert Adam's landscape watercolors and late 18th-century "castle style," and a discussion of the individuating potential of certain "discrete" architectures. Trotter teaches at SCI-Arc, where she heads the history and theory department.

14/05/2020

WEBINAR:
TOM WISCOMBE
OBJECT MODELS WORLDS

13 MAY 2020
19:00 CET - Online

Tom Wiscombe Architecture (TWA) is an internationally recognized design practice, known for powerful massing, alluring graphic qualities, and tectonic inventiveness. Founder Tom Wiscombe, AIA is Creative Director of TWA, combining design expertise with a deep knowledge of construction and project delivery. He is a leading voice in design culture today.

Wiscombe is Chair of the Bachelor of Architecture Program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). He taught Advanced Research studios as Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania for 4 years; in 2012, held the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professorship at Yale University; and in 2005 was the U.C. Berkeley Esherick Chair. He has published texts on architectural theory in journals such as AD, Project, and LOG.

Previously, Wiscombe worked for Coop Himmelb(l)au, where he was responsible for multiple international projects and large project teams from competition through realization. Notably, he was Chief Designer and project leader for the UFA Cinema Center, Dresden, the Akron Art Museum, BMW Welt, Munich, and the Lyon Museum of Confluences, known as four of the most important works of contemporary architecture.

08/05/2020

WEBINAR:
DAVID RUY
MODELS AND DATA

08 MAY 2020
18:00 CET - Online

David Ruy is an architect, theorist, and director of Ruy Klein. David received his M Arch degree from Columbia University and his BA degree from St. John’s College where he studied philosophy and mathematics. David is currently Chair of Postgraduate Programs at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). A frequent lecturer internationally, David has previously held numerous positions at universities and institutes around the world.