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Tacit knowledge is a key characteristic of architecture culture. It plays a central role in the conception, design, construction and appropriation of buildings and cities. It characterizes architectural education, distinguishes the cultures of design offices and typifies the collaborations between different actors, including craftsmen, engineers and architects.
Despite this central role that tacit knowledge assumes in architecture culture, our understanding of it remains limited. Research into tacit architectural knowledge has only recently gained momentum and its specificities still need further exploration. Questions as: What are the roles of tacit knowledge in architecture culture?, How does it complement other forms of knowledge?, and how does it construct cooperative communities across disciplines? still await more nuanced answers.
‘TACK / Communities of Tacit Knowledge: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing’ is a funded Innovative Training Network, as part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions within the European Framework Program Horizon 2020. It trains young researchers in understanding the specific knowledge that architects use when designing buildings and cities. TACK gathers ten major academic institutions, three leading cultural architectural institutions as well as nine distinguished architecture design offices. Collaboratively these partners offer an innovative PhD training program on the nature of tacit knowledge in architecture, resulting in ten parallel PhD projects.
The TACK Conference “Tacit Knowledge in Architecture” and Exhibition “Unausgesprochenes Wissen/Unspoken Knowledge/Le (savoir) non-dit” took place at ETH Zürich, 19-21 June 2023.
Prof. dr. ir. Klaske Havik is Professor of Methods of Analysis and Imagination at the Department of Architecture at TU Delft. Her book Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architecture (Rotterdam: Nai010 2014), based on her PhD, proposes a literary approach to architecture and urbanism. Other publications include Writingplace. Investigations in Architecture and Literature (2016), “Writing Atmospheres”, in Jonathan Charley(ed), Routledge Companion to Architecture and Literature (London: Routledge, 2018) and Architectural Positions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere (with Tom Avermaete and Hans Teerds, 2009). Havik is editor of the Writingplace Journal for Architecture & Literature, and Action Chair of the EU Cost network Writing Urban Places.
Prof. Dr. ir. Janina Gosseye is Professor of Building Ideologies in the TU Delft Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. Her research is situated at the nexus of architectural theory, urban planning and social and political history. Gosseye has edited and authored several books, including Shopping Towns Europe 1945-75: Commercial Collectivity and the Architecture of the Shopping Centre (2017, with Tom Avermaete) and Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research (2019, with Naomi Stead and Deborah van der Plaat).Her research has also been published in several leading journals, including the Journal of Architecture,the Journal of Urban History, and Planning Perspectives.
Eric Crevels is an architect, urban planner and craftsman his work focus on socially oriented practices, investigating the built environment by the perspective of labour and the interfaces between craft and architecture. In 2018 Eric received a Master’s degree in Architecture and Urbanism at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais with the thesis “Essays on Resistance: A practical architectural proposal from the perspective of labour”, exploring with the potentialities of crafts, tacit knowledge and manual labour in the empowerment of individuals and communities. His research seeks to connect architectural and urban studies with anthropology, sociology and philosophy, looking for ways that may bridge the boundaries between theory and practice, looking to reshape the urban experience and architectural practice in inventive and socially responsible ways.
Prof. dr. Helena Mattsson is Professor in History and Theory at KTH School of Architecture. Her research deals with the 20 th century theory on welfare state architecture and contemporary architectural history with a special focus on the interdependency between politics, economy and spatial organizations. She is the co-editor for publications such as Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010), the themed issue of Architecture and Culture, “Architecture and Capitalism: Solids and Flows”, 2017 and Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). She is currently working on a book on the neoliberalization of the 1980s welfare state (Bloomsbury Publishing). She is part of the group Action Archive and a member of the editorial board of Journal of Architecture.
Assoc. Prof. Jennifer Mack is Associate Professor in Theory and History at the KTH School of Architecture. Broadly, her work concerns equality, power, and social change and the built environment, combining approaches from architectural history and anthropology. Her current research focuses on the design, use, and renovation of late modernist landscapes. She is the author of The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and the co-editor of two anthologies: Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects (Actar, 2019) and Life Among Urban Planners: Practice, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2020). She has published in numerous anthologies and a range of journals, including Public Culture, American Ethnologist, International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and Landscape Research (forthcoming) and is a member of the editorial board of Thresholds.
Anna Livia Vørsel is an architectural historian, researcher, and PhD candidate in Architectural History, Theory and Critical Studies at the School of Architecture, KTH. She holds an MA in Architectural History and a BSc in Architectural and Interdisciplinary Studies, both from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Working in-between and across scientific, historical, artistic and critical inquiries, her work addresses economic, legal and bureaucratic infrastructures in discussions around identity, belonging and knowledge production in architecture.
Prof. dr. Tim Anstey trained as an architect, and took his PhD, at the University of Bath in England. He is Director of the PhD Programme at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway, and a member of OCCAS, the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies. His recent publications include Images of Egypt, edited together with Mari Lending and Eirik Bøhn (Frankfurt: Lars Müller, 2020), “Movables”, in The Printed and the Built edited by Mari Hvattum and Anne Hultszch (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), and “Economies of the Interior: Thomas Hope and Interior Decoration”, in Grey Room 78 (Winter 2020).
Mara Trübenbach is an architectural designer and researcher strongly interested in the intersection of design methods and craft in architecture. In 2018 she graduated from the Bauhaus-University Weimar, DEU with a MSc Architecture, having studied before at the Peter Behrens School of Arts in Dusseldorf, DEU and at the Technical University Vienna, AT. She has gained a wide professional horizon in well-known architectural practices across Europe and has done research on provenances and migration movement in architecture and related subjects. In summer of 2019 she was selected for the Bauhaus Lab program at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Dessau, DEU. An accompanied collectively curated exhibition and pocketbook was published soon after. Mara gave a talk at the Isokon Gallery in London, UK and was invited to speak at the Design History Society Annual Conference at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK both held in 2019.
Prof. dr. ir. Christoph Grafe; architect and writer; living and working in Amsterdam, London and Wuppertal. Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Wuppertal. From 2011 to 2017 he served as the director of the Flanders Architecture Institute in Antwerp. Visiting professorships at University of Hasselt (Belgium) and Politecnico di Milano. His book People’s Palaces – Architecture, Culture and Democracy in Post-War Western Europewas published by Architectura & Natura in 2014. Editor of OASEand publisher/ editor of Eselsohren. Member of the editorial board of the Journal of Architecture (RIBA) and the advisory board of the Baukunstarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen. Acted as interim city architect (with Bob van Reeth) in Antwerp in 2015.
Filippo Cattapan is an architect and researcher based between Milano, Cologne and Lausanne. He studied Architecture at the IUAV University of Venezia, where he graduated in 2011 with a design thesis supervised by Giovanni Corbellini. In the last years, he has been teaching and researching at the Politecnico di Milano, at the ETH in Zürich and at the EPFL in Lausanne, where he is currently chargé de cours within the Laboratoire des Arts pour le Sciences directed by Nicola Braghieri. His studies in the field of architectural theory and history are mainly focused on architectural and urban representation, Renaissance architectura picta, seventeenth and eighteenth century visionary engravings, 1970s collages.
