Articles in this Section

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  Data Territories: Lübbenau

  Seminar 26/27

  Teaching

  Digital infrastructure is reshaping the relationship between settlements, labour, energy systems, and the territories that support computation. In Atlas of AI (2021), Kate Crawford describes data centres as “non-descript” objects, “out of sight and abstracted away,” with their environmental impact largely invisible – contrary to the visible smokestacks of coal-fired power stations. AI data centres are increasingly located in rural landscapes while serving metropolitan regions, creating new demands on land, water, electricity, and infrastructure. These enclosed objects offer few permanent jobs, have a significant impact on the environment and face growing public opposition.
  What changes when a small town becomes part of the physical infrastructure of the digital age? How are local economies and collective memory affected as computation becomes part of the territory with a long history of energy production? What spatial conditions emerge when historical energy systems, water landscapes, tourism, and digital infrastructures coexist within the same territory?
  The urban design studio uses Lübbenau as its case study. Lübbenau is located approximately 80 km from Berlin in the Brandenburg region. The town is known as an entry point to the Biosphere Reserve Spreewald, where its canal system supports a tourism economy. The Spreewald’s canal system is an infrastructural landscape developed over centuries to manage water, mobility, and agriculture. Energy infrastructures of lignite extraction and coal-fired power generation transformed the region in the 20th century. The construction of an €11 billion AI data centre on the site of the former power plant is the latest in a line of Lübbenau’s successive yet coexisting infrastructures – one that, unlike the canal landscape it neighbours, is enclosed and inaccessible to the public.
  This history of overlapping infrastructures gives the studio its starting point. After the research phase, students will develop design proposals and spatial strategies addressing landscapes, infrastructure, buildings, or public space. The studio asks how digital infrastructures transform spatial relationships with the territories that host them.

  Team: WiMi Iva Baljkas Pick / Lecturer Zlatko Nikolic

  (fig: Kräne stehen auf einer Baustelle für das neue Schwarz Digits Rechenzentrum. Auf dem Gelände des ehemaligen Kraftwerks Lübbenau soll eines der größten und nachhaltigsten Rechenzentren in Deutschland entstehen. +++ dpa-Bildfunk +++)

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  IBA 34-37 - Eine Bestandsaufnahme

  Seminar WS 26/27

  Teaching

  IBAs are part of the history of urban planning in Germany, and a new chapter is about to be written in Berlin with the IBA 2034–37. IBAs provide an opportunity to reflect on the major urban questions of their time. Today, one of the greatest challenges is the Bauwende (the building transition), which requires transforming our built environment by repurposing what already exists. We need to imagine singular, site-specific, and frugal solutions to meet the demands of sustainable and socially just urbanism.
  The studio proposes to take the IBA 34–37 as an opportunity to test a project method based on the investigation of the existing, in order to identify potential project situations and to invent from the resources of the place. We will understand the existing as the result of all layers of institutional and vernacular histories—past and present—that have shaped the site in all its dimensions, both material and immaterial.
  We will focus on a perimeter of 400 hectares located within the area designated by the IBA: the Ring. An intensive fieldwork around the S-Bahn Wedding will be an opportunity to explore observation and description tools rooted in various disciplines, in order to build a narrative of the existing that will serve as the basis for the design project.

  Team: Prof. Jörg Stollmann / WiMi Jeanne Lacour
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  Conflicting Natures: Rights, Rule, Restoration

  Seminar WS 26/27

  Teaching

  Nearly a quarter of global land is in private ownership, the most productive of which is owned by just 10%. In Europe, 60% of forests are privately owned. Similarly, most agricultural land is in the hands of family farms and private individuals. In Germany, almost a third of the country is forested, an area of about 11.4 million hectares: half is privately owned. Much is controlled by historic aristocratic families, the largest being the Thurn and Taxis family. Berlin sits against this trend. It boasts Germany’s largest urban forest, a more-than-human landscape in public ownership in a city where non-human natures are increasingly understood as a multiplicity of life with rights. Spatial conflicts over land use, value and climate change intersect with struggles over ideology, class and contested meanings of nature. The reemergence of a transnational ultra-wealthy oligarchic class is banking capital in land, hedging its bets against socioecological collapse. In parallel, we are witnessing the return of extremist right-wing ideologies where territory is connected to blood and borders, and ‘Nature’ is used to justify racialised and gendered violence. While solving these problems is beyond the scope of a lone urban design project, we will use the critical spatial design method to research and map actors, regimes and power dynamics to better understand new spatial figurations of nature. Here, design is understood as critical, dialectical and processual. It is integral to problem-framing and future-thinking and integrated from the beginning of the course. The aim is to curate an exhibition of the studio’s collective work, part of the international conference ‘Architectures of Authoritarianism’ hosted at IFA in 2027.

