In this lecture, Ulrika Karlsson will address her specific interest in architectural representations and their translations, where the representation of the architectural object sometimes coincides with the object itself. The coincidence of the object and its representation sometimes leads to the conflation of material and information. Karlsson pursues this interest through projects in her architectural practice as well as research.

Ulrika Karlsson is an architect and founding member of the architectural design and research collaboratives Brrum and servo stockholm. She is professor of architecture at KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, where she previously served as the Director of the Architecture programme. Karlsson has been a professor at the University of Arts, Craft and Design, Stockholm, and taught at Bartlett, London, and UCLA, Los Angeles. She received her master degree in architecture from Columbia University and landscape architecture degree from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. 

Karlsson has received several prestigious research grants, including from the Swedish Research Council and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Her projects and written work has been widely published - including in Arq, Perspecta, Via, Arkitektur and AD. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Centre Pompidou, ArkDes, SFMoMA, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Servo’s work is part of the permanent collections of SFMoMA and the FRAC Centre.

Embedded Architectures is a design framework for architecture and environment integration.

The talk will introduce aims and motivations in setting out this approach including its political, ethical, economic and environmental grounding, the related development of guiding design principles and works that begin to unfold within this framework.

Michael Hensel is an architect, researcher, writer and a founding member of the network practice OCEAN. He currently co-directs the practice OCEAN Architecture | Environment. Previously he was founding and acting chairperson of the OCEAN Design Research Association. He is professor at Vienna University of Technology where he heads the research department Digital Architecture and Planning. Previously he taught at the AA in London, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, Rice School of Architecture, and Technical University in Munich. He was innovation fellow at the University of Technology in Sydney, honorary fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Technical University in Munich, and founding and acting director of the Research Centre for Architecture and Tectonics at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. He authored and edited numerous books including Emergent Technologies and Design (Routledge, 2010), Performance-oriented Architecture (Wiley, 2013), Grounds and Envelopes (Routledge, 2015), The Changing Shape of Practice (Routledge, 2016) and The Changing Shape of Architecture (Routledge, 2019).

In his lecture, David Brüll will give insights into NODEs bottom up grown culture, spiked with some projects and learnings from the work with software development from a designers point of view.

David Brüll is a media system designer working across disciplines in the field of interaction and experience design. His Studio curates and creates live experience spaces, interactive environments and installations. David also founded and formed the Frankfurt based media arts festival NODE Forum for Digital Arts over the last 12 years to support an innovative and responsible movement within the digital media scene by encouraging new collaborations, interdisciplinary interchange and open knowledge sharing. Starting from this perspective the new NODE Institute for creative computation started its programme of Workshops and Masterclasses last year. David teaches experience design and interactive media design courses at universities and festivals.

In the lecture Oliver Tessmann will present and discuss the research of the Digital Design Unit (DDU) from the TU Darmstadt. The group explores novel digital strategies of designing and materializing architecture. DDU uses global networks for crowdsourcing design, digital fabrication and robotics for innovative and resource-efficient concrete element production and develops software to design for re-assembly. The research seeks to address our global challenges of scarce resources and co-creates the ongoing digitalization of our lives in a responsible way.

The Städelschule Architecture Class proudly presents Thom Mayne for its Dean’s Honorary Lecture 2019. Thom Mayne is the founding principal of Morphosis whose research and projects in architecture and urban planning have world-wide recognition and critical acclaim. Mayne's distinguished honours include the Pritzker Prize (2005) and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal (2013). From 2009 till 2016, he served on the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities under President Obama.

Since its founding in 1972, Morphosis has grown to have offices in Los Angeles, New York, and Shanghai. Its work spans across a wide variety of scales and typologies, from civic projects, schools, and museums to commercial towers and city planning. Under Mayne’s leadership, Morphosis’ X-Tech group pursues technology and fabrication research, working with industry partners to arrive at new solutions for constructability and performance. Mayne also leads The Now Institute, a graduate studio dedicated to applying design thinking to real-world issues facing cities today.  

With Morphosis, Thom Mayne has been the recipient of 29 Progressive Architecture Awards, over 120 American Institute of Architecture Awards and numerous other design recognitions. The work of Morphosis has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and over 30 monographs. 

Among Thom Mayne’s many academic appointments is his position as Distinguished Professor at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA); he is also a Founding Board Member of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

Having accepted the invitation to give the thirteenth Dean’s Honorary Lecture, Thom Mayne joins a distinguished roster of previous lecturers. The annual Dean’s Honorary Lecture was introduced in 2006 in conjunction with Städelschule Architecture Class’ End-of-Year Review and sees Städelschule's dean invite an honorary guest to give a lecture on the basis of his/her merits and contribution to architecture.

Thom Mayne’s lecture is part of Städelschule Architecture Class’ End-of-Year Programme at the German Architecture Museum. The two-day programme includes the Master Thesis Review on June 26 -27 from 10:00-18:00 each day. 

Link for the lecture here

Architectural design is influenced and restricted by several different fields like program, function, politics, client, software, construction process, climate, sustainability and last but not least budget. To transform an idea into a building is a lengthy procedure with several drawbacks and obstacles. But also the process of designing is changing through the introduction of digital tools, ways of teaching and impacts from other fields like movie, advertising, media and art. It uncovers both possibilities and vulnerability to the ownership of the design process and its outcome. 