Prof. dr. Gennaro Postiglione is a full Professor in Interior Architecture at Politecnico di Milano where he acts as Head of the MSc in Architecture. Besides his research on Scandinavian Modern and Contemporary Architecture, since 2005 he started a research by design track on reuse and valorisation of minor heritage – among which also the one coming from conflicts – recurring to sustainable re-active-action strategies and stressing the relationship between collective memory, public space and cultural identity. Lately including also contemporary housing and dwelling practices, to promote innovative, up-to-date solutions capable of meeting the urgent needs of housing. Putting the resources of architecture in the public interest.
Ass. Prof. Gaia Caramellino is Assistant Professor of history of architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and member of the PhD supervisory board at Politecnico di Torino. Her research focuses on the transatlantic transfer of architectural and urban knowledge; the history of housing practices, cultures, forms and theories; terminology and the study of the ordinary. She has held several visiting fellowships (the CCA, Kyoto University, IIAS, Radcliffe) and research grants (Graham Foundation). She is the author of Europe meets America (2016) and co-editor of The Housing Project (2020), Post-war Middle-Class Housing (2015) and Storie di Case (2013). She chairs the research group Retheorizing the Architecture of Housing.
Claudia Mainardi, together with her collective Fosbury Architecture, is curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. In the previous years, Claudia worked for numerous offices including OMA/AMO, MVRDV, Stefano Boeri Architetti / MultiplicityLab, and Studio Folder with whom she won a special mention at the 14th Venice Biennale. In 2019 CM was head curator of the exhibition and graphic design of UABB Shenzhen Biennale and in 2017 she was assistant curator of BIO 25, the 25th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana. CM has been teaching assistant at Politecnico di Milano, researcher at The Why Factory –the think-thank led by Winy Maas within TUDelft– and collaborator at the Nieuwe Instituut.
Prof. dr. ir. Angelika Schnell is Professor for architectural theory, architectural history and design at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Former editor of ARCH+, current member of the editorial boards of ARCH+ and Candide, co-editor of Bauwelt Fundamente. Numerous publications and lectures at international institutions. Dissertation on the theoretical work of Aldo Rossi (summa cum laude). Research foci on the relationship between architecture and urbanism in the 20th and 21st centuries, in particular on the criticism of modernism and its historiographical conception, on design methods and their transdisciplinary interconnections.
Dr. Eva Sommeregger is Senior Scientist at the Institute for Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, associated with the platforms „History, Theory and Criticism“ and „Analogue and Digital Production“. Her research deals with models of thought related to the human body’s spatiality. Eva was Schütte-Lihotzky Research Fellow 2010, Architect in Residence at the MAK in Los Angeles in 2011 and was appointed Senior Researcher at the LMDA at the Art Academy of Latvia, Riga in 2021. She is the co-editor of „Silver Linings“ (Breite Gasse, 2015, with Mike Aling and Florian Schafschetzy) and „Entwerfen Erforschen: der „performative“ turn im Architekturstudium“ (Birkhäuser, 2016, with Angelika Schnell and Waltraud Indrist), and author of “Tupaia, Kybernetes & Lara Croft” (Breite Gasse, 2022).
Paula Strunden is a transdisciplinary artist with a background in architecture. She pursued her studies in Vienna, Paris, and London and gained professional experience at Raumlabor Berlin and Herzog & de Meuron Basel before undertaking her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna as part of the European network TACK: Architecture and its Ways of Knowing. Her installations have been exhibited internationally at the Royal Academy of Arts London, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, and Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam and were nominated for the Dutch Film Award “Gouden Calf” in 2020. Paula is an Associate of Store and co-founder of the educational initiative Virtual Fruits, teaching courses at the Architectural Association London, Akademie van Bouwkunst Amsterdam, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, advocating for alternative historiographies of virtual technologies through www.xr-atlas.org.
Prof. dr. ir. Lara Schrijver is Professor in Architecture Theory at the University of Antwerp Faculty of Design Sciences. Earlier, she taught at Delft University of Technology (2005–2014) and the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture (2007–2013). She is editor for the KNOB Bulletin and has served as editor for Footprint journal and OASE. Her work has been published in various academic and professional journals. She is author of Radical Games (2009) and co-editor of Autonomous Architecture in Flanders (2016). She was co-editor for three editions of the annual review Architecture in the Netherlands (2016–2019).
Ionas Sklavounos is an architect and co-founder of the research-and-practice collective “Boulouki – Itinerant Workshop on Traditional Building Techniques.” Currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Antwerp, he graduated at the University of Patras and completed his post-graduate studies on the Epistemology of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, where he also worked as Teaching Assistant in courses of “Architectural Design” and “Analysis and Study of Historical Settlements and Ensembles.” His research focuses on participatory and ‘hands-on’ recuperations of cultural heritage through processes of making, repairing and building.
Prof. dr. Peg Rawes is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Trained in art history and philosophy, her anthologies, Architectural Relational Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity (ed 2013), and Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts (co-ed. 2016), publish architects alongside practitioners in the arts, environmental, human rights, social and medical research. Other recent publications include: ‘Insecure Predictions’, E-Flux Architecture, 24 July 2018; ‘Housing biopolitics and care’ in A. Radman and H. Sohn (eds), Critical and Clinical Cartographies (2017) and ‘Planetary Aesthetics’, in E. Wall and T. Waterman (eds), Landscape and Agency (2017).
Jhono Bennett is an architectural urbanist based in Johannesburg. He is a co-founder of 1to1 – Agency of Engagement, a design based social enterprise that has been developed to support the re-development of South African cities through addressing systemic spatial inequality post-Apartheid. In addition to this role, Jhono has held research and teaching and research positions in both the University of Johannesburg’s Design for Social Development Desis Lab and the Graduate School of Architecture; where he has been developing a focus on the inter-sectional role of design in how South African cities are seen, made and managed. Through his research he aims to explore the various contested imaginaries-in-action carried within the enforcement of urban policy in South African public space with a particular focus on the effect these value-based forces have in everyday city-making practices. Jhono holds a life-long fellowship with the Ashoka Global Changemakers Network as well as a place in the Alumni of the Young African Leaders Initiative’s (YALI) Mandela Washington Fellowship.
Prof. dr. ir. Margitta Buchert was Chair for Architecture and Art 20th/21st Centuries at the Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Sciences (Leibniz Universität Hannover). Contents focus on architectural theory, design theory, and design principles. The primary fields of research are ‘Reflexive design’, ‘Urban architecture’, as well as the aesthetics and contextuality of architecture, art, cities, and nature. | Selected publications: Bigness and Porosity, in: Sophie Wolfrum et al. (ed.), Porous City, Berlin 2018, 84-88; Margitta Buchert (ed), Processes of Reflexive Design, Berlin 2018; Margitta Buchert, Mobile und Stabile, in: Anett Zinsmeister (ed.), Figure of motion, Berlin 2011, 50–73; Margitta Buchert, Actuating. Koolhaas´urban aesthetics, in: Jale Erzen (ed.), Mirmarlikta estetik dusunce, Ankara 2010, 223-231.
