BACHELOR

Design in Studio Space 

The studio Raum begins by inviting students to rediscover their everyday routines and their everyday environment as interlocking actions and experiences of making space and appropriating space. The seemingly familiar disappears in favor of again-to-be-discovered and redesigned spaces of possibility. Routiniers become discoverers and designers of the surprising in everyday life.
With mandatory excursion

Appointment: Mo-Fr, 02:00 PM–05:30 PM (Building 11.40)
Excursion: 27. – 29.11.26
Submission/Exam: Wed, 17.02.27
Event type: Presence
Language: German/English

Basics of Design Theory (Exercise) 

As accompanying exercise to the lecture series «Grundlagen der Entwurfslehre» selected buildings are analysed. The aim of the exercise is to study concrete architectural buildings from different times under specific aspects such as spatial structure and functional structure and to present them with drawings and models.

Regular appointment: Wed, / 9:45 - 11:15 / 20.40 
First meeting: Wed, 28.10.2026 / 11:30 - 13:00 / 20.40
Submission/Exam: Wed, 03.02.27 / 09:45 - 11:15 / 20.40 Hörsaal 9
Sprache: Deutsch/Englisch

Bachelor's Thesis: Blue Banana 071

The studio is part of a multi-semester sequence focusing on different cities in a region that has for decades been considered Europe´s economic backbone: the so-called Blue Banana. Once the core of industrialization, production and trade, the region along the Rhine struggles to keep its central role in Europe, while looking for new forms of value creation (“Wertschöpfung”) - economic, social and spatial. 
This semester focuses on Charleroi. Formerly a center of the Belgian coal and steel industry, the city lost its economic foundation with the decline of heavy industry. What remains are extensive industrial remnants, brownfields, and voids within the urban fabric.

The abundance of vacant buildings, unused plots, and interstitial spaces has become one of Charleroi’s defining conditions and, paradoxically, one of its primary assets. In contrast to nearby Brussels, where limited available land results in high land prices and economic pressure, Charleroi offers spatial abundance within the same metropolitan region. In Charleroi emptiness is simultaneously a strategic surplus and an urban challenge. To the inhabitants it offers spatial freedom. From the architect it demands a shift away from the single focus on designing the architectural object toward designing the void.

In a plot right next to Charleroi´s train station - a strategic position for people commuting from Bruxelles - the Studio’s task is to design a complex of ateliers, workshops and event venues for artists and others engaged in the cultural sector. It offers an abundance of space outside the common mechanisms of commercialization of rentable space. Before designing the actual building the students will develop the urban voids characterizing the site.

20 Attitudes towards heritage buildings

As we build less and transform more, preservation has become a defining question of contemporary architecture. But preservation is not a doctrine: it is a shifting field of architectural, institutional and political positions.
Through 20 canonical projects, this seminar maps how attitudes towards the existing have evolved—from conservation to transformation, from memory to reinvention. Through drawing, analysis and comparison, we will reconstruct a genealogy behind today’s positions in order to question what they might become tomorrow. A continuous discussion of seminal writings on questions of preservation will accompany the investigation.

Where did preservation begin? What shaped its transformations? Who defines its limits? And what should preservation become next?

First Meeting: Wednesday 20th october 11:30-13:00 Room 113
Every Week on Wednesday 11:30-13th 
Number of Participants: 15

MASTER

Studio: Architectural Misfit 

The transformation of existing buildings has become one of the defining questions of contemporary architecture. As preservation increasingly replaces demolition, adaptation is no longer a technical necessity but a design position.
 Between projects that privilege minimal intervention and those that radically reinvent the existing, architecture is no longer defined by a single doctrine but by competing attitudes towards what already exists. The challenge is no longer whether to preserve, but how.
 The landmarked Zentralmensa in Heidelberg offers a precise case study for this debate. Built in the 1970s as a single-purpose social infrastructure of the Neuenheimer Feld campus, it was conceived as a collective machine dedicated to a unique ritual: feeding the university community. Its structure, organisation and spatial logic remain inseparable from this original programme.
 Today, as new programmes such as student housing, sports facilities, cafés and offices are being proposed to inhabit the building, the future of the Mensa raises a fundamental question: what happens when such a single-purpose building encounters a programme for which it was never designed?
 Rather than searching for compatibility, the studio investigates the potential of the architectural misfit. Transformation is understood not as reconciliation but as productive conflict, where an inherited spatial order resists a new occupation.
 The objective is not to find the right programme, but to use the conflict between building and programme as a catalyst for architectural invention.

1st meeting: Thu, 29.10.26, 14:00 Room 207
Submission/Examination: Thu, 25.02.27, 14:00

Language: English
Excursion: Heidelberg

20 Attitudes towards heritage buildings

As we build less and transform more, preservation has become a defining question of contemporary architecture. But preservation is not a doctrine: it is a shifting field of architectural, institutional and political positions.
Through 20 canonical projects, this seminar maps how attitudes towards the existing have evolved—from conservation to transformation, from memory to reinvention. Through drawing, analysis and comparison, we will reconstruct a genealogy behind today’s positions in order to question what they might become tomorrow. A continuous discussion of seminal writings on questions of preservation will accompany the investigation.

Where did preservation begin? What shaped its transformations? Who defines its limits? And what should preservation become next?

First Meeting: Wednesday 20th october 11:30-13:00 Room 113
Every Week on Wednesday 11:30-13th 
Number of Participants: 15