  Team: Jamie-Scott Baxter / Lecturer Régis Lemberthe

  (fig: Screenshot, https://www.thurnundtaxis.de/informieren/neuigkeiten/art/glorias-zukunftswald)

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  Beyond Modernism - Vernacular Use(s) of Hansaviertel

  MA Design Studio

  Teaching

  We will deepen our understanding of the so-called “existing” – a fertile ground for every project. Alongside historical research, planning, and market analysis to grasp the context, we will conduct intensive fieldwork in order to: 1) understand the site in its materiality, immaterial dimensions, and ontology, and 2) make conscious and well argued decisions regarding how the design project engages with the existing. This reflexion will be supported by readings on philosophy of the vernacular, new materialism and critical heritage.
  Hansaviertel and its surroundings (IBA 57, the northern historic quarter, and northwest of Tiergarten) will serve as our field of inquiry. This heritage site is, in many respects, a true palimpsest. Successively a hunting reserve, a mundane fragment of the city, a field of ruins, and later the site of an international architectural exhibition, it has not undergone major physical transformation for nearly seventy years. Life has settled between memory, modernist heritage, and everydayness. People inhabit and continue to transform the place through the sedimentation of traces of their uses – in both material and immaterial forms.
  Within this context, we will ask: what should be preserved, transformed, or erased to make space for the vernacular practice within a site strongly marked by institutional transformation and market forces? To address this question, we will rely on the tensions between three positions toward history: monumental, antiquarian and critical.

  PiV offered by Fachgebiet Bildende Kunst:
  In connection with the studio Beyond Modernism – Vernacular use(s) in Hansaviertel, an artistic research project using the medium of film will be conducted.
  Intertwining archival images with footage captured on site during fieldwork, this research will constitute a pivotal moment within the studio, during which design project ideas will be developed between analysis and speculation through narratives that engage with the materiality of the site and the everyday practices of its inhabitants.

  Team: Prof. Jörg Stollmann / WiMi Jeanne Lacour / Student Assistant Evangelia Grammati

  (fig: Photos: Bürgerverein Hansaviertel e.V. (background) / CUD Team (foreground))

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  IfA EXPO 2026

  Seminar SS26

  Teaching

  This year, the IfA Expo returns as the annual exhibition of student work, bringing together all departments of the institute. Through the exhibition, we aim to create a platform where students present their projects and gain insight into the diverse work developed across our institute. The exhibition opens a shared space to explore design, research, and experimentation, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the many fields that shape architecture at the IfA. The exhibition weekend concludes with a summer gathering that brings together students, teachers, and guests to reflect on and celebrate the semester.

  Team: IfA Kollektiv & Prof. Jörg Stollman
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  Is Typology a Scam?

  Seminar SS26

  Teaching

  This semester, the seminar wants to reflect not only on types and their appropriation and transformation, but on typology as such and the way typolegical thinking is taught, theorized, and developed in the Master Architecture Typology program and beyond. We will ask: “If and how typological thinking as it is taught in the M-Arch-T affeets our thinking about architecture and our future potential practice.”

  Team: Prof. Jörg Stollmann, Beyza Uysal, Tomás Martínez
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  Mapping Through the Looking Glass

  Seminar SS26

  Teaching

  Berlin is widely regarded as one of the queer capitals of the world. Maps produced by the City of Berlin or by Siegessäule reinforce this claim through the marking of the city’s milestones. These spatial representations of queerness are largely oriented toward the tourism industry and function as a form of urban branding that caters to market demands. As such, they often carry ambiguous political meanings for queerness, serving neoliberal regimes of spatial production while reinforcing forms of homonormativity. Queerness today can be understood through tensions between the “neoliberal queers” of the present and the radical queer movements of the past. These positions frequently exist in conflict and contradiction rather than within a single coherent queer space. Such fractures can already be observed in Berlin itself: in the existence of two pride parades, in the contrasts between lesbian and gay housing projects, and in the spatial tensions between queer centers and anti-queer peripheries.
  This seminar aims to address the complexities of queer representation in a more conflictual yet intersectional manner. Its objective is to investigate how urban domains such as housing, leisure, labor, public space, nature, culture, and infrastructures of care might be presented as queer counterparts to normative spatial orders, and to examine the spatial and systemic forces that enable or constrain these processes. In this sense, the seminar employs research methods and various forms of mapping in order to produce a publication that questions the dominant narratives often reproduced by existing “queer maps” of Berlin and instead asks a broader question: Is Berlin a queer city?