Caendia Wijnbelt is an architect and researcher (doctoral candidate, LUH) with a strong interest in the many modes of perceiving/interpreting place, building upon a broad range of experiences working between disciplines and across cultures. Her project explores how reflexive approaches towards sites and localities could be conceptualised and generate practical tools for design. Before working in Lisbon at Inês Lobo Arquitectos for two years, she graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from ENSA Toulouse, and completed a dual Master’s degree in European Architecture within the international network Reiseuni_lab in 2018. Her experience includes workshop-based design projects in Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa (MA), Tallinn University of Technology (MSc), University of Ljubljana, Haifa School of Design, Bauhaus Dessau, University of Innsbruck.
Prof. dr. ir. Tom Avermaete is Professor at ETH Zürich, where he is Chair for the History and Theory of Urban Design. Avermaete has a special research interest in the post-war public realm and the architecture of the city in Western and non-Western contexts. He is the author of Another Modern: The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005) and Casablanca, Chandigarh: A Report on Modernization (2014, with Maristella Casciato). Avermaete has also edited numerous books, including Shopping Towns Europe 1945-75: Commercial Collectivity and the Architecture of the Shopping Centre (2017, with Janina Gosseye), and is a member of the editorial team of OASE Architectural Journal and the advisory board of the Architectural Theory Review, among others.
Hamish Lonergan is a PhD candidate at the institute for the history and theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich. His research uses methods informed by queer theory to investigate the philosophical concept of tacit knowledge in design studio education since the 1970s. He has been a visiting researcher at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Nieuwe Institute. Before joining TACK, he studied architecture at the University of Queensland and worked at COX architecture on Indigenous cultural facilities on Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island). His writing—broadly concerned with the entanglement of architecture, philosophy, and queerness—appears in publications including OASE, Interstices, gta Papers, Footprint and Cartha.
Dr. Monika Platzer studied art history at the University of Vienna. She is a curator at the Architekturzentrum Wien and heads its collections department. International curatorial activity at leading institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and the Getty Research Institute (GRI). Her exhibitions include: Cold War and Architecture. Contributions to Austria’s Democratization after 1945.; ‘Vienna. The Pearl of the Reich.’ Planning for Hitler; a_show: Austrian Architecture in the 20th and 21st Centuries; Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky; Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe 1890–1937; and Kinetism. Vienna Discovers the Avant-Garde. Monika Platzer is editor of icamprint, the journal of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums. In 2014, she was visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University. Her current research focuses on transnational architectural history which was the subject of her latest publication on ‘Cold War and Architecture. The Competing Forces that Reshaped Austria after 1945. ’ by Park Books in 2019.
Dr. ir. Dirk van den Heuvel is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. He heads the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, the research collaboration between the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of TU Delft, and Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. The Jaap Bakema Study Centre develops a public research programme of exhibitions, books, events and PhD projects in connection with the Dutch national collection of architecture and urban planning, held by Nieuwe Instituut. Van den Heuvel received a Richard Rogers Fellowship from Harvard University in 2017, and was a Visiting Scholar at Monash University in Melbourne, in 2019. He was curator of the Dutch national pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014. Other exhibitions include Changing Ideals. Rethinking the House (Bureau Europa, 2008) and Art on Display 1949–69 (Calouste Gulbenkian Museum 2019). Publications he (co-)authored include Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture (2020), Jaap Bakema and the Open Society (2018), Architecture and the Welfare State (2015), Team 10: In Search a Utopia the Present 1953–1981 (2005), Alison and Peter Smithson: From the House the Future to a House Today (2004).
Dr. Fatma Tanış is the coordinator of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre at the Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam and lectures at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft. Prior to Delft, Tanış trained as an architect in İstanbul and Stuttgart. She holds Master’s degrees in Architectural History (ITU) and Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage (MSFAU). Having a particular interest in the in-between realm, she has explored the specificity of port cities through the notion of cosmopolitanism in her doctoral dissertation titled ‘Urban Scenes of a Port City: Exploring Beautiful İzmir through Narratives of Cosmopolitan Practices’ (2022). Her other publications include ‘Spatial Stories of İzmir’ (2020); ‘Space, Representation, and Practice in the Formation of İzmir during the Long Nineteenth Century’ in ‘Migrants and the Making the Urban-Maritime World: Agency and Mobility in Port Cities, c. 1570–1940’, eds. Christina Reimann, Martin Öhman (New York, London: Routledge, 2020); and a themed issue ‘Narratives #1: Mediterranean and Atlantic Cities’ (2021).
Dr. Sofie De Caigny is director of the Flanders Architecture Institute since January 2018 and Lecturer at the University of Antwerp in Architecture Critique at the Faculty of Design Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. (2007, University of Leuven) in architectural history and a Master degree in Cultural Management (2001, Universitat de Barcelona). She coordinated of the heritage department of the Flanders Architecture Institute since 2006. In this position, she manages projects on the conservation, digitization, dissemination and publication of digital architectural records. She was in charge of the integration of the architectural archival collection of the Province of Antwerp into the Flanders Architecture Institute. Sofie De Caigny has actively collaborated on enriching the intellectual scope and depth of the Flanders Architecture Institute. The results of this can be seen in two editions of the Flanders Architectural Review (2016 and 2018) and the exhibition Maatwerk that De Caigny curated for the German Architecture Museum, Frankfurt. Since 2014, she is Secretary General of ICAM – International Confederation of Architectural Museums. Sofie De Caigny is commissioner of the entry for the Belgian Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennial in 2021.
CITYFÖRSTER was founded in 2005 as an interdisciplinary partnership of architects, engineers, and urban planners that operates internationally, with employees from more than 10 countries. The team, led by eight partners, is spread across offices in Berlin, Hamburg, Hannover, and Rotterdam. They conceive, plan, and implement buildings, urban structures, and open spaces for cities that are compact, socially and functionally mixed, multimodally networked, productive, organized around circular economies, and capable of adapting to climate change.
Jan De Vylder, born 1968, is a Flemish architect based in Ghent and Brussels, Belgium. He has worked under his name since 2000. In 2005 together with Inge Vinck jan de vylder architecten was founded. Later on in 2010 architecten de vylder vinck taillieu was founded together with Inge Vinck and Jo Taillieu. And more recent architecten jan de vylder inge vinck was founded with Inge Vinck. In this divers constellations Jan De Vylder has realized several works in Belgium and abroad and has been exhibited in galleries like MANIERA (BE), FRIEDMAN BENDA (US), TOTO MA (JP) and biennials (Venice 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018; Chicago 2014, 2016; Lisbon 2019 and Sao Paolo 2019).
Holger Hoffmann is a registered architect and founder of ‘one fine day. office for architectural design’, based in Düsseldorf, Germany. He holds a professorship for ‚Techniques of Representation and Design‘ at the University of Wuppertal since 2011. From 2007-2011 he led the ‘Department for Digital Design’ at the University of Applied Sciences in Trier, Germany. Holger gained professional expertise at UNStudio, Amsterdam, (2002-2008) and Bolles+Wilson, Münster (2000-2001). He received a postgraduate diploma in 2004 from Städelschule (SAC), Frankfurt, as he holds a professional degree in architecture from Münster School of Architecture (MSA), Germany. Before studying architecture, he was trained as a journeyman mason.
