Aktuelles

01.2025 Workshop organized by TUM IAS Anna Boyksen Fellow Nathalie Bredella in collaboration with her host Dietrich Erben (TUM School of Engineering and Design), Grayson Bailey (Leibniz University Hannover) and supported by Simon Rötsch. Visit Program

Infrastructures can be defined, operationalized and analyzed in various ways. They include the architecture of circulation that underpins modern societies, and they create the environment of everyday life. They are also objects that enable the operation of other objects, organizing materials and spaces in the form of an operating system (Larkin). 

Looking at infrastructures and how they work can reveal the politics that underly technological projects such as road or metro systems, as well as how they give rise to “apparatuses of governance” (Foucault). Thus, any study of infrastructure is situated within a cultural analysis that highlights the epistemological and political commitments that are involved in the choice of what is and what is not infrastructural. 

Infrastructures also exist apart from their technical and organizing functions, because they emerge from and store forms of desire and fantasy. They are part of the promise of a future in which infrastructure creates a sense of modernity, speaking to the body and the mind and communicating what it means to be modern and progressive.

This workshop is interested in methodological perspectives and looks at case studies when dealing with the planning, failure and protest against infrastructure. It is split into three discursive sessions which focus on historical and contemporary perspectives as well as case studies addressing the following themes: (1) Histories of Infrastructural Governance, (2) Dismantling infrastructures and (3) Infrastructural labour histories.

11.2023 Architektur für Alle?! Emanzipatorische Bewegungen in Planung und Raum

Vortrag und Workshop von  Insa Meyer, Céline Schmidt-Hamburger, Christian v. Wissel

12.2024 The chair of Architectural Theory welcomes Prof. Dr. Daniel Cardoso Llach, recipient of the prestigious Humboldt Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung/Foundation.

Extending his previous work documenting the postwar nexus of design and computing in North-America and Britain, Daniel Cardoso Llach’s current project Provincializing the digital: Computational Design in Germany after 1950 will examine how German researchers, government, and corporate actors conceptualized and gave meaning to computational ideas and methods in Germany’s design and architectural contexts during this period. Drawing on recent science and technology (STS) and media studies perspectives that complicate a dominant view of computational systems as neutral and universal, the project will help reveal how computational design ideas and methods in Germany emerged in conjunction with specific institutional, political, and material histories. Instead of asking what computation and software might mean ‘for’ architecture and design in Germany, Cardoso Llach is interested in asking what these technologies might mean ‘from’ there.

Daniel Cardoso Llach, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and the chair of the graduate program in Computational Design at the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also directs CodeLab, an interdisciplinary laboratory aimed to critically rethinking the role of computation in design.

Image Credit: Wisnosky, “ICAM Program Prospectus,” AIR FORCE MATERIALS LAB WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB, Ohio, ADA051670, Mar. 1978. Accessed: Jul. 02, 2024. p. 18

10.2023 Prof. Dr. Nathalie Bredella was named as the Anna Boyksen fellow in the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at TU München (Link). As a part of a two-year fellowship, Prof. Dr. Bredella will lead the newly created focus group Feminism and Digital Culture in Architecture. 

06.2023 ist Utopia Computer : The "new" in Architecture? erschienen, herausgegeben von Nathalie Bredella, Frederike Lausch und Chris Dähne. Die Publikation thematisiert die Euphorie und die Erwartungen, die mit der Einführung des Computers in der Architektur im frühen digitalen Zeitalter verbunden sind. Mit Beiträgen u.a. von Grayson Bailey „Pre-Requisites for Self Organization," Hélène Frichot „A Dirty Theory for a New Materialism: From Gilles Deleuze to Jennifer Bloomer” sowie Interviews mit Frieder Nake, Kurd Alsleben und Antje Eske.

11.2024 Workshop organized by TUM IAS Anna Boyksen Fellow Nathalie Bredella in collaboration with Pierluigi D’Acunto (TUM School of Engineering and Design and TUM IAS), Kathrin Dörfler (TUM School of Engineering and Design) and Anna Keune (TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology and TUM IAS) supported by Simon Rötsch. Visit Program

07.2024 Workshop by Anna Boyksen Fellow Nathalie Bredella with Andrea Reichenberger (TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, History of Technology), Rudolf Seising (Deutsches Museum), in connection with Grayson Bailey („Feminist Craft“ Seminar), supported by Tabitha Goricki-Eickel and  Simon Rötsch. Visit Program

05.2024 Nathalie Bredella and Grayson Bailey presented their paper "Computational mapping techniques und knowledge cultures within Landscape, Design and Planning” at the DESIGNSHS Workshop Writing the History of the Computer Visualizations in the Sciences: Production, Uses, Circulation (1940-1990) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Visit Program

04.2024 Sophia Walk's article on Konrad Frey and Florian Beigel's Fischer House (link)was published in the series Building of the Month on the website The Twentieth Century Society.

Fischer House on Grundlsee in Austria’s Ausseerland from Konrad Frey and Florian Beigel was the first solar house in Austria, with construction beginning in 1972 and completing 1978. The fact that it has not worked perfectly stresses that environmental designs do not have to be totally successful in order for us to learn from them. 

10.2024 "Link it and Move it" is a collaboration between the TUMlab at the Deutsches Museum and the IAS, TUM. Anna Boyksen Fellow Nathalie Bredella together with Grayson Bailey, Merel de Coorde and Jonah Marrs will lead a workshop exploring the history of Laura and Leonardo Mosso's "Programmable Architecture" through robotic re-enactment. The workshop will bring together architectural history through the presentation of a comic illustrating the life and work of the Mossos, followed by an Arduino workshop. Visit Program

06.2024 As a part of the Parity Jour Fixe No. 32 at TU-München, Grayson Bailey, Nathalie Bredella and Jonah Marrs (Base Digitale, Beaux-Arts Paris) presented works related to technologies, craft and practice. In his lecture "Prepared Instruments", Marrs discussed artistic experimentation with media technology in the 1960s and 1970s, along with his own video synthesis devices in the lineage of prepared instruments. Afterwards, there was a conversation with the Craft Archaeologies (LUH) and Feminist Craft (TUM) seminars on traditions of craftsmanship in the context of computer-based practices, which explored methodological approaches that address the shaping of technological knowledge at the interstices of theoretical discourse and material practices, and reflect on methods of feminist practices in research and teaching. Visit Program

06.2023 Grayson Baileys Artikel "Constructing the Anti-Architect" wurde in der 19. Ausgabe des Graz Architecture Magazine (GAM) veröffentlicht, die sich mit dem Thema "Professionalität" beschäftigte.