Research

Since the Renaissance, the architectural discourse has also been based, above all, on the definition and analysis of architectural elements. Leon Battista Alberti´s six elements (region/location, site, division (floor plan), wall, roof and openings; 1452), Gottfried Semper´s four elements (hearth, roof, enclosure and mound, 1851) and Le Corbusier´s five elements of architecture (Pilotis, free façade, open floor plan, horizontal windows, roof garden, 1928) were all attempts to analyze the history of building in varying degrees of intensity and to codify the future of architecture. 

But since the globalization of modern architecture after the Second World War, the possibility of an element-related systematization of architecture has been largely ignored. With architectural consequences as: what was once the specialty of architects - the roof and the window, but also the façade - became an apparatus, evaporating into advanced technological spheres, decoupled from the architect's responsibility. 

The research question entails a paradox: despite standardization, despite devices becoming apparatuses and the attempts of the parametric architecture, distinct categories such as the roof, the wall or the window don´t merge into a continuous surface of architecture and are outlasted by certain elements of the architecture. 

Preliminary work: Stephan Trüby: Geschichte des Korridors (HfG Karlsruhe, 2011, Fink, 2018); Rem Koolhaas, James Westcott, Stephan Trüby (ed.): Elements of Architecture (Marsilio, 2014)

The relationships between economics, architecture and urbanism find their relative zero in the term oikos. Under the term oikos one understood first the basic unit of society in Greek city-states in the sense of an economic municipality, which formed the center of life of a large family. Later, from the early modern period, the housekeeping turned into a city and finally a state or national economy.

The fact that economic contexts require design artifacts has perhaps been insinuated most meaningfully by the neo-Marxism of David Harvey. In The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey presents postmodernism as the cultural logic of post-Fordist late capitalism or neoliberalism. Architectural and design forms, as can be seen after Harvey, always refer to economic contexts. As part of this research, through the examination of selected international examples, the spatial effects of historical and contemporary ways of dealing with money, credit and investment will be investigated and the question will be posed as to what extent a new (urban) ethic is necessary.

Preliminary work: Gerhard M. Buurman, Stephan Trüby (ed.): Geldkulturen. Ökonomische, philosophische und kulturtheoretische Perspektiven (Fink, 2014).

When Kenneth Frampton formulated his concept of "Critical Regionalism" in the mid-1980s, he did so in polemical opposition to the two most influential architectural movements of his time: the high-tech wave and post-modernism. The latter considered Frampton as deeply "scenographic". Against the background of a "bad" scenographic backdrop, Frampton articulated a desire for a "good, non-scenographic" architecture that assures itself of "critical" regional building traditions.

Frampton's juxtaposition obscures the view of an advanced understanding of scenography beyond lying and deception - a scenography understanding that ties in with those decisive cultural developments since the end of late modernity, which have recently been summarized as "performative turn" - and in relation to this research project, should be systematically related to architecture.

Preliminary work: Stephan Trüby (guest curator): Archithese 4/2010: "Szenografie"; Stephan Trüby, Verena Hartbaum (ed.): Germania, Venezia. The German Entries to the Venice Architecture Biennale since 1991 (Fink, 2016)

"Stuttgart School" in the architectural context is commonly understood through the conservative architectural teaching of Theodor Fischer students like Paul Bonatz, Paul Schmitthenner and Heinz Wetzel. However, when talking about it, the much more progressive "Stuttgart School" of the aftermath of 1968, still yet to be researched, should not be forgotten. There are various reasons for that.

On the one hand, the "Stuttgart School" from the late 1960s and 1970s (also) stands for the radical experiment of a "faculty without professors", in which students independently organized seminars, design classes and exams, printed leaflets and founded magazines; on the other hand, the most important result of this "faculty without professors" from today's perspective is the foundation of the journal ARCH+ 1 in January 1968 in the Kollegiengebäude 1 (K1) of the University of Stuttgart. Furthermore, it stands for the founding of IGmA in the same year, the first institute for "architectural theory" in Germany directed by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Joedicke, who published books as the "Documents of Modern Architecture" and the "Arbeitsberichte zur Planungsmethodik" and at least indirectly influenced the early phase of ARCH+. Last but not least, it stands for intellectuals such as Max Bense, who worked from 1950 as Associate Professor and from 1963 as Professor (Emeritus 1978) for Philosophy and Philosophy of Science, or Horst Rittel, who worked from 1973 to 1990 as Professor at the Institute for the Foundations of Planning. A detailed analysis of the reception of Bense as Rittel in architectural circles is yet to be done.

Preliminary work: Stephan Trüby (guest curator): ARCH + 221: "Tausendundeine Theorie"