  Team: Prof. Jörg Stollmann, Veljko Marković

  (fig: Collage: Moschinos ‚Baustellen-chic‘ in Berlin-Steglitz)

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  Beyond Modernism - Vernacular Use(s) of Hansaviertel

  The Dream of Tomorrow

  Teaching

  Students: Vincent Egbert, Johanna Horner, Phuc Huân Le, Thomas Schächtel, Arne Titze
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  Beyond Modernism - Vernacular Use(s) of Hansaviertel

  I’m Not Just a Monument

  Teaching

  Students: Victor Neumeister, Hai Nam Pham Jähler, Jonathan Stumme, Jan Tietz
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  Beyond Modernism - Vernacular Use(s) of Hansaviertel

  Transformations Unseen

  Teaching

  Students: Elisa Goldfarb, Guy Goldman, Celia Martinez de Albornoz
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  Beyond Modernism - Vernacular Use(s) of Hansaviertel

  Dynamics of the Standstill

  Teaching

  Students: Delphine Douglas, Jaehwan Kim, Sanaz Nahalbar, Jonathan Sparla, Eunkyung Yoo
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  Beyond Modernism - Vernacular Use(s) of Hansaviertel

  Exclusive Heritage

  Teaching

  Students: Evgenia Andrikara, Bertold Bohn, Joy Dourmashkin, Malwina Herold, Naz Nar
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  Beyond Modernism - Vernacular Use(s) of Hansaviertel

  Hansapocene

  Teaching

  Students: Nicolas Becker, Alice Bussei, Atalay Fersiz, Vinith Gopalakrishnan, Alec Jil Aqopian, Niklas Schütt
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  Arbeit der Straße – Karl-Marx-Allee

  Design Studio BA

  Teaching

  In diesem Semester untersucht die BA-Studioreihe Straßenarbeiten die vielschichtige Bedeutung der Straße selbst. Wir hinterfragen ihre konventionelle Rolle: als Infrastruktur für den Verkehr, als Nebenprodukt der Stadtplanung und/oder als öffentlicher Raum für physische und soziale Vernetzung. Zusätzlich betrachtet das Studio „Arbeit der Straße“ die Straße als eigenständiges architektonisches Projekt. Was wäre, wenn die Straße selbst die Arbeit leisten würde, den modernen Bürger oder das politische Subjekt zu formen? Was wäre, wenn das Alltagsleben sich als Performance auf einer Bühne entfaltet, deren räumliche Eigenschaften, Programme und umliegende Fassaden nur als eine Architektur der Mise en scène verstaden werden können?

  Nicht jede Straße wird als vollständiges Projekt in ihrer Gesamtheit konzipiert und gedacht. Die Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin ist eines dieser seltenen Beispiele, bei denen sich die Straße als ein Raum zwischen Architektur und Stadt entfaltet, der beide gleichzeitig aushandelt und dabei ihre eigene Prä- senz behauptet. Im Studio werden wir die Straße in Quadranten aufteilen, in denen jede Gruppe kar- tiert, dokumentiert, Erkenntnisse interpretiert und Widersprüche identifiziert, die später ihre Entwurfs- vorschläge beeinflussen werden. Diese Segmentierung macht die fragmentierte Natur der Straße sichtbar – weniger als ideologische Totalität, wie sie ursprünglich gedacht war, sondern mehr als Collage historischer Schichten.

  Team: Prof. Jörg Stollmann / WiMi Veljko Marković / TT Sina Schaper & Franka Matthes

  Wann: Donnerstags und/oder Freitags | 10:30 – 17:00 Uhr

  Wo: A701
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  Arbeit der Straße – Karl-Marx-Allee

  Student Work KMA01

  Teaching

  KMA01

  Students: Samuel Duran, Malo Willems, Dariia Zhyzhyrun, Kristina Kokuri
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  Arbeit der Straße – Karl-Marx-Allee

  Student Work KMA04

  Teaching

  KMA04

  Students: Johanna Pfefferle, Lioba Beckers, Lowis Wue Freyenhagen, Lena Bruhier
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  Arbeit der Straße – Karl-Marx-Allee

  Student Work KMA05

  Teaching

  KMA05

  Students: Zeyna El Mawed, Robert Kurochkin, Alyona Tishkina, Melanie Klintzsch
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  Arbeit der Straße – Karl-Marx-Allee

  Student Work KMA07

  Teaching

  KMA07

  Students: Lara Zoe Garbe, Laura Rebholz, Maria Dmitrievna Kolesnikova
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  Urban Co-Production

  Rathausblock and the Urban Fabric Behind

  Teaching

  The Rathausblock is an urban renewal area in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Emerging from more than a decade of struggle by urban activists, a cooperative model project has developed between the city administration and civil society. The project is currently in its development phase and highlights both the socio-political challenges and potentials of co-production. How can communication succeed between such different actors? How can we overcome diverse organizational and power structures to enable inclusive, balanced, and productive exchange?

  In this three-day workshop, we will explore this case through hands-on exercises and socio-spatial site investigations. We will reflect on how affordable spaces for living and working, as well as social and cultural places, can be created with the common good in mind – while thinking beyond the often resigned approach of “Realpolitik” in urban development. As an introduction to the case study, we will also have online sessions with invited guests, as well as in-person visits to other exemplary projects in the Berlin context. In doing so, we will gain in-depth insights into the current state of urban co-production in a European capital city that is currently engaging with these socio-political questions in particularly intensive ways. In conclusion, students will be required to produce a small documentation that offers both a reflection and a direct contribution to the ongoing development of the Rathausblock.