Paul Vermeulen is architect and partner in the Ghent-based office De Smet Vermeulen. He is also a professor in Urban Architecture at Delft University of Technology. In 2011 he received the Flemish Culture award (architecture) for his contributions to architecture critique and culture.
Dan Tassell joined Haworth Tompkins in 2007. He has delivered strategic masterplans for some of the UK’s leading institutions, including the Royal College of Art, Kingston University, Queen Mary UoL and the V&A. He has worked on the delivery of three new buildings at the RCA’s Battersea Campus, a major retrofit and extension for the Warburg Institute, University of London, and a range of projects for Kingston University including the BREEAM Award-winning retrofit of Kingston School of Art. In recent years Dan has been working with universities on their decarbonisation goals.
Onsitestudio is an architectural practice founded in Milan in 2006. The studio is headed by Angelo Lunati and Giancarlo Floridi. At this moment it employs 25 architects. They are interested in the intriguing relationships between the individual object and the city, between the need and specificity of the forms of a building and the collective character of the urban space, between the idea of modernity and the temporal depth inherent in the construction of places. They believe that these relationships can significantly inform the qualities of the architecture and that the city is still the privileged place of these possible resonances. On a number of different occasions, the projects confront reality, trying to amplify the already existing characters of the places and investigating new combinations between the complexity of contemporary life and the urban dimension.
soma is an Austrian practice run by Stefan Rutzinger and Kristina Schinegger. Since 2007 they have been working on a wide range of international projects, from implementation of innovative cultural buildings to award winning competition entries, from urban master planning and social housing to exhibition design and installations. Completed projects include the Theme Pavilion for the Expo 2012 in South Korea, the travelling Art Pavilion for the Salzburg Biennale and the Austrian headquarters for the German firm TECE.
Spridd is an architecture office based in Stockholm since 2005. It has established itself as one of Sweden’s most innovative architectural offices in urban development and architecture through success in competitions , research, debates and completed projects. The projects range in a wide field from interior design to urban development as well as from conceptual thinking to construction drawings. Spridd currently consists of ten architects with a network of established partners.
Korteknie Stuhlmacher Architects was founded in 2001 by Mechthild Stuhlmacher and Rien Korteknie. The Rotterdam-based agency has realized a range of projects that, despite their initially limited scale, gained much appreciation and attention in the domestic and foreign press and have been awarded multiple architectural prizes.
Boris Brorman Jensen is an independent consultant and practicing architect with a background in research and teaching from schools of architecture and universities throughout Denmark and abroad. He has authored and edited numerous articles, papers and books on architecture and urban development. Over the years Boris has served on a large number of committees and boards, most recently as a member of the Danish Arts Foundation’s Committee for Architecture Grants and Project Funding. His practice involves strategic consultancy and concept and idea development within architecture, landscape design and planning. He has been involved in a wide range of exhibition, including the Danish contribution to the 2016 International Architecture Exhibition in Venice.
Caroline van Eck studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, and classics and philosophy at Leiden University. In 1994 she obtained her PhD in aesthetics (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. She has taught at the Universities of Amsterdam, Groningen and Leiden, where she was appointed Professor of Art and Architectural History in 2006. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art at Yale University, and a Visiting Professor in Ghent, Yale and York. In September 2016 she took up her appointment as Professor of Art History at Cambridge, and in 2017 she gave the Slade Lectures in Oxford on Piranesi’s late candelabra: ‘The Material Presence of Absent Antiquities: Collecting Excessive Objects and the Revival of the Past’. Her main research interests are art and architectural history and theory of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century; classical reception; the anthropology of art; Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Gottfried Semper and Aby Warburg.
Françoise Fromonot is an architect and critic based in Paris, currently Professor (design, history and theory) at the ENSA Paris-Belleville. A contributing editor to l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (Paris), then a joint editor of le visiteur (Paris), she was in 2008 a founding member of criticat (www.criticat.fr), and the editor in 2016 of selection of articles from the first ten issues, Yours critically. She is also the author of numerous books and essays, including Glenn Murcutt-Buildings and Projects (Electa, 1995 / 2003), Jørn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House (Electa, 1998), La Campagne des Halles (La Fabrique, 2005), a critical account of the renovation of central Paris followed in 2019 by a second volume, La Comédie des Halles. Her latest monograph deals with the large-scale projects of Michel Desvigne (Transforming Landscapes, Birkhäuser, 2020).
Hilde Léon is a full professor at Leibniz University in Hannover, since 2019 dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Science. After graduating at TU Berlin and at the architecture school of Venice IUAV Léon established an architectural office in Berlin together with Konrad Wohlhage († 2007). Léonwohlhage Architects design a wide range of projects, such as housing, public buildings and offices, i. e. the Indian Embassy in Berlin and the extension to the Maximileaneum, housing the Bavarian state government. Her academic career started at the Universität der Künste Berlin in 1990 and continued at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg as visiting professor. Since 2000 Hilde Léon is full professor at the Leibniz University Hannover. She acts as jury member in national and international competitions apart from giving lectures and publishing in various architectural magazines.
Stefan Anspach (*1978) has been chairman of the Montag Stiftung Urbane Räume gAG since November 2017. It is his conviction that acting for the common good requires entrepreneurial expertise if projects are to have a sustainable impact. As a graduate industrial engineer and a graduate engineer of architecture, he links passion for planning with business management expertise. After studying at RWTH Aachen University, he worked as a strategy and management consultant for over 10 years. Since 2014 he was a partner in a medium-sized management consulting agency focusing on the real estate sector. In March 2017 he joined the Montag Foundations Group. Until September 2018 he was Managing Director of the Carl Richard Montag Foundation.
Wivina Demeester (*1943) became in 1967 an Agricultural Engineer and post-graduate in teaching University of Ghent. From 1974 to 2004 she was MP for the Christian Democratic party in Belgium, State Secretary for Public Health and Handicapped Care, State Secretary for Finance, Minister for Budget and Science, Flemish Minister for Finance and Budget, Health Institutions, Welfare and Family, MP in the Flemish Parliament and Chairperson of the Committee for Public Works, Transport and Energy. From 2004 to 2014 she was president of the Task Force for the deepening of the Westerschelde and Ghent-Terneuzen Canal. She was also president and member of the board of different Welfare, Health and Financial organisations Since 2004 President of the Board of deSingel (www.deSingel.be) and VAi (www.vai.be). Since 2004 she is member of the High Counsil of Finance and since 2005 member of the Board BAM/LANTIS (www.Lantis.be). Since 2010 she is president of School Invest en and member of the board of DBFM SvM (www.scholenvanmorgen.be).
The TACK project is coordinated by Prof. Tom Avermaete, Prof. Janina Gosseye, Korinna Zinovia Weber and Laura Trazic.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 860413.
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Those engaged in architecture culture rely not only on information that is explicitly recorded, such as social surveys, technical formulas and economic calculations, but also on knowledge acquired in other, more implicit ways. How such tacit, ‘unspoken knowledge’ operates in architecture is examined in the four sections that make up this exhibition.
