CURRICULUM CONTENT         DE ENG

Every significant design begins with an exploration of boundaries. Before we begin working on a design, we first have to systematically examine the resources and restrictions which, on the one hand, make every design project possible and, on the other hand, also define and delimit it. Knowing what we have to work with enables us to explore its boundaries and at the same time to venture beyond those boundaries. This is our studio’s sphere of action; our projects emerge as a critical reflection of the discipline of architecture, in its essence, on fundamental concepts, their general form, and their underlying media and processes.

The goal of our work is to master a variety of forms of the architectural repertoire of the 20th century, but especially to develop and expand this repertoire, as has been happening in the past 20 years. This goal focuses on three areas: concept – form – medium. These terms indicate three semi-autonomous registers of an architectonic toolbox and at the same time three aspects of every design strategy. They correspond to three different levels of abstraction in the development of a design, but not in such a way that they have no impact on one another. The effects that these levels of the design process have on one other, for instance the way in which a medium can suggest a concept or even become a formal catalyst, or the way in which conceptual restrictions can also determine formal entities, etc. are explored in our studio.

Unlike the study of building typologies, working on a concept includes the structuring of space as such. In the process, modernist approaches are consistently further pursued on the basis of abstraction, for example phenomenal transparency, figure/ground relation, etc. The formal dimension has to do with a specific concretisation of conceptual principles as architectonic form, not only as the form of a solitary design, but also in the sense of a formal system: orthogonality, parallelism, undulation, etc. Here, too, all the possibilities of a form-generating process are researched by means of interdisciplinary and multiconceptual exploration. Our teaching programme is based on an unusually broad conception of the design medium. Every medium opens up or delimits a whole field of possibilities. One premise of our studio is that formal and conceptual potential is inherent in every medium. Working from this approach includes beginning, portraying, communicating, modelling and even realising architecture in the sense of building and producing.

Our involvement with new, future-oriented and constantly changing technologies (CAD, 3-D modelling, etc.) at every level of architectural “discovery” enables us to continuously develop a new architectural “language”.