Learning Approach
To stimulate innovative architecture, our studio is a laboratory that encourages a certain fearlessness to envision the new, while developing skills and an attitude of patient and disciplined enquiry.
The importance of taking risks and managing uncertainty cannot be over-stated in any innovative work. With a deliberate intention, and experienced strategies, the aim is to help students overcome the fears of failure and anxieties that prevent them from taking the path that is less trodden, and resist the temptation of producing ‘expected’ designs that are based on conforming to expectations rather than developing their individual true potential to the highest.
Confronting limits through true scale, true materials and direct engagement, students are empowered, develop their uniqueness, based on gathering knowledge as well as experience. Studios are structured to achieve a much higher detailed architectural design than mere concepts, with the idea that ‘the details are the architecture’.
Materiality includes not the only materials themselves but also climatic strategies, building infrastructure and management (water, waste, energy), and does not leave out the topic of local skills and socio-economic factors that would influence the choice of building technologies. Architectural technologies are not separable from architecture and are an integral part of architectural design.
Overall the mood is based on ‘learning’ together and inspiring students through an active engagement rather than allowing them to land in a passive role faced with ‘teaching’.
Winter Semester 2025/26
PEOPLE AND NATURE
Nestled here is the campus for the Keystone foundation, an NGO that has been working to empower indigenous people and the local community by building socio-ecological resilience since 25 years. Over the years, they have developed their campus with spaces for developing livelihood security, agriculture and food security, land and community rights, community health and development, and conservation of biodiversity through the socio-ecological growth of all life in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve.
Now that this campus is close to completion, Keystone foundation requires a 'People and Nature Centre', an interface between its work and the general public. The building is envisaged as a reception to welcome visitors and raise awareness about the work of the foundation, and will have spaces for education and interaction such as classrooms, workshop spaces, permanent exhibition spaces, audiovisual section and more.
Students will have the opportunity to work with a real site and real requirements and receive inputs and feedback from people on the ground in South India on design development including materials and construction details. A site visit is not offered as part of the course, but will be supported if funds become available. Virtual site visit data will be shared.
Prof. Anupama Kundoo
Bachelorthesis
The Nilgiri Mountain range with its unique bicultural diversity, is the first Biosphere Reserve in India recognised by the UN. It is occupied by several tribal communities that have protected and known the Shola forests and grasslands for thousands of years.Bachelorthesis
Nestled here is the campus for the Keystone foundation, an NGO that has been working to empower indigenous people and the local community by building socio-ecological resilience since 25 years. Over the years, they have developed their campus with spaces for developing livelihood security, agriculture and food security, land and community rights, community health and development, and conservation of biodiversity through the socio-ecological growth of all life in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve.
Now that this campus is close to completion, Keystone foundation requires a 'People and Nature Centre', an interface between its work and the general public. The building is envisaged as a reception to welcome visitors and raise awareness about the work of the foundation, and will have spaces for education and interaction such as classrooms, workshop spaces, permanent exhibition spaces, audiovisual section and more.
Students will have the opportunity to work with a real site and real requirements and receive inputs and feedback from people on the ground in South India on design development including materials and construction details. A site visit is not offered as part of the course, but will be supported if funds become available. Virtual site visit data will be shared.
MAKING ARCHITECTURE
Erste Schritte
Im ersten Semester lernen Sie die Grundlagen der Architektur, wie klimatischer Komfort, Raum, Funktion, Materialien, Form, Struktur, Erschließung sowie der Bezug zum Körper, zum Ort und zum Kontext.
Durch abwechslungsreiche Übungen lernen Sie Analyse, Entwicklung von eigenen Konzepten und Präsentationen.
Das Studio versteht sich als Labor und Spielplatz zugleich. In einer offenen Atmosphäre wird experimentiert, geforscht und gemeinsam an kreativen Ansätzen gearbeitet. Mit Skizzen, Modellen und Materialien wie Papier, Pappe, Ton und Holz entstehen erste Entwürfe, die sich im Prozess immer wieder weiterentwickeln. Kreativität entfaltet sich dabei im ausprobieren.
Erste Schritte
Prof. Anupama Kundoo, Li Lin,
Clemens Waldhart, Bene Wahlbrink
Grundlehre
Architektur eröffnet immer wieder neue Blickwinkel und schärft den Sinn dafür, Räume bewusst wahrzunehmen. Im Entwerfen entstehen Ideen, die sich Schritt für Schritt zu einer eigenen Gestaltungssprache entwickeln.Clemens Waldhart, Bene Wahlbrink
Grundlehre
Im ersten Semester lernen Sie die Grundlagen der Architektur, wie klimatischer Komfort, Raum, Funktion, Materialien, Form, Struktur, Erschließung sowie der Bezug zum Körper, zum Ort und zum Kontext.
Durch abwechslungsreiche Übungen lernen Sie Analyse, Entwicklung von eigenen Konzepten und Präsentationen.
Das Studio versteht sich als Labor und Spielplatz zugleich. In einer offenen Atmosphäre wird experimentiert, geforscht und gemeinsam an kreativen Ansätzen gearbeitet. Mit Skizzen, Modellen und Materialien wie Papier, Pappe, Ton und Holz entstehen erste Entwürfe, die sich im Prozess immer wieder weiterentwickeln. Kreativität entfaltet sich dabei im ausprobieren.
with Bene Wahlbrink
Seminar
A Journey Through Berlin's Housing Legacy and Its Adaptation
How do buildings shape our lives, and how do we shape them in return?
The seminar VOICES OF THE CITY invited participants to explore the housing legacy of post-war modernism in West Berlin – not just as architectural landmarks, but as living spaces with evolving social, cultural, and political meanings.
