Teaching

Generative AI is rapidly changing how research and writing are conducted across academic disciplines. But beyond questions of efficiency, plagiarism, or how to use particular tools, AI raises more fundamental questions for the humanities: How is knowledge produced? What does it mean to write and think with machines? And how might AI change the ways we research, interpret, and write architectural history?

This seminar approaches these questions through a combination of architectural history and critical perspectives on digital technologies. We will examine both established methods of historical research, including archival work, critical engagement with historical and contemporary sources, interpretation, and scholarly writing, alongside emerging practices involving generative AI. Topics will include authorship, writing as a form of thinking, bias and representation, the environmental costs of AI, and the colonial and extractive structures underlying contemporary data systems.

Students will complete weekly readings and smaller assignments in preparation for each seminar meeting and maintain an autoethnographic research journal throughout the semester, reflecting on their own processes of researching, writing, and working with or without AI. Each meeting will result in an “artifact” that documents, tests, or reflects on a particular aspect of the seminar’s inquiry. These artifacts will accumulate into a collective body of work that students will collaboratively conceptualize, design, and present as an exhibition at the end of the semester.

The seminar will be taught in English.

Mondays 18:00 - 20:00

Universitätsplatz 9
(ASL 1)  Room 2111

Seminar

6 Credits

A-2.0-40 / A-1.0-40

The seminar focuses on architectural, infrastructural, and landscape planning phenomena in border regions.

The conceptual framework of the border region provides an opportunity to examine spatial production under unstable conditions, in which cultural notions, political influences, and economic demands are constantly being renegotiated. The seminar examines how, in border architectures, sometimes contradictory cultural practices and political ideologies overlap. These circumstances, shaped by exchange and conflict, allow us to reflect on new forms of land use, design, and coexistence. Finally, we will discuss the conditions under which border architectures can become sites of negotiation where power relations and the appropriation of contested territories and resources are questioned.

The course is aimed at master’s and bachelor’s students majoring in architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture, as well as anyone interested in environmental sciences, sustainability studies, and governance. Weekly readings form the basis for the discussions. Students present examples they have selected themselves. 

The seminar is conducted in German. Knowledge of English is required
to work through the preparatory texts.

Mondays
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Universitätsplatz 9 (ASL 1), Room 2111

Seminar

3 credits

A-2.1-31 / A-1.1-31

How does law shape the built environment when buildings, landscapes, and urban infrastructures become sites of exposure or disease vectors? This seminar examines the intertwined histories of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and environmental law through the movements of toxic substances, infection and contamination. Students will investigate how courts, legislatures, regulatory agencies, property owners, designers, and communities have defined—and contested—responsibility for hazardous environments.

The course takes legal cases as historical records that reveal changing ideas about risk, evidence, and the responsibilities of design professionals. Topics range from contaminated housing and occupational exposure, to the siting of toxic industries and infrastructures, air and water pollution, as well as remediation efforts. Particular attention will be given to legal decisions that have transformed architectural practice, land use, environmental remediation, building regulation, and the spatial organization of cities.

The seminar strengthens students’ analytical reading, academic discussion, and critical writing skills. It is intended for advanced Bachelor’s and Master’s students in Architecture, City Planning, and Landscape Planning interested in understanding how toxic exposure is addressed across scales, from the material detail of a building to the regional landscape and the metropolitan plan. Throughout, the course asks a broader question: what happens to architectural and urban history when exposure, liability, and law become central to the story of the built environment?
All literature will be provided on Moodle in the course of the seminar.
Active participation is mandatory.

Excursion Week
02.11.-06.11.2026

Room will be 
announced on moodle

Compact Seminar

3 Credits

A-1.0-40 / A-2.0-40 D-2.0-44
A-2.0-11 / A-1.0-11
 

For several decades, authors of architectural history publications and teachers of lecture courses (such as “The History of the Built Environment,” taught at the University of Kassel) have increasingly emphasized global connections, mobility, and the circulation of people, ideas, materials, and expertise. Yet current geopolitical developments—renewed nationalisms, armed conflict, climate inequality, and breaking economic networks—question the validity of these narratives. In this seminar, we will reflect about the ways of addressing the global dimension of architectural history today.

To do so, we will examine global architectural history as a historically situated method in its intellectual context, including such related approaches as world history, comparative history, and global history, as well as its more recent alternatives: crossed history, connected history, planetary history, among other. Topics will include world histories of architecture, nationalist historiographies, comparative methodology, critiques of Eurocentrism, colonial and postcolonial perspectives, environmental history, and emerging approaches that address an increasingly fragmented yet still interconnected world.
 

Wednesdays 
10:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Nora Platiel Str. 5
Room 0107

Seminar

6 Credits

A-1.0-11