BACHELOR

„This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, after that the huts,
then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies.“
-Giambattista Vico, La Scienza Nuova, 1725

Bachelor Thesis: THE FOREST INSTITUTE

Historically viewed as the opposite of the city, the forest has grown into a man-made institution. For example, since the advent of modern forestry in Germany in the late 18th century, the forest has long been regarded as an artificial typology in which wood production is to be calculated and maximized. Its counterpart, the wild forest, was first themed by the Romantic artists and poets and later came into focus in the 1970s as an ecological symbol for activists. Current research results show that the forest is not only able to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions, but could also reverse or contain the effects of climate change. 

Somewhere between the romantic, the rational, the sustainable and the utilized, is a large unexplored space for architectural intervention. In this studio, we will examine four different meanings of the forest as a product of the Anthropocene: as an ecological resource, material resource, romantic ideal and bureaucratic institution.

We will design a forest institute to support research, development and education on a range of forest related issues. In a central location between the Black Forest, Palatinate and Vosges, the KIT Campus North, embedded in the Karlsruhe Hardtwald, offers an ideal location for a new forest research institute. The challenge will be to develop the institute building and the external program and to relate them to one another, thereby renegotiating the external border from the north campus to the surrounding Hardtwald.

Extension - Bachelor Thesis 

Accompanying event for the bachelor's design in Studio Frohn. The theoretical and analytical basis for the design is created on the basis of texts and reference objects.
Allocation only in connection with a Bachelor's design in Studio Frohn.

MASTER

Design Studio: ARCHITECTURAL METHOD ACT

"Method Acting" is a term used in acting and means that an actor, e.g. by evoking events from one's own memory or by imagining the “external circumstances” of a figure, is intensively placed in the character to be embodied and its actions and feelings authentically reproduced.

In the “Architectural Method Act” studio, this method is applied to design. As with acting, the design process as an "Architectural Method Act" means, on the one hand, fully immersing yourself in the design and thought world of another architect, and on the other hand, taking your own, independent position on your character and interpreting it individually.

Within the studio, each student is assigned a charismatic architectural figure whose biography, positions, characteristics and design attitudes and methods are analyzed in detail using selected projects. The goal is to decipher the specific formal vocabulary in order to adopt it as a tool for one's own design and to critically negotiate in one's own design work.

Seminar: FORMAL DE-CODING

The FORMAL DE-CODING seminar deals in depth with the work of selected architects in relation to technology. The respective specific formal vocabulary is decrypted and reflected on the basis of selected projects and drawings.
An analysis of the biographies of the respective architects and their ideas, theories and positions based on texts and interviews contextualizes this analysis. The aim of the seminar is to decode the specific formal code using analytical graphics. This seminar is an integral part of the “Architectural Method Act” studio and it is reserved and mandatory for them.

Seminar: THE B-SIDE

The B-Side Seminar presents the under-represented and under-appreciated in architecture: the back of the building. In everyday as well as academic life, we are constantly confronted with its counterpart, the representative front: we enter buildings through the front, we consume the front in publications and we present the front in lectures.

Each student will focus on one architectural precedent. Focusing on programmatic, representative, and contextual as well as ideological relationships, we are going to decode the architectural "back" by producing a series of analytical and experimental drawings and short texts.

The output will be consolidated in a 'zine produced by R+E. This issue will constitute the first in a new series produced by the Fachgebiet.

Research Seminar: OPERATIVE SPACE

Operative Space is a research seminar in which new structures are generated from reference buildings.

Based on the classic architectual drawings--plan and section--the DNA of a reference building is decoded. The structure-forming elements such as the spatial system, the structural arrangement, geometric relationships and regularity are extracted from the context of the selected building and translated into a diagram.

This becomes an architectural instruction. With its help the structural elements of a further building can be extended, multiplied, scaled, mirrored, compressed, stretched or stretched.

The results of these transformations are presented in a series of drawings. The generated hybrids contain parts of the DNA of their original structures, but beyond that they become independent, unexpected and completely new spatial structures.