SS 26

BACHELOR

Bachelor 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.

Regular Meetings: Wed-Thu, 2:00-6:00 pm, Bldg. 20.40
First Meeting: 02.04.2026, Studio Bldg. 20.40
Pin-Up: 29.04.2026
Mandatory Excursion: Charleroi, 24.04.2026 - 26.04.2026
Submission/Presentation: 02.07.2026

Seminar week: Archival Bastards

The seminar offers the opportunity to dive into the wealth of architectural knowledge stored at SAAI, making it accessible and meaningful as a trigger for your own design practice. Instead of following the usual silos of classification (by author, date or type), the seminar seeks to team archival material that was not destined to meet.
Focussing on single-family house typologies, you will work with a series of pre-selected sectional drawings of projects from a wide variety of architects and historical periods. Using different strategies of visual association such as exquisite corps, palimpsest and cut-up, you will bring together two of these seemingly unrelated drawings thereby creating your own architectural “single family bastard”.
Through this process of bastardization, the seminar explores a design methodology based on the fortuitous meeting of architectural antagonists. The result will be a series of three operative sectional line drawings, each of which is based on a specific approach to visual association.
Will your bastards be architectural compromises? Can they be read as a synthesis? Or will they embody a non-resolvable conflict between both sources?

Appointment: 26.05.2026 – 29.05.2026
First Meeting: 26.05.2026 – 10:00, room to be announced
Reviews: tbd
Submission: 29.05.2026, 12:00 Uhr
Number of participants: max. 20 students
Language: English / German

DATES:
Di, 26.05.2026 _ 10:00 - 18:00
Mi, 27.05.2026 _ 10:00 - 18:00
Do, 28.05.2026 _ 10:00 - 18:00
Fr, 29.05.2026 _ 10:00 - 12:00

MASTER

Design studio: THE TOWER AND THE PAVILION

From the atelier system of the Académie des Beaux-Arts to the Bauhaus and its total vision of art and craft to the pedagogical experiments after 1968, architectural schools have continually redefined themselves. Once hierarchical and authority-driven, they gradually opened to contexts shaped by sociology, politics, economy, and ecology. Transmission became exchange. The master’s desk turned into a shared table.
The spatial organization of a school is never neutral. It produces knowledge, frames positions, and structures encounters. Studios, seminar rooms, and libraries are not mere containers; they stage debate and collaboration. Pedagogy and space inform one another.
As our current buildings face major renovation, the high-rise and pavilion long occupied by the school of physics will soon become available.
Moving the architecture school there would be more than a change of address. It would mean a radical shift in the spatial framework of our education and research.
Our present buildings, raised on a plinth, are introverted and courtyard-centered—generous yet rigid, almost invisible on campus. The former physics cluster operates as a counterpoint: an open pavilion engaging its surroundings and a tower whose skeletal structure promises adaptable floor plates.
Pavilion and tower create a productive tension. One spreads and mediates; the other compacts and focuses. Together they redefine proximity, exposure, and circulation, suggesting new modes of encounter and collaboration. Will this tension become the framework for our school? From introverted to extroverted, hidden to visible, rigid to adaptable: a shift in spatial logic—and in architectural education.
The accompanying “Vertiefung” will contextualize this shift historically and typologically, examining how architectural space shapes pedagogy and vice versa. The studio will transform the former physics buildings into a new framework for architectural education—becoming a self-experiment for students and educators alike.

Appointment: Every Thursdays
1st meeting: Thu, 23.04.26, 14h00
Submission/Examination: Thu, 06.08.26
Final critic: TBD
Number of participants: max 15 students
Language: English

Seminar: THE ANATOMY OF A SCHOOL: Space, Pedagogy, Genealogy

From the Académie Royale to post-1968 experiments, architectural schools have continually redefined themselves—spatially, intellectually, experimentally.
From the classical atelier of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, to the specialized Bauhaus, to the open fields of Delft, the spatial organization of a school is never neutral. Pedagogy and space inform one another; they structure encounters and stage debates.
From Weinbrenner to Hübsch in Karlsruhe, Ungers to Koolhaas in Cornell, Zenghelis to Hadid in London, schools frame positions and host multiple genealogies.
Our seminar complements the master studio, inviting students to dissect a singular school, deep diving into what an architecture school was, is, and could be.
It traces historical and typological transformations, mapping genealogies and the interplay of space and teaching, producing insights that feed the studio and are collected in a zine.

First Meeting: 29.04.26
From: 11:30 to 13:00
Number of participants: 15 Max
Final Meeting & Abgabe : 04.08.26 _ digital

Seminar week: Archival Bastards

Impromptu design: (Inhabiting) Unplanned plans

As part of the research project Typologische Resilienz, we are exploring the potential of converting vacant office buildings into residential spaces. Previously, suitable dwelling types were translated into machine-readable grammars, enabling the development of a software that can now generate various apartment layouts based on predefined rules regarding surfaces, accessibility, apartment types, and more. Within the Inhabiting Unplanned Plans Stegreif, we critically analyze and test the inhabitability of these computer-generated apartments. Can we refine the machine-generated floorplans into livable spaces? What are the limitations of the software, and where do we still need to intervene spatially? The outcome of this Stegreif will be a set of (overdesigned) floorplans that highlight both the potential and the limitations of software-generated layouts.

First Meeting: Wednesday 29.07.2026
Submission/Exams: Friday 21.08.2026