BACHELOR

Design Studio: Blue Banana 010

The new series Studio Raum II beginning this semester focuses on the region of the Blue Banana, Europe’s economic backbone. Once the core of industrialisation, 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”) - economical, social and physical. The geographical, historical and infrastructural context of the Blue Banana provides the framework to the Studio.
In the first studio of the series, the Studio focuses on the city of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port and delta of the Rhine. After being destroyed during the Second Word War, Rotterdam has since been sculpted and transformed under the motto “first the port, then the city”, experiencing a progressive growth that more and more intensified the conflict between the spatial logic of the port and that of the city. As the port itself changes and becomes more and more automated, it leaves behind vast areas of land. While housing demand is putting pressure on the unused port areas, there are movements to establish new forms of production in those areas.
The Studio considers the current shift in the development of the city of Rotterdam and takes on the challenge of re-inhabiting a vacant port area, combining production and living facilities. 

First meeting: 03.04.2025
Excursion Rotterdam: 25.04 - 27.04.2025 
1. PIN-UP: 07.05.2025 
2. PIN-UP: 28.05.2025 
Final Presentation: 09.07.2025 
Language: English / German

Seminar: Blue Banana 

The Blue Banana, or ’Greater Rhineland’, is the area where ‘the true heart of Europe beats’’, stretching over Benelux, parts of France, Germany, and Switzerland.  It is a place of the European Union’s core regional economy, of centuries-old trade routes, a densely populated and highly urbanized area and a place where important institutions are located. Cities in this region, or their conglomerates, often act as nodes, within the broader system of networks of people, goods, capital, data, and species. 
In the seminar we will investigate the Blue Banana focusing on the spaces and infrastructure of value creation. We will look at its past and recent history and connect it to the future prospects for development. Through mapping, we will underline different aspects of value creation in the region. The research will be conducted at a multitude of scales, from the global scale, through regional scale, to the scale of local realities, which will be consolidated in a series of maps.

First meeting: 23.04.2025, 11:30 
Appointments: Wednesdays 11:30 
Submission/ Exam: 06.08.2025 (TBC)
Number of participants: 25 students 
Language: English 

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?

DATES: 
Tue, 10.06.2025 _ 10:00 - 18:00
Wed, 11.06.2025 _ 10:00 - 18:00
Thu, 12.06.2025 _ 10:00 - 18:00
Fr, 13.06.2025 _ 10:00 - 12:00

First meeting: 09.06.2025, 10:00
Submission: 13.06.25, 12:00  
Number of participants: max. 20 students
Language: English / German

MASTER

Design Studio: Bermuda Berlin 

Suburbia was born as a dream - a utopia promising individual space, comfort, and a better life. As a retreat from the chaos of the city, it offered the ideal home, the perfect lawn, and the promise of community.
 But somewhere along the way, the hopeful dream could no longer escape its doubtful reality. Sprawl replaced country side, the escape from the city turned into endless commutes, and the lack of shared spaces drained its social core.
 Building upon the work conducted during the last semester this studio continues to rethink suburbia, this time not on the scale of the individual home and its garden, but as a site for radical infrastructural intervention.
Based on a series of different urban readings, we will challenge conventional suburban planning and propose new spatial strategies for a more connected, inclusive and resilient suburbia.
Our site of investigation continues to be the Mahlsdorf, Kaulsdorf and Biesdorf quarters of Berlin, which constitute Germany’s largest single-family housing development.
 
The goal of the studio is to develop architectural interventions that rethink shared social infrastructures, exploring spatial and programmatic strategies to transform suburbia

First meeting: 24.04.2025 14:00
Appointments: Thursdays 14:00
Excursion Berlin: 01.05. - 03.05.2025  
Final Presentation: 07.08.2025
Language: English / German

Seminar: Blue Banana 

The Blue Banana, or ’Greater Rhineland’, is the area where ‘the true heart of Europe beats’’, stretching over Benelux, parts of France, Germany, and Switzerland.  It is a place of the European Union’s core regional economy, of centuries-old trade routes, a densely populated and highly urbanized area and a place where important institutions are located. Cities in this region, or their conglomerates, often act as nodes, within the broader system of networks of people, goods, capital, data, and species. 
In the seminar we will investigate the Blue Banana focusing on the spaces and infrastructure of value creation. We will look at its past and recent history and connect it to the future prospects for development. Through mapping, we will underline different aspects of value creation in the region. The research will be conducted at a multitude of scales, from the global scale, through regional scale, to the scale of local realities, which will be consolidated in a series of maps.

First meeting: 23.04.2025, 11:30 
Appointments: Wednesdays 11:30 
Submission/ Exam: 06.08.2025 (TBC)
Number of participants: 25 students 
Language: English 

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?

DATES: 
Tue, 10.06.2025 _ 10:00 - 18:00
Wed, 11.06.2025 _ 10:00 - 18:00
Thu, 12.06.2025 _ 10:00 - 18:00
Fr, 13.06.2025 _ 10:00 - 12:00

First meeting: 09.06.2025, 10:00
Submission: 13.06.25, 12:00  
Number of participants: max. 20 students
Language: English / German

Research Seminar: > .xls

Current real estate industry studies predict that up to 20% of all current office space in Germany will become obsolete in the medium term. This trend is already noticeable today. For the current year 2025, 7.87 million sqm of vacant office space is expected in the “Big7” cities.
As part of the seminar, we will use the city of Mannheim as an example to examine the specific architectural and urban development potential for the conversion of office space threatened by vacancy.
Our analyses reflect our basic understanding that the spreadsheets (.xls) usually created by the real estate industry to quantify the utilization potentials do not adequately express and make comprehensible the architectural and urban development potentials on which a successful conversion is based.

The seminar is part of the research project “Typological Resilience”.

Appointment: Wednesdays, 11:30 - 13:00 
Submission: 17.07.2025
Number of participants: 15 students 

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.

Dates: 13.08 - 29.08.2025 
First meeting: 13.08.2025 
Submission: 29.08.2025