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.

The Curated Study Programme

The Curated Study Programme turns teaching into an urban and spatial real-world laboratory, an experimental infrastructure and a learning system for architectural knowledge production. At its core is the collaborative development of relevant questions, methods and spatial strategies through which knowledge emerges in the process of research, design and exchange.

Curating means bringing topics, actors, expertise and scales into relation in ways that generate productive friction. Architecture, interior architecture and Civic Design work in interdisciplinary groups together with experts from academia, politics, public administration, culture and civil society on real societal challenges. The encounter between different perspectives becomes a productive condition for both inquiry and design.

The real-world laboratory provides a testing ground. Societal realities are both the point of departure and a critical reference for teaching. Designs, concepts and strategies are continuously tested, developed and refined through internal and external dialogue with different actors.

At the same time, the Curated Study Programme operates as a learning system. Projects, teaching formats, methods and forms of collaboration are continuously reflected upon and developed further. Teaching itself thus becomes a field of critical practice.

With a different overarching theme each year, temporary spaces of collaboration bring together up to 120 students, teachers and experts around a shared question. Projects such as Learning from Chorweiler, Positions – Dortmund Nordstadt, Hybrid Strip -bonner strasse cologne and StadtLand (IBA Thüringen) explore architecture as a societal practice and experiment with new forms of designing, researching and working together.

credits © pbsa, emma van heek, adela hass, hannah buchmann, sofie wolff