After successful completion of the course, students are able to formulate answers to the following questions:
What are the fundamentals of living? Are there parameters inscribed in dwelling, like a DNA, that influence the planning, building, but also the inhabiting of living space? Is there a DNA of dwelling on which our material, spiritual and biological coexistence is based? Which visible and invisible parameters are part of this DNA of living?
In 10 different lecture inputs, the question of a DNA of dwelling will be explored: What role does the media representation of housing play and how does the digital and analog display and representation of living spaces shape our ideas of housing and thus our (living) habits (rituals, routines). Likewise, the question of how structures of classism (origin, income) are deeply rooted in the question of housing will be explored. Although housing is an everyday practice, the question is how the commodification of housing transforms its DNA so that access to it is not possible (affordable) for all. What roles do power structures and gender roles play in our everyday living and housing spaces? What divisions of labor (care work, reproductive work) are associated with spatial functions and gender roles and manifested spatially through architecture? Away from inscribed power structures, we also attempt to break down the complexity of the built environment to elements and their relationships to each other: Methods and theories such as Pattern Language will reveal insights into the partitioning and arrangements of (living) spaces. Likewise, we will examine the concept of housing from a philosophical perspective, what does thinking about housing mean and what impact does this thinking have on our actual built environment?
The image of the Home I & II (Bernadette Krejs)
The lecture "Das Bild des Wohnens" (The Image of Living) explores the question of what effects the media representation of residential imagery has on the understanding of architecture and space, but above all on living. What kind of housing knowledge do images generate as housing pedagogical tools in an accelerated, globalized image production, in which images produce different cultures of evidence and forms of historiography and thus shape a social body? For images not only represent a reality, they also co-construct it. The complexity of the arena of housing, which puts up for negotiation an apparatus of demarcations, value concepts, and power structures, is not done justice by the everyday, dominant (housing) visual worlds - made of consumable housing ideals and desires. However, the visual housing ideals also find material and built translations and connection points. Furthermore, the lecture explores the question of what counter-hegemonic housing imagery can achieve as politically activist images for housing?
Emancipatory Housing: Housing from a Gender Perspective I & II (Sabina Riß)
Housing is subject to production factors such as economic and social policies as well as power. These lead to standards and norms for the formation of space. In the process, groups of people are excluded from participation and housing and living needs are disregarded. In women's movements, therefore, housing and urban development have been central issues. Feminist critique led to the formulation of demands as well as strategies in production and suitability of built space. The political EU concept of gender-sensitive planning aims at taking into account the different demands and interests in everyday life of different user groups in all planning levels and improving the awareness of quality and participation in planning processes.
Housing Question(s) and Class Relations in Art and Architecture I & II (Rosanna Umbach/Amelie Ochs).
How are class relations re/produced in images of housing, floor plans and (interior) architecture and how are in turn art and architectural history, (housing) media, urban planning and architecture involved in cementing classist structures and (stereotypical) notions of class(es)? In this lecture, we will approach the aesthetic, social, and political interrelations of housing and class through image readings, historical examples, and current interventions. We will analyze the extent to which class relations and class affiliations are negotiated through housing, architectural and planning practices, discourses of taste, and image and language politics. Where does bourgeois housing remain as an unmarked norm between Schöner Wohnen and Instagram? And what proletarian, revolutionary, or emancipatory housing designs have already existed? How do histories and theories of housing deal with class/classism (and vice versa)? Which discourses and voids are generated here and which interventions in classist (building) structures can be found?
In Search of a New Humanism (Christian Kühn)
After 1945, Functionalism and International Style dominate architecture, but criticism soon begins to form in the underground. In 1959, CIAM officially dissolves at its last congress in Otterlo to usher in a new era. After the failed attempt to create a rational architecture in the international style that could be understood in the same way worldwide, different new currents search for alternatives: Brutalism, structuralism, deconstruction, hisotrizing postmodernism. Among the actors who instead wanted to revive functionalism in a renewed form - not least through the use of the computer - were Christopher Alexander and Serge Chermayeff, whose approaches the lecture will deal with primarily on the basis of Alexander's book "Notes on the Synthesis of Form".
The Pattern Language or the Abolition of the Architect (Christian Kühn)
Already at the end of the 1960s Alexander criticizes the idea of creating a new rational architecture with the help of computer-aided methods. In particular, the central thesis of the "Notes", that problems can be cleanly decomposed into tree-like structured subproblems, becomes questionable for Alexander. In his text "A City is not a Tree," he explains how this notion has become a planning ideology that extends into urban design. Instead, he focuses his interest on archetypes and attempts to develop a new "language of architecture" from their combination, which he publishes as a book in 1977 under the title "A Pattern Language". The lecture examines and criticizes the Pattern Language from several aspects: as a closed archive of architecture, as an open planning method, and as a radical approach to participation that does not require professional planners.
Living Thinking Acting I & II (Lisz Hirn)
Following Heidegger's attempt to reflect on "Bauen Denken Wohnen" (Building Thinking Living), we try to take the leap into the political. To what extent does our Conditio Humana influence our living and thinking? What ethical and moral implications does our housing have for our actions and the democratization of our society? What political subject is fostered by the contemporary DNA of our housing?
Termine
Termine
23. Okt. 2023: VO 01 Das Bild des Wohnens I (Bernadette Krejs)
30. Okt. 2023: VO 01 Das Bild des Wohnens II (Bernadette Krejs)
6. Nov. 2023: VO 03 Wohnen aus Gender Perspektive I (Sabina Riß)
13. Nov. 2023: VO 04 Wohnen aus Gender Perspektive II (Sabina Riß)
20. Nov. 2023: VO 05 Wohungsfrage(n) und Klassenverhältnisse in Kunst und Architektur I
27. Nov. 2023: VO 06 Wohungsfrage(n) und Klassenverhältnisse in Kunst und Architektur II
4. Dez. 2023: VO 07 Auf der Suche nach einem neuen Humanismus (Christian Kühn)
11. Dez. 2023: VO 08 Die Pattern Language oder die Abschaffung des Architekten (Christian Kühn)
15.Jän. 2023: VO 09 Wohnen Denken Handeln I (Lisz Hirn)
22.Jän. 2023: VO 10 Wohnen Denken Handeln II (Lisz Hirn)
Ort und Zeit
HS 7 Schütte-Lihotzky statt.
10:00 - 12:00 Uh
In a Visual Essay, students will independently develop a research question in text and images related to the content presented.
Please enroll in the corresponding TUWEL course.
Examination modalities
A critical examination of a research question developed from the lecture content is required. Each student will be assigned a research question by the Housing Research Department. The assignment can be found on TUWEL after the last lecture (January 2023). In the form of a written and visual examination, the research question will be elaborated in an individual work. The result will be uploaded as a PDF on TUWEL at the end of the semester. The paper consists of a visual reflection of the research question (diagrams, collage, drawings, ...) as well as a textual reflection of the research question (3,000 characters, incl. spaces), in German or English.
More detailed information can be found on TUWEL.
