LFU:online

Introduction

Borderlessness defines a contemporary architectural condition in which the boundary between systems is no longer understood as a line, but as a gradient. In the context of urban heritage, this condition challenges traditional notions of monument, preservation, and intervention.

The Alhambra of Granada is commonly perceived as a clearly delimited architectural object: enclosed by walls, protected by regulations, and separated from the city. However, when understood as a spatial, environmental, and cultural system, its limits become ambiguous. Water infrastructures extend beyond its walls, visual relationships traverse the valley of the Darro, and climatic, material, and spatial logics continue into the Albaicín.

This studio investigates architecture at the fringe of urban heritage, focusing on the northern slope of the Alhambra, where monument, topography, river, and city intersect. Rather than proposing direct interventions on the monument, students will explore how architectural design can operate within zones of transition, where heritage dissolves into urban fabric through gradients of space, use, materiality, and geometry.

Artificial Intelligence will be used as a critical analytical and generative tool, enabling students to construct and train datasets that capture spatial logics from both the Alhambra and the Albaicín. Through diffusion-based models, the studio will explore how intermediate architectural conditions can emerge within the latent space between these two systems.

As part of the course, students will have the opportunity to participate in a Blended Intensive Programme (BIP) in Granada, developed in collaboration with partner universities. The BIP will focus on on-site analysis, collective workshops, and public presentations in direct relation to the Alhambra and its urban fringes. Participation in the BIP is optional, but strongly encouraged as an intensive complementary experience that expands the scope of the studio beyond the regular semester structure.

Learning Outcome

Students will:

• Investigate Borderlessness as a conceptual framework for architectural intervention in urban heritage contexts.

• Understand the monument not as an isolated object, but as part of a continuous spatial and environmental system.

• Explore architectural borders as gradients rather than fixed limits, drawing from historical, theoretical, and spatial analysis.

• Utilize Artificial Intelligence as a tool for reading, abstracting, and translating heritage logics into contemporary architectural proposals.

• Construct and curate training datasets combining architectural heritage and urban fabric.

• Develop architectural projects that operate at the fringe between monument and city, without imitation or reconstruction.

• Gain the opportunity to participate in an international Blended Intensive Programme (BIP), engaging in on-site research, workshops, and cross-institutional exchange focused on urban heritage and AI-driven architectural methodologies.

By the end of the semester, students will deliver a complete architectural proposal that redefines how contemporary architecture can engage with urban heritage through transitional, gradient-based systems.

Contents

The course positions architecture as a disciplinary tool to rethink the limits of urban heritage. Rather than focusing on preservation or formal reproduction, the studio addresses heritage as a set of operative principles: spatial sequences, climatic strategies, material transitions, and modes of inhabitation.

Borderlessness is explored through three intertwined dimensions:

• Spatial: from enclosed monument to open urban fabric

• Geometric: from regulated geometry to incremental growth

• Conceptual: from linear boundaries to painterly gradients (Wölfflin)

The course will be structured around three thematic investigations:

AI-Driven Analysis of Heritage Systems

• AI-assisted reading of architectural plans, sections, photographs, and diagrams.

• Extraction of spatial patterns, thresholds, and gradients.

• Translation of architectural intelligence into abstract datasets.

Border Conditions and Urban Gradients

• The architectural fringe as an operative zone.

• Gradients of use, ownership, materiality, and climate.

• Architecture as mediator between monument and city.

Projective Translations

• Generating architectural proposals through latent transitions.

• Diffusion models as instruments for exploring intermediate states.

• Designing architectures that emerge from systems, not forms.

Course Blocks

The course follows a three-block progression, moving from conceptual analysis to procedural experimentation and final architectural proposals.

BLOCK 1: Conceptual Knowledge – Borders, Systems, Gradients

• Historical and theoretical analysis of architectural borders.

• Wölfflin’s linear vs painterly as spatial framework.

• Reading the Alhambra and the Albaicín as systems.

• Dataset construction: heritage and urban fabric.

BLOCK 2: Procedural Knowledge – Latent Transitions

• Training diffusion models using curated architectural datasets.

• Exploring intermediate spatial conditions within latent space.

• Testing geometric, material, and spatial gradients.

• AI as a tool for architectural translation, not form generation.

BLOCK 3: Practical Knowledge – Architectural Proposal

• Design of an architectural intervention at the fringe of the Alhambra.

• Focus on the northern slope, Darro river, and Albaicín interface.

• Development of drawings, diagrams, and AI-generated mappings.

• Final architectural project articulating borderlessness.

Architectural Framework: Access, Threshold, and Public Interface

As a concrete architectural framework, students will develop a proposal for a new access system to the Alhambra, located along its northern fringe, in relation to the Darro river and the Albaicín.

The intervention will be conceived not as an isolated building, but as a gradient-based architectural system operating between monument and city. The program will include:

• A new point of arrival and access to the Alhambra

• Ticketing and visitor management spaces

• A small museum and documentary space, dedicated to contextualizing the Alhambra as a spatial, environmental, and urban system

Rather than functioning as a conventional entrance pavilion, the project is understood as an architectural threshold: a sequence of spaces that mediate between different degrees of monumentality, publicness, and urban integration.

The program serves as a disciplinary anchor, allowing students to explore how borderlessness can be translated into architecture through gradients of space, use, materiality, and tectonics, without direct intervention on the monument itself.

Lehrveranstaltungsprüfung gemäß § 7 Satzungsteil, Studienrechtliche Bestimmungen.

Wird im Rahmen der ersten Lehrveranstaltung besprochen.

IInformationen zu den Anmeldungen an der Archtektur finden Sie hier