‘Horizons and References’ explores the importance of visual, conceptual and material references in architecture culture. It shows how their tacit presence can install a horizon against which architects think, write, draw, speak and build.
‘Making and Materiality’ demonstrates how the act of making a drawing, a scale model, a piece of furniture, a book or a building can result in the acquisition of knowledge. It also reveals how the physical qualities of materials often adopt central roles in such acts of tacit knowledge production.
‘Codes and Communities’ focuses on how codes about building and buildings can be learned through tacit observation, and illustrates how the ability to decipher such codes is often a matter of belonging to an informed community.
‘Embodiment and Experience’ uncovers the role of bodily experiences in learning about architecture. It explores how our senses can be activated in analogue and digital ways to gain knowledge about the built environment.
The various objects on display in this three-day exhibition have been crowd-sourced. They are the result of a ‘call for objects’ to which a large group of practitioners and scholars responded. The selected items – models, photographs, videos, etc. – are prime witnesses to the critical and fertile role of tacit knowledge in architecture culture.
The TACK Exhibition will take place between 19-21 June 2023 at ETH Zürich, Hönggerberg, Archena (HIL D 57.1).
Curators
Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye
Scenography
Tom Avermaete and Janina Gosseye
Calligraphy
Eva Storgaard
Production lead
Laura Trazic
Production
Laura Trazic, Korinna Zinovia Weber, Jonas Pfändler, Sereina Fritsche
Technical support
Daniel Sommer, gta exhibitions
Contributors
Nadi Abusaada, ETH Zürich, & Wesam Al Asali, IE University
Alba Balmaseda Domínguez, Kyra Bullert & Špela Setzen, University of Stuttgart
Sarah Becchio & Paolo Borghino, ErranteArchitetture
Francesca Berni, POLIMI
Verena Brehm, Cityförster
Irina Davidovici & Ziu Bruckmann, ETH Zürich
Adam Caruso, Caruso St John Architects
Filippo Cattapan, BUW
Sofie de Caigny & Tine Poot, Vlaams Architectuur Instituut
Maria Conen, Conen Sigl Architekt:innen, Zürich
Nicole de Lalouvière, ETH Zürich
Nathalie de Vries, MVRDV Architects
An Fonteyne, noAarchitecten
Irmgard Frank, Institute of Spatial design, TU Graz,
Annette Gigon & Mike Guyer, Gigon/Guyer Architects
Holger Hoffmann, one fine day
Anne Holtrop, Studio Anne Holtrop
Johanna Just, ETH Zürich
Momoyo Kaijima, Atelier Bow-Wow
Katharina Kasinger
Joris Kerremans & Hong Wan Chan, Ghent University
Angelo Lunati & Giancarlo Floridi, Onsitestudio
Elli Mosayebi, Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin Architekten & Fabian Bircher
Samantha Ong & Ariel Bintang, Yale School of Architecture
Monika Platzer, Architekturzentrum Wien
Elena Perez Guembe, TU Delft
Samuel H. Ramirez
Martin Rösch & Nicola Graf, ETH Zürich
Klas Ruin & Ola Broms Wessel, SPRIDD
Eva Sommeregger, ABKW
Sofie Stilling, University of Copenhagen
Paula Strunden, ABKW
Mara Trübenbach, AHO
U5 Collective, ETH Zürich
Dirk van den Heuvel, Nieuwe Instituut
Dick van Gameren, TU Delft
Paul Vermeulen, De Smet Vermeulen architecten
Inge Vinck & Jan De Vylder, AJDVIV
Martina Voser, mavo Landschaften
Maxime Zaugg, ETH Zürich
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Citations and references have always been an essential part of architecture culture. They forge a horizon against which architects think, write, draw, speak and build.
How architects and architectural firms compose these horizons of references varies. Many construct carefully curated libraries of architecture photographs, as ‘Heinrich Helfenstein’s Photography’ provided to various practitioners, but also of books, magazines and sometimes even scale models, as is shown in ‘Clay Landscape’. Others, like ‘a Studio for Orbanism – Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office ’, create a spatial universe of drawings, sketches, models and other knick-knacks within which to work.
Architects often engage with references from other fields of knowledge, such as literature and art, as is the case in ‘Tests and References, ZSC Arena, Zurich 2012–22’ and ‘Ink Blot Drawings’. Nature can also serve as a source of inspiration on which to draw, as ‘City as Forest’ exemplifies.
Sometimes architects design specific devices, such as ‘Material Chariots’, ‘Forêt DesCartes’ or miniatures (e.g. ‘Bed Chamber’), that can gather, visualise and activate frames of references. Even so, expressing horizons of references in architectural design is no mean feat. Building fragments at scale 1:1, such as the ‘Concrete Column, Pirelli Learning Centre’, can assist in gauging the legibility of the associative vocabularies that have informed a project.
@TACK Exhibition, Calligraphy by Eva Storgaard
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Material references play a vital role in the collaborative work of architects. At the office of De Smet Vermeulen architects in Ghent, chariots are used to expose samples of materials and combine them into palettes.
The main idea is that the materials stay on display for the duration of the project in order to facilitate material decisions. The chariots are part and parcel of the design process.
As the office only has three chariots but more ongoing projects, each chariot carries more than one palette of materials. Complementary samples often lie on the floor. As a result, different project palettes tend to melt together, creating new sources of inspiration.
Submitted by
Paul Vermeulen is an architect, writer, and founding partner of the Ghent-based office, De Smet Vermeulen architecten. He is a professor at TU Delft, leading the chair of Urban Architecture. In 2011 he was awarded the Flemish Culture Prize (Architecture) for his contribution to architecture, its culture, and its criticism.
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Architectural references and citations of visual culture are embedded in the form, materiality, and ornamentation of a structure. This precast concrete column fragment from the Pirelli Learning Centre built in Milan in 2022 is a case in point.
The physicality of the column creates a strong reference to Italy’s interwar architecture culture. Its material form speaks to the innovation in construction techniques that characterised the period, while its ornamentation echoes that of the neighbouring Bicocca degli Arcimboldi villa. The abstract advertising of the tire-thread graphics imprinted on the column also illuminates the company’s history as well as the common culture.
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Onsitestudio, the Milan-based firm founded in 2006 by Angelo Lunati and Giancarlo Floridi, values the bond between culture and professional practice. Recent works include the BEIC public library, Mapei Football Centre, Hotel Le Palace in Brussels, and Pirelli Learning Centre. Onsitestudio is a non-academic partner of the Tacit Knowledge Community.
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Forêt DesCartes is a prototype of a postcard display designed by Belgian architect Christian Kieckens in 1995.
This curious object evokes Kieckens’s habits and practices: the collection of images and their arrangement in space, travel as a form of disciplinary exchange with a community of practice, and the teaching of architecture by means of references. Forêt DesCartes is an experimental spatial device for handling, transmitting, and producing tacit visual knowledge.
