Bachelor's and Master’s KIT Seminar Course, Fall 2025,
Professorship Architecture Theory.
Professorship Architecture Theory.
While we often think of space as something abstract, it is shaped by a range of infrastructural systems. The seminar will investigate how the infrastructural networks—roads, railways, electricity grids, oil pipelines, internet cables and waste systems—provide a concrete physical form to the abstract political idea of a united Europe. The seminar is particularly interested in the physical materiality of mundane infrastructural objects and their generative (and often violent) spatial effects.
During the semester, we will read key texts on the politics of infrastructure and investigate political imaginaries of selected systems. Karlsruhe, an envisioned European oil and data hub in the 1970s, will provide a helpful departure point. We will map the spatial impact of selected infrastructures and envision alternative futures more responsive to the contemporary climate emergency.