Generating Insight

Teaching is a learning system. It is a collaborative process of acquiring and producing knowledge: rather than providing answers, it enables students to ask relevant questions. It supports open-ended processes, opens up new perspectives and creates spaces in which new connections can emerge. Design is understood not as the search for a single correct solution, but as a shared process of inquiry that brings together analysis, imagination and critical thinking.

Architecture emerges at the intersection of different disciplines, perspectives and experiences. Teaching responds to this complexity through collaborative, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary forms of working in which hierarchies are questioned, expertise is shared and responsibility is assumed collectively. Architecture becomes a discursive practice whose quality develops through exchange, controversy and a willingness to continuously reconsider positions.

As part of their teaching at the Peter Behrens School of Arts, Tanja Kullack and Barbara Holzer have developed the Curated Study Programme as an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary urban and spatial real-world laboratory. Together with students and experts from within and beyond the university, it investigates societal questions while continuously developing new forms of architectural practice, participation, teaching and learning. The Curated Study Programme is both an experimental space and a learning system in its own right.

This approach to teaching is grounded in the conviction that architecture carries social, ecological and political responsibility. At its core is the development of an independent, responsible and empathetic position. The aim is to enable students to recognise complex relationships, question them critically and collectively translate them into appropriate spatial strategies.

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fall term 26.27 @pbsa: a new semester, new questions, new perspectives!
destroy, she says.

destroy, she says.

A new semester, new questions, new perspectives!

The Curated Study Programme brings together Master's students in Architecture and Interior Architecture to explore design as a processual and societal practice. The process begins by negotiating what is at stake and what is open to question. Students identify their own critical questions and work across disciplines and scales, from interior spaces to the urban fabric.

In the winter semester 2026/27, the studio is titled “Destroy, she says. – Critical Care as Architectural Practice”. The title refers to Marguerite Duras’ Détruire, dit-elle (1969) and Monica Bonvicini’s video installation Destroy, She Said (1998). While Duras explores the disruption of established orders, Bonvicini examines how these orders are produced and reinforced through space. The studio brings both perspectives into architectural and feminist practice: “Decide critically what must end, persist or be transformed!”

The site is the Opernbrache at Am Wehrhahn 1 in Düsseldorf. From 1969 to 2024, the building housed a Kaufhof department store before being acquired by the city for its proposed Opera House of the Future. Following the suspension of planning in 2026, the site has become a programmatic void in the heart of the city.

The methodological foundation is Critical Care: an attentive, critical and responsible engagement with what is already there, considering ecological, social, economic, cultural and political conditions. Preservation, repair, adaptation, transformation and destruction emerge as equally legitimate architectural actions, each requiring critical examination and justification.

Prof. Astrid Bornheim
Prof. Dr. Linda Hildebrand
Prof. Barbara Holzer
Prof. Tanja Kullack
Prof. Anca Timofticiuc

Hannah Buchmann
Hannah nullmeyer