LFU:online

In this course, students gain insight into the political, ideological, and philosophical contexts of architecture, urbanism, and landscape.

This year’s lecture on architecture theory I call "The History of Contemporary Architecture“. With it, I want to trace a genealogy of architecture’s practice that has radically shifted since the end of the Second World War in relation to modernism and its economic, technological and political framework. 

My aim is to provide the audience with an understanding and analytical tool that will enable them to navigate current architectural discourses and, in the best case, to develop their own position. 

This means that the lecture focuses specifically on analysing significant projects and their embeddness in social discourses of the last 50 years. The symbolic starting point of the lecture is 8 February 1971, the day on which the data centre of the world's first fully electronic stock exchange of the „National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations“ (NASDAQ), opens in New York. 

Shortly afterwards, on 15 August 1971, then US President Nixon declared the withdrawal from the Bretton Woods Agreement, which  initially had made possible the post-war economic miracle and the social-liberal welfare state in the western industrial nations. From this moment onwards, money production became more and more virtual, the use of electronic technology intensified, and the political ideology commonly known as "neoliberalism" increasingly became the dominant thought pattern in politics in general. 

As a result, the framing of architecture and its production has also been shifting. The themes, content and aesthetic practice have been and are shifting and can be traced and analyzed in significant projects. One example might be the book "Delirious New York" by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas ...

Course examination according to § 6, statute section on "study-law regulations".

Will be discussed in the first lesson.