Forêt DesCartes, a play on words that combines ‘forest of cards’ with the surname of René Descartes, proposes a visual system of accumulation and production of knowledge that, although based on a regular Cartesian grid, is structurally implicit and non-linear.
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Filippo Cattapan is a PhD candidate at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, working within the framework of the Communities of Tacit Knowledge network.
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This 1:1000 landscape model made from clay shows the site of a prominent twelfth-century church and graveyard located between two housing areas, Tensta and Rinkeby, both built during the 1960s as part of the Million Programme in Stockholm. We are currently adding a wall of housing combined with a 100-metre-long assembly hall on this site.
In our practice, we have used this kind of clay model for numerous projects over the years. Collecting these models, we have built our own growing landscape of models in the office.
We enjoy the reference to Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and his mode of producing imaginative collage paintings, representing the totality of his work as an autonomous place of culture production.
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Klas Ruin and Ola Broms Wessel founded Spridd in 2005. Spridd is one of Sweden’s most innovative offices with success in competitions, research, debates, and completed projects. Spridd has been nominated for the Kasper Salin Prize for the best building of 2023, for the transformation of St. Paul’s Church, Stockholm.
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The Swiss architectural photographer Heinrich Helfenstein (1946–2020) trained as a linguist, his approach shaped by semiology and post-structuralism. Having worked as Aldo Rossi’s assistant at ETH in the 1970s, his early photographs illustrated the latter’s Scientific Autobiography, instigating a delicate, absorbing dialogue between images and words.
Helfenstein photographed the works of architects including Diener & Diener, Peter Zumthor, Meili Peter, Gigon Guyer, Burkhalter & Sumi, Peter Märkli, and Valerio Olgiati, as well as artists such as Hans Josephsohn, Per Kirkby, and Meret Oppenheim among many others. His photography not only disseminated, but actively shaped, recent Swiss architecture discourse and its interfaces with art.
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Irina Davidovici is the Director of the gta Archives at ETH Zürich, where she is also active as a private lecturer and senior scientist. Ziu Bruckmann is an architect who works as a scientific assistant at the gta Archives at ETH Zürich and the THEMA laboratory at EPF Lausanne.
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We often include references in our competition submissions: images of places and buildings that hold something of the atmosphere that we intend for the completed project.
For the ZSC Arena, we wanted to underline our interest in giving this sports building civic qualities appropriate to its social programme and to its position as a gateway into the city from the north west. We included images of the tents for the Swedish royal family at Hagaparken and an ancient mosque in the Syrian desert.
In the long process of developing the design for the in-situ concrete ‘textile’ façade, we continued to use references, to architecture by Schinkel and etchings by Flaxman, to get ever closer to the image of what we were after.
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Adam Caruso was born in Montreal and studied architecture at McGill University. He established Caruso St John Architects with Peter St John in 1990. The practice won the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2016 for the Newport Street Gallery and represented Britain at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Adam Caruso is Professor of Architecture and Construction at ETH Zürich.
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Designing is based on images. Nature is an essential source. The ‘city as forest’ image has accompanied CITYFÖRSTER as a mission statement since its founding in 2005.
We understand the city as a forest: a complex (eco)system in which various spatial elements are synergistically and dynamically networked. In this sense, with every design, the challenge and the opportunity arise to contribute to the system as a whole rather than creating a solitary object.
The metaphor of the city as a forest is always an occasion for interpretation, evoking associations and including various readings of the interaction of scales, objects, functions, and programmes. The brushwood stands for open spaces for innovation; the humus is the constantly renewing network of urban spaces and userships; wastelands are underexposed places for the unpredictable; only the mixed forest creates climate resilience; material cycles keep the system alive…
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Verena Brehm is a founding partner of CITYFÖRSTER architecture + urbanism. Her field of work encompasses urban transformation processes. Verena Brehm studied architecture and urban design in Hannover, Berlin, and Copenhagen. Since 2022, she has been Professor for Urban Design at the University of Kassel.
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The house of Luc Deleu, the founder of T.O.P. office, in the city of Antwerp (Belgium), is not only a design studio and home for the architect. Above all, it is a space of accumulated knowledge: a kaleidoscope of collected references and an archive of drawings and models produced over more than fifty years.
In 2020-2021 this ‘orbanist’ universe – the term ‘orbanism’ was coined by Deleu as a vision for a global urbanism – became the basis for an interuniversity educational project, when the Flanders Architecture Institute digitised the archive of T.O.P. office. Five groups of architecture students were invited to develop a project based on the office’s immaterial knowledge by producing a storyline following objects found in the archive. As a result, a virtual studio space emerged that cumulated different sets of tacit knowledge.
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Sofie De Caigny is director of the Flanders Architecture Institute and visiting professor at the Faculty of Design Sciences, University of Antwerp. Tine Poot is consultant design at the Flanders Architecture Institute and project leader of Future Plans which celebrated 50 years practice by Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office.
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In 2015 we exhibited our work in this gallery and made some spatial interventions, including coloured columns, such as this one. These interventions represented our way of thinking, reflecting, acting, and communicating. We believe that a RE-enactment of a part of this exhibition fits well within the TACK framework. We thus proposed to RE-instal a column.
This piece of coloured column, which has already been RE-used in the office/studio of Jan De Vylder at ETH, is about showing what is not visible anymore. It is a RE-presentation of and RE-flection on our work and thus conveys TACIT KNOWLEDGE.
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Inge Vinck and Jan de Vylder are the founders of architecten Jan de Vylder Inge Vinck. In diverse constellations the office has realised projects in Belgium and abroad. Their work has been exhibited in galleries in Belgium, the US, Japan and at biennials held in Venice, Chicago, Lisbon and Sao Paolo.
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Drawings, tracings, automatic drawings, ink blots like Rorschach have no clear connection to architecture. Yet they offer a base from which research into the possibility of architecture can start. Could they be used as a plan for the building? If so, which parts? What might be the size of this work in relationship to the building? And so on.
To appropriate a drawing also comes with constraints. Some moments are not entirely logical from a conventional architectural point of view: strange corners, irregular spaces, and parts of the house that are so slim you can only squeeze through. This mode of translating non-architectural references into built form can thus also enhance the experience and embodiment of space.
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Anne Holtrop started his own practice in 2009. It currently has studios in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and Muharraq (Bahrain). Holtrop is an associate professor at ETH Zürich. For his practice he received the Charlotte Köhler Prize for Architecture (2017), the Iakov Chernikhov International Prize (2016), and the Aga Khan Award (2019).
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The act of making a drawing, a scale model, a piece of furniture, a book or a building can result in the acquisition of tacit knowledge. This knowledge can be about materials and their capacities, as is the case in ‘HERMIA’. It can be knowledge about particular sites and spaces of production, as is shown in ‘Innerer Garten project, Zürich Leutschenbach’, ‘Tannour’ and ‘Lava Brick’; or it can be knowledge about craft, skill and (new) modes of making, as is demonstrated in ‘Clay 3D Print of Urmein’, ‘The Yield of the Land’ and ‘Four Square Levels’.
