LFU:online

The students gain in-depth insights into special perspectives and working techniques of the various topics within the architecture and set individual emphases.

Creation and Exhaustion

Breath and breathlessness, creation and exhaustion.

“I can’t breathe” is no longer merely the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter; it has become a metaphor for our present – a time in which a planetary sense of suffocation prevails: in cities besieged by heat waves and air pollution; among people crowded into refugee camps or boats; on enclosed and besieged territories; in the lithium mines of the southern hemisphere.

Breathlessness also manifests inwardly: in burnout, in the persistent feeling of fatigue, and in the inability to recover. In other words: everything and everyone around us is exhausted. Exhausted are human beings, the collective psychosphere, and natural resources; exhausted, in the face of ongoing crises and catastrophes, are both our ideas and our humanity.

Against this backdrop, the question arises: What does it mean to practice architecture in times of exhaustion? Or, to put it differently: What meaningful contribution can architecture still make in the face of exhaustion?

This seminar is based on an understanding of architecture that goes far beyond the mere erection of buildings. Architecture is an act of imagination, of the organization of space, time, and material – and, metaphysically speaking, an act of creation.

We will engage with philosophical positions that place the tension between creation and exhaustion at their center. How can architecture respond to an exhausted world without itself becoming exhausting? What modes of thought and design might open up – in a figurative sense – between the breath of creation and the breathlessness of the present?

We engage with philosophical positions that place the tension between creation and exhaustion at their center. Franco Berardi, in Respirare, develops the image of breathlessness as the signature of an exhausted world and asks how poetry might open up new rhythms of life. Gilles Deleuze, in The Exhausted, describes the state in which all possibilities have been played out – and how it is precisely from this that something radically new can emerge. Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace, interprets creation as an act of withdrawal, one that creates space for freedom and renewal. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, shows that creative action can renew the world, yet is also endangered by mechanized production and continuous operation. Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, analyzes how technical reproduction can exhaust and transform the creative aura. Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter, develops the idea of a living materiality that conceives of design as a collaboration between human and nonhuman actors. Giorgio Agamben, in Creation and Anarchy, emphasizes that creation need not always aim at realization, but can also consist in keeping possibilities open. How can architecture respond to an exhausted world without itself becoming exhausting? What modes of thought and design might open up – in a figurative sense – between the breath of creation and the breathlessness of the present?

Reading, discussion

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

>> Term paper

Agamben, Giorgio. Creazione e anarchia: L’opera nell’età della religione capitalista. Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2017.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Benjamin, Walter. “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5, no. 1 (1936).

Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” Respirare: Caos e poesia. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010.

Deleuze, Gilles. L’épuisé. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1992.

Weil, Simone. La Pesanteur et la grâce. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1947.