Many of these buildings were at the center of debates: Should they have been preserved, adapted, or even replaced? The seminar combined personal narratives with photographs, videos, interviews, and essays to create a multimedia archive that documented the past, examined the present, and explored possibilities for the future of the Schwarzwaldsiedlung in Berlin Reinickendorf.
Through architectural analysis and urban research, the settlement was used as a case study to understand its development over time.
By engaging and interacting with the people of the settlement, the seminar uncovered how architecture shaped daily life and explored the relationship between the built environment and the community's experiences.
with Prof. Anupama Kundoo, Li Lin,
Marius Busch, Bene Wahlbrink
Studio
Contemporary concerns for sustainability recognise that post-industrial building construction habits and large supply chains based on a linear economy generate enormous resource wastage, alongside other challenges such as increased transportation and the loss of local skills and know-how.
In this context, and addressing society's demand for a circular economy, our studio investigated Berlin’s urban waste and trash culture – which offered a substantial opportunity for rethinking the sourcing of building materials, how we design, use, and maintain our buildings. A wide range of materials collected as ‘urban waste’, generated by the habits of contemporary lifestyle, was examined as unconventional materials that could be repurposed as building components.
Our aim was to remove materials from their original context and reinterpret them architecturally. We worked both analog and digital, hands-on, and at a 1:1 scale. The studio encouraged ideas that aimed to make a practical difference.
The studio incorporated input from practitioners who had successfully reused waste, brought broader perspectives, and shared insights related to supply chains and circular economy concepts. It helped students develop the vocabulary to collaborate effectively and to take a greater role in interdisciplinary efforts to address the transition to a non-extractive economy.
with Li Lin
Seminar
In today’s age of industrialization, globalization and digitalization, we often interact with our environment without truly understanding how the things around us are sourced, produced or assembled. The act of making with our own hands remains a rare and valuable experience, reminding us that we are not only deeply connected to the things we create but also to the process of creation itself.
This course was conducted in a hybrid format, with preparatory sessions during the semester and a 14-day on-site winter school in Longmen town in southern China in March 2025. The winter school was held in collaboration with China Academy of Art in Hangzhou.
During the winter school, students from Berlin and Hangzhou explored how making is deeply connected to local products, resources, space, tradition, social relations and everyday life.
As a culmination of the research phase, students collectively realized a temporary intervention in the riverbed: a participatory event that integrates full-scale, hands-on making with locally grounded narratives. All the tools and materials were borrowed, collected and finally given back to the neighborhood.
Atlas of Making does not seek to define what it means to make, but rather to dwell in its unfolding. It asks: What kinds of knowledge are activated in the act of mending, of shaping, of responding to materials as they resist and offer? How does making shape the maker in return?
with Marius Busch
Seminar
This seminar researched collective spaces with a special focus on the “lobby” as a central space of encounters and negotiation. The starting point was a field research based on attentive observation and understanding of a diverse range of existing lobbies in Berlin. What is the unique character of each of these spaces? What do they tell us about the rest of the building? Which spatial elements provoke collective actions? How does the choice of furniture and material influence human habits?
We learned from the existing by making large-scale models and drawings, and we reflected on our observations in writing. We aimed to understand more about construction, the use of materials, the haptic quality of surfaces, and other key details.
Finally, the collective results of the seminar were exhibited in the lobby of the IfA building.
– A Cooperative Housing Project in Berlin
with Prof. Anupama Kundoo, Li Lin,
Marius Busch, Bene Wahlbrink
StudioMarius Busch, Bene Wahlbrink
Human settlements can be rethought in the interest of reducing resource consumption while enhancing the human potential for progress through new sharing models leading to health, happiness, and well-being. Taking note of the growing imbalances in current urbanisation, the studio used integral thinking, thereby addressing environmental, social, and economic impacts of development. New models of living were envisaged with a greater sense of community, where self-reliant people could live together in a relatively small area and yet find the diversity and all the useful services that can be accessed by foot. These projects were primarily built (conceptually) out of local materials and local skills, improving the local economy while reducing environmental impact.
The studio investigated urban co-housing prototypes with a focus on redefinition of private and shared spaces in the context of community living. The project context was Berlin, where co-housing built on previous collective living experiences and explored new models of living alongside an emerging urban future in terms of mobility, circular economy, and green infrastructure.
Our design studio incorporated the JOANES-Preis student competition, focusing on designing future-oriented cooperative housing (genossenschaftlicher Wohnungsbau) with commercial spaces on the ground floor for a real site in Berlin. The design ideas from the winning projects were further developed by the participating students in a workshop process during the summer of 2025.
with Prof. Anupama Kundoo, Li Lin,
Marius Busch, Bene Wahlbrink
StudioMarius Busch, Bene Wahlbrink
In our vertical design studio, materials transcended their conventional roles to become not only sources of inspiration but also defining elements that shape both space and program. As we reconsidered the potential of “local materials” in the context of climate change, we delved into the rich and complex material culture of place—exploring all its dimensions, including its vital contributions to traditional architecture.
Throughout the semester, we devoted ourselves to an in-depth exploration of a singular material: brick. Participants engaged deeply with its various manufacturing processes, technical properties, sustainable applications, and aesthetic possibilities. Through hands-on experimentation and critical analysis, we sought to push the boundaries of what this one material could achieve.
Berlin, renowned for its storied tradition of brick architecture, served as our living laboratory. Here, participants had the unique opportunity to reimagine how brick might shape contemporary public spaces—showcasing material knowledge, fostering community, and enriching the urban fabric.