Materials are also carriers of tacit knowledge. Their physical qualities, along with their dents, tears and scratches, can silently speak about their provenance, material capacities, past lives and previous usages, and can stimulate designers’ imaginations, shaping (or sometimes even dictating) new realities and novel possibilities, as is shown by ‘Carpenter Chair’, ‘Glassplitter/Broken Glass’ and ‘The B-Sides. Tupaia, Kybernetes & Lara Croft’.
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This vector drawing is the outcome of an elective course led by Wan and Joris at Ghent University that explored a fragment of the fast-changing landscape of Nanhai District in the Pearl River Delta, Wan’s ancestral home.
The selected area, measuring 5 by 3 kilometres, was tackled by eighteen master’s students who used satellite images as an underlayer and drawing as a tool to bridge the gap between China and Belgium. As their enquiring eyes wandered over the landscape, themes and patterns were picked up, while the activity of drawing recorded, questioned, and affirmed their findings.
This approach relies on the tacit knowledge the students have gained during their studies: to draw is a process of selecting, omitting, isolating, ordering. It directs the gaze and prompts questions. Performing it demands precision and deliberation.
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Joris Kerremans and Hong Wan Chan both teach at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at Ghent University in Belgium. Alongside their teaching activities, Joris also runs an architectural practice, and Wan is completing a PhD on her changing ancestral landscape in China. Together with their students, Joris and Wan explore peri-urban landscapes in both China and Belgium through the medium of drawing.
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Corrugated steel rods, wooden scraps, insulating sheaths, etc. Before being covered, dismantled, hidden from view, or lost, this collection of materials, shapes, and forms suddenly revealed an alternative potential to us.
Carpenter Chair is an icon of construction and a eulogy to the exploration of the ordinary. It is a low, comfortable, and flexible lounge chair inspired by the aesthetics of the construction site.
Composed of metal elements, wooden laths, and heat insulation pipes held together by pairs of wooden laths, Carpenter Chair exists in two versions: one is covered with a soft blue cushion made of insulation pipes, the other made of simple industrial plywood panels. The support elements are two hardwood wedges, the presence or absence of which allows for different types of seating.
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ErranteArchitetture is a studio established by Sarah Becchio and Paolo Borghino that engages in projects across different scales. In addition to their professional activity, Sarah and Paolo are also involved in academic collaborations with the Polytechnic of Turin, IAAD, and IED.
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Designed to capture the lesser-known history of the 1933 transportation of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg from Hamburg to London, for me, this 1:75 model of a ship embodies how material literacy is tacitly acquired through the model-making process.
A key moment occurred when I had to carry the finished model. It felt lighter than the MDF sheets from which it was constructed; not only because a compact model is easier to carry than large MDF sheets, but also because I had established a relationship with the object. I touched every layer, assembled it carefully, and glued and finished it. This, along with the energy I had invested in producing accurate drawings for laser-cutting, gave me a keen awareness of the material.
Through the material, I built a relationship with the (hi)story of the ship and acquired knowledge that is tacitly held between humans and non-humans.
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Mara Trübenbach is an architectural designer and scholar. She holds an Architecture MSc from Bauhaus University, and is undertaking her PhD at AHO (Oslo). Part of the TACK network, she is strongly interested in the intersection of craft, material and alternative design methods in architecture, including performance and theatre studies.
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Model-making can be a heuristic practice for architects. For us, this model that was produced for the ‘Innerer Garten’ project in Zürich Leutschenbach, was an instrument for both concept-finding and communication.
This project is about understanding the existing and emerging context and interweaving space and time. The transformation process was shaped by finding and defining principles for the development of a new type of public space, which mediates between diverse demands.
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mavo Landschaften is a landscape architecture studio in Zurich whose expertise lies beyond conventional roles and tasks; and is always on the lookout for specific, strategically astute, and spatially rich answers.
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This book exhibits the B-sides of my dissertation – ideas that were cut from the final version but that have nonetheless proven promising. Dealing with post-digital forms of navigation, it juxtaposes the stories of the Polynesian navigator Tupaia, the Ancient Greek Kybernetes, and Lara Croft’s avatar.
In making this book, tacit conversations unfolded between its theoretical content and the object’s physical limitations as if the future book talked back, sharing its material constraints with me, the designer/author, thus influencing my decision-making.
The result was a cyclical process in which content and form mutually informed one another. Like the content that the book conveys, its kraft paper tells stories of long journeys, its white colour expresses non-standard printing, and its elongated double-sided layout reveals handmade methods.
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Eva Sommeregger is an architect/researcher, a Senior Scientist at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and a Senior Researcher at LMDA research institute of the Art Academy of Latvia. Eva is also co-founder of eyetry architecture and Magazin, an exhibition space for contemporary architecture in Vienna.
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We are only vaguely conscious of the quantities of materials we throw away each day.
Near the end of the previous century, waste recycling became more common in Switzerland, not only for paper, but also metal and glass. While developing the plans for the Kirchner Museum Davos in 1989, we had the idea to use waste glass as a roof covering for the glazed building instead of gravel or sheet metal. Glass has a similar weight to gravel and is therefore well-suited to ballasting flat roofs. Without much effort, the cullet could be taken from the recycling process before remelting.
The unusual roof covering, in combination with a protective mat made from recycled tires, has served its purpose well over the years. Whenever the sun shines it continues to create a crystalline sparkle on the building’s ‘fifth façade’.
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Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer are architects who founded the architecture firm Gigon/Guyer in 1989. Among their oeuvre are both museum buildings, such as the Kirchner Museum Davos, and residential and office buildings, like the Prime Tower in Zürich. Their work has received numerous awards. Both partners have been full professors at ETH Zürich since 2012.
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Over the past three years, I have been researching assembly methods that can join different post-consumer objects found in the street without the use of glue or screws.
Four Square Levels resulted from an exploration into the capacity of a rope to tie together different elements to make them work as a corner shelf. It consists of two straps, four planks of recycled birch plywood, each with a thickness of 12mm, and intermediate PVC pipe supports with a diameter of 40mm. Four PVC pipes with a diameter of 160mm form its base. These pieces were assembled following a dry construction method that is activated by tightening the ratchet.
I built Four Square Levels after extensively playing and experimenting with webbings to gain an understanding of what they need and what they can provide.
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Samuel H. Ramírez studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain. Dance studies led Samuel to understand the body as a learning tool and made him question the absence of praxis during his studies in architecture, a discipline that for him relates body–object–space. This, in turn, inspired him to design and build objects that allowed him to learn by doing.
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This installation pays tribute to the vanishing soap manufacturing industries of several cities in the Arab Mediterranean region, especially Nablus and Aleppo.
Its title, Tannour, is derived from the Arabic name for the large conical towers of stacked soap for which the region’s soap industry is famed. These towers serve a crucial purpose in the process of soapmaking: drying the soap by optimising its surface’s exposure to air. This process of optimisation depends heavily on the tacit knowledge of the soap-maker to adjust the tannour’s geometry and form to the vaulted architectural space of the soap factory.
This installation emphasises the reciprocal relationship between the crafted object and the architectural space it inhabits. It pushes the boundaries of the tannour from the realm of adjustment to its architectural setting into an architectural creation in its own right. The soap tower no longer merely inhabits: it becomes inhabitable.
