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Students can accomplish integrative tasks in architectural design and planning. They are able to critically formulate architectural concepts independently, situate them in the architectural discourse and realise them across a variety of scales. Students are familiar with a series of methods and special skills which are required to integrate aesthetic, functional, programmatic, urban, topological, technical and ecological aspects into their designs.

Imparting of methods of analysis and synthesis within an architectural design tasks; Understanding of the dynamics between architectural designs, their urban surroundings, their socio-cultural impacts, and the discussion of their relevance to contextual discourses.

Post-Digitalia
Increasing digitalisation has influenced and formed contemporary society in a way that our daily lives, as well as our cultural environment, have changed and adjusted. Digital technologies appear as self-evident, neither being explicitly noticed as such nor critically questioned. This influences not only individual behaviour but also culture itself. We now live in a world that is (in)formed by digital mass media; it has incrementally adapted and therefore cannot be defined any longer as pre-digital or digital but as post-digital. This allows designers to re-negotiate previously solid design pillars (such as nature, context, craft, material, typology) as approximations.
Eccentric Instability
In the context of architectural design this assumes the use of digital tools of creation as granted and standard. Such design processes consecutively esteem occurrences such as bugs, errors, distortion or noise as process- inherent and natural. The interference and overlay of digital design and materiality generate a thick grey zone of formal ambiguity but material truth. In that sense post-digital processes establish a new framework of honesty regarding the relationship between intention and result: Whilst a digital design intention can be defined as stable its results remain unstable. This is due to diverse uncertainties deriving from migrating it into the physical world; mainly the fabrication process and material properties. These unstable outcomes are not simply physical images of a digital picture but morphological deformations.
Spatial Monsters
Is it even possible to design something new? In our connected world it is rather challenging to produce truly individual or new content without referring (unknowingly or ignorant) – through citing or sampling- to existing work. Within the fields of music and visual arts the method of citations or samples is nothing new. As a result, one could argue, that the true path to discover something new lies in the fragmented/blurred/distorted review of the past and a new configuration and allocation in a contemporary context. Those post-digital processes provoke eccentric and enigmatic monsters.

As part of this design studio you should approach architectural design from the perspective of a post-digital explorer. Inspired by the dynamic Zeitgeist of the baroque you should play with highly eccentric forms, dynamic systems, fluctuating programs. Taking formal and contextual reference from this crucial period of architectural culture, with its rhythmically reoccurring and eccentric re-interpretations, constitutes a design framework for this studio. We will explore the vice-versa relationships between constructed space and grown materiality. We will look at this styleless epoch as vast pool of spatial concepts, formal canons, and turbulent environments. Without venturing too deep into the Baroque’s historic details, but given its socio-cultural relevance for the post-digital, such a reference is required to form a critically reflected foundation for this design studio.
A strong focus lies on the geometric construction and planning of thresholds. Inside and outside environments can be developed independently. Consequently, the void/niche/poche space in-between those convoluted and folded layers become the architectural fabric – core and shell engage in partially instable relationships that result in eccentric articulations. This method forms the basis of a critical discussion of the architectural envelope in a post-digital context.
A successful process will produce final results from the first meeting on. A "final" design (i.e. a variation of many experiments) should be avoided.

Course examination according to § 7, statute section on "study-law regulations".

Benjamin, Andrew (2006): Surface effects. Borromini, Semper, Loos. In The Journal of Architecture 11 (1), pp. 1–36. DOI: 10.1080/13602360600636099.

CALABRESE, OMAR (2017): Neo-Baroque. A sign of the times. [S.l.]: Princeton University Press.

                Chapters:              4. Detail and Fragment

                                               5. Instability and Metamorphosis

                                               10. Distortion and Perversion

Colletti, Marjan (2010): DigitAlia. The Other Digital Practice. In Marjan Colletti (Ed.): Exuberance. New virtuosity in contemporary architecture, vol. 80. Chichester: Wiley (Architectural design, 80,2), pp. 16–23.

Colletti, Marjan (2016): The Awesome and Capricious Language of Past, Present and Future Digital Moods. In Matias del Campo (Ed.): Evoking through design. Contemporary moods in architecture, vol. 86. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons (Architectural design, vol. 86, 06 (November/December 2016)), pp. 118–125.

Colletti, Marjan (2017): Post-Digital-Neo-Baroque - Reinterpreting Baroque Reality and Beauty in Contemporary Architectural Design. In Walter Moser, Angela Ndalianis, Peter Krieger (Eds.): Neo-Baroques. From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster. Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi (Postmodern studies, volume 55).

Delbeke, Maarten; Leach, Andrew (2017): The Future of the Baroque, c. 1980. In Andrew Leach, John Macarthur, Maarten Delbeke (Eds.): The Baroque in architectural culture, 1880-1980. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 231–237.

Farago, Claire; Hills, Helen; Kaup, Monika; Siracusano, Gabriela; Baumgarten, Jens; Jacoviello, Stefano (2015): Conceptions and reworkings of baroque and neobaroque in recent years. In perspective (1), pp. 43–62. DOI: 10.4000/perspective.5792.

Lynn, Greg (1999): Animate form. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Wölfflin, Heinrich (2000): from Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture. In Isabelle Frank (Ed.): The theory of decorative art. An anthology of European and American writings, 1750-1940. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 332–339.