Teaching

This seminar explores architecture’s role in the historical transformations associated with the Anthropocene, with a particular focus on the Great Acceleration—the dramatic surge in energy use, industrialization, urbanization, and environmental degradation since the mid 20th century. Treating the Great Acceleration as both a historical period and a conceptual lens, the course examines how architecture has shaped, and been shaped by, intense socio-ecological change at a planetary scale.
 

Students will engage a critical history of architecture’s entanglement with the infrastructures, ideologies, and spatial logics that have driven the intensification of extraction, consumption, and carbonization—from postwar modernism and megaprojects to global logistics and climate engineering. Alongside these dominant developments, the course foregrounds critical and resistant practices that question the techno-optimism and extractive paradigm underpinning much of modern architectural production.

This seminar is open to students of Architecture, Urban Planning, and Landscape Architecture.
The first meeting will be held on zoom.

Seminar in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Ateya Khorakiwala (Columbia University, New York, USA), Dr. Megan Eardley (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden), and the Columbia University Global Center in Mumbai, India. 

This seminar examines how land is designed, shaped, and organized by economies, bureaucracies, and knowledge. It will take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on perspectives from urban planning, agricultural science, economic theory, labor studies, political theory, environmental studies, and more. Through a series of readings and discussions, students will explore how land has been measured, managed, contested, and transformed, and how these processes reflect broader structures of power, policy, and development. Focusing on the example of South Asia, together, we will develop approaches towards a methodology for the nascent field of the history of rural design.

The seminar will focus on the regional context of South Asia, with an emphasis on India. Students will study how the region’s history, economy, and political structures have influenced the ways in which land is organized and analyzed—from agriculture and industry to housing and infrastructure. Following several preparatory sessions on campus, the seminar will make a ten-day study trip to Mumbai, India, in March 2026. During this trip, students will engage with local institutions, researchers, and practitioners, and will visit selected sites to examine the history of land use and planning in India.

This course is intended for Master and Bachelor students in architecture, urban planning, landscape planning and landscape architecture, as well as those interested in environmental sciences, governance, and South Asian history and society.

All literature will be provided on Moodle in the course of the semester. It is possible to write a Studienarbeit in connection to the seminar.

The date and location of the first meeting to be announced on Moodle.

First meeting 22.10, 18:30 (Wednesday)
Universitätsplatz 9, ASL1 Room 0105
Study trip 9-16.03.2026
Dates to be announced
Partial subsidy to be confirmed

A-2.0-40 / A-1.0-40
A-2.0-11 / A-1.0-11
D-2.0-44
SWS: 4
Credits: 6
Form: Seminar
Language: English