For example parametric design based on pure algorithmic thinking without clear relationship between design intend and design response is mostly used to justify complex geometries and structures without challenging the question of the actual quality of the work. It should not replace or dis-empower the designer’s creative freedom and make the architect loose the ownership of the work (Werk). It should only act as another tool to enhance and open up the designer’s creative ingenuity. The same applies to other fields like structural engineering, MEP and construction. The architect always has to keep ahead of the design process and challenge its fellow consultants to achieve the best in aesthetics for the final project. The lecture “Design to build” will review the design process and its impact on recent work completed by the firm studioGA.

StudioGA is an award-winning architectural firm based in Munich, Germany. It has won numerous competitions in places like Düsseldorf, Bremen, Austria and Lithuania and has implemented over 20 projects. Over the past fifteen years, studioGA’s project portfolio has been expanding internationally both within and outside of Central Europe, including locations in Russia and China. The firm’s highly competent and experienced staff from across the globe provide holistic and high-quality design services, including but not limited to the initial planning assessment, conceptual design, construction documentation, and administration, as well as interior, furniture and landscape design. With its strength in large-scale facilities, studioGA strives to maximize “added architectural values” to each project that might otherwise be merely an “efficient-but-boring box.” 

studioGA creates dynamic, awe-inspiring spaces through complex geometries or through simple logic. The company skillfully optimizes details and construction strategies to achieve these complexities and to successfully carry through on the initial design intents. Unlike large, corporate architectural firms, studioGA is dedicated to ensuring that all clients receive personal care while also achieving one-of-a-kind architecture.
StudioGA believes that a strong owner-architect relationship is equally essential to our competencies in order for long-lasting benefits for investors and operators.

Michael Young is a founding partner of the architectural design studio Young & Ayata and Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union in New York. On his return visit to Städelschule, Young will speak about our contemporary image culture:

‘As we bluntly evaluate our digital image culture and its ceaseless flow through Internet dissemination, it becomes more and more difficult to divide the production of architectural representation into two clear cut species. The images formerly known as drawings are behaving socially more and more like the images formerly known as photographs. It is apparent that the way architecture has used to value certain genres of representation over others will no longer be sufficient for our current situation. In order to have some modicum of hope for architectural discourse and pedagogy within this image deluge, it may be necessary to question several of our disciplinary assumptions regarding the fear of the image. Specifically, when considering images, we may need to look a little closer at photography's relation to realism, at digital vs. mechanical reproduction, and at the ties between aesthetics and politics.’

Young & Ayata were awarded a Design Vanguard Award from Architectural Record for 2016 and received a first place prize to design the new Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany, in 2015. Their work has been widely exhibited internationally, and Michael Young is with his writing on image culture, geometry and sensation in relation to aesthetic discourse a frequent contributor a various publications. Young has taught at numerous universities and been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Princeton University, and the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale University, as well as a visiting professor at Shih Chien University in Taipei, Taiwan, and the Crete Technical University in Greece. Michael received his Master's Degree from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

WE REGRET TO INFORM THAT THE LECTURE IS CANCELLED! 

Since 2015 Hernan Diaz Alonso is the director of SCI-Arc, currently one of the leading schools in architecture worldwide. He is widely credited with spearheading SCI-Arc’s transition to digital technologies, and he played a key role in shaping the school’s graduate curriculum over the last decade.

In parallel to his role at SCI-Arc, Diaz Alonso is principal of the Los Angeles–based HAD-x (Hernan Diaz Alonso creative agency). His multi-disciplinary practice is praised for its work at the intersection of design, animation, interactive environments, fashion and speculative architectural explorations. 

Over the course of his career as an architect and educator, Diaz Alonso has earned accolades for his leadership and innovation, as well as his ability to build partnerships among varied constituencies. In 2005 he was the winner of MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program (YAP) competition, and in 2012 he received the Educator of the Year award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). He won the 2013 AR+D Award for Emerging Architecture and a 2013 Progressive Architecture Award for his design of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Pavilion/Museum in Patagonia, Argentina.

Diaz Alonso’s architectural designs have been featured in exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the London Architecture Biennale, and ArchiLab in Orleans, France, as well as included in exhibitions at such leading museums as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the Art Institute of Chicago; and MAK Centre, Vienna. The work has been widely published in magazines, journals, and books, including the Excessive monograph of Xefirotarch. The office is currently working on a new monograph to be published by Thames and Hudson. Diaz Alonso’s work is in the permanent collections of the FRAC Centre, Orleans, France; SFMOMA; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Thyssen-Bornemisza, the MAK Museum, Vienna; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Diaz Alonso has held a series of prestigious academic appointments; these include Yale University’s Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professorship of Architectural Design (2010), Visiting Design Studio Faculty at the GSAPP at Columbia University (2004–10), an ongoing appointment as architectural design professor in the Urban Strategies Postgraduate Program at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and as a Distinguished Faculty Member at SCI-Arc. In spring 2015 he served as Yale University’s Eero Saarinen Professor of Architectural Design, and in 2018 he was chosen as one of the 25th most admired educators in USA.

In his lecture Diaz Alonso will speak about the work of his office for the last 15 years.

SAC is presenting its lecture series for the summer semester 2018.

HOSTED BY STÄDELSCHULE STIFTUNG FÜR BAUKUNST

The next lecture takes place on the 27th of March 2017 at 18:00 in STÄDELSCHULE AULA. The following videos are part of a special Lecture Series catered for the First Year Group.