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Nadi Abusaada is an architect and historian. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zürich.
Wesam Al Asali is an Assistant Professor at IE University in Spain and the co-founder of IWlab and CERCAA.
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This lava brick resulted from a situated project that studies, through making, the house–workshop of a Zapotec woman artisan who hosted me over two long periods of time.
The process of working with clay externalised the knowledge of my thinking body by materialising embodied memories in the brick (the 2017 earthquake in Mexico, my training as an architect, etc.), while at the same time internalising new bodily memories created in the process of making and through daily practice in the spaces where the activity took place. Thus, I could tacitly assimilate the spaces’ practical and symbolic functions, everyday dynamics, embedded rituals, and the myths that structure and give meaning to them. The thinking mind comes into play when an architectural analysis is made a posteriori, processing information and making explicit a vast cultural knowledge embedded in spaces that otherwise would have been overlooked because of their seemingly ‘simple’ or ‘uninteresting’ appearance.
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Elena Perez Guembe is a licensed architect, currently undertaking a PhD at TU Delft in the Netherlands. Elena has worked in the offices of Zaha Hadid, Rafael Moneo, and Nicholas Grimshaw, and has taught at RPI School of Architecture in New York. Her work has been exhibited at the 2018 Venice Biennale as well as at the 2019 Lisbon Triennale.
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The tools that architects use to visualise and materialise their ideas have changed rapidly in recent years, but their impact on the design process has often remained unacknowledged.
The model displayed here, a clay 3D print of Urmein, a rural village in Switzerland, highlights the exploratory path that architects often take when new technologies become available. The model is based on information drawn from photogrammetry and drone footage, and has been produced by a clay printer intended for pottery – all tools that do not typically belong in the architect’s toolbox.
By combining a well-known material such as clay with the relatively new technique of 3D printing, the model not only implicitly questions the potential of the tools used to communicate ideas, but also foreshadows new design concepts that might result from it.
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Martin Roesch and Nicola Graf are architecture Master students in their final year at ETH Zürich. For the past five years, they have been working with HYTAC, a teaching unit at ETH Zürich that explores the communication of architecture through technology. Accordingly, Martin and Nicola share a great interest in the tacit impact of technology on the design process.
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Architectural knowledge is codified. While many codes can be learned through manuals and textbooks, others can be best understood through tacit observation. If ‘Model Haarlemmerplein’ devised an architectural proposition through a close reading of urban morphological conventions, ‘Texture Kortrijk – Jewel Box’ did so by carefully interpreting a building’s structural codes.
Architectural codes create communities of those who understand them. These can be global, as in ‘Post CIAM’; they can operate on the level of nation-states, which ‘Maputo Land Rover’ hints at, or exist at the scale of an architectural office, as is the case in ‘Playa Blanca, Bankers, and the Pivotal Point’. Shared tacit knowledge not only binds communities of architects, but also other collectives, such as residents, as is shown in ‘Objects of Belonging’ and ‘Tesseln/Bâtons à marques’.
Various approaches, techniques and tools have been developed to share codified tacit knowledge. The ‘Arteplagemodell Swiss National Expo 02’ and ‘Model of Silodam Housing, Amsterdam’ models, for instance, were specifically designed to engage heterogeneous actors in conversation about architecture. ‘Public Drawings, Atelier Bow-Wow’ and ‘Chozos, Houses of Nomadic Shepherds’ employ the physical act of drawing or building together to share and co-construct tacit knowledge, while ‘Eilfried Huth’s Bauhütte’ was conceived as a designated place of cooperation.
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The structure of the city is the expression of cultural codes and conventions, of relations between private and public space, and between individual and collective interests.
This design for sixty-seven apartments, commercial spaces, and underground parking was for a location on the edge of the seventeenth-century western part of central Amsterdam. To anchor the project in its site and broader context, the design draws on historical patterns of parcellation, housing and courtyard typologies, and material expressions that can be found in Amsterdam’s historic core.
These tacit references to historical urban forms and types are expressed in this conceptual wooden model.
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Dick van Gameren is a professor and dean of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft in the Netherlands, and a partner at Mecanoo Architecten. He combines his work in practice with education and research. In 2014, he initiated the Global Housing Study Centre, a global network on affordable housing design.
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I made this 1:200 working model, entitled Playa Blanca, Bankers, and the Pivotal Point, during my time at the Städelschule Frankfurt.
The three-dimensional knot bent from copper wire combines investigations into rotational symmetries, the programmatic linking of living and working environments, and early aesthetic explorations into the consequences of parametric design models.
This physical model formed the basis for a series of digital models whose gene codes continue to shape the work of our office in terms of methods and aesthetics to this day.
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Holger Hoffmann is a registered architect and founder of one fine day. office for architectural design, based in Wuppertal, Germany. Since 2011, Holger has held a professorship in Techniques of Representation and Design at the University of Wuppertal.
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Bâtons à marques (also called ratements or Tesseln) are pieces of carved wood used as tally sticks in the Swiss Alps. They functioned as records of use rights, taxes, products, and labour duties. Tesseln in Upper-Valais and bâtons à marques in Lower-Valais were employed in the governance of common property and resources including alpine pastures, wine, and irrigation water.
The tally stick of the Bisse de Bitailla, an irrigation channel in the Arbaz municipality, has carvings referring to domestic signs and their associated water rights. These link water-rights holders to water use, accounted in irrigation time.
As they were passed down, edited, and made anew, tally sticks enabled tacit knowledge transmission and performed as adaptable physical supports of negotiation and cooperation – crucial components to governing the commons.
Beyond their regulatory function, they also offer a glimpse into how premodern alpine communities engaged in practices of commoning.
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Nicole de Lalouvière is a doctoral fellow at the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies, Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich. Her doctoral research project, undertaken under the supervision of Prof. Tom Avermaete, examines the landscape and material history of the irrigation systems of Canton Valais in Switzerland.
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Wooden model (1:400), representing an existing warehouse and its extension.
The orthogonal cast-iron column structure of the existing building is continued in the lightweight steel building on top. The new beams connect the column grid diagonally and at two different heights. The result of logical structural thinking is an unexpected golden crown.
The Texture Kortrijk museum celebrates the prosperous past of the flax industry in the region that used to give the Scheldt river a golden shine.
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An Fonteyne runs the Brussels-based noAarchitecten together with Jitse van den Berg and Philippe Vierin. The office has developed a strong interest in reflecting on the potentials of re-use, whether newly built or already existing. An is Professor of Affective Architectures at ETH Zürich.
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This diagrammatic model, developed to discuss the disposition of various elements of a new housing estate in Amsterdam with its clients – a private investor–developer and an affordable housing cooperation – embodies tacit knowledge in multiple ways.
First, the model tacitly extends an invitation to the stakeholders involved in the project to discuss this new part of the city in an open manner. By making the elements of the model very different – to express different atmospheres, neighbourhoods, and spaces – it invites the stakeholders to play around with the model. It thus tacitly conveys how a community of stakeholders was formed through an open design process.
Second, the components of the model represent what Nathalie de Vries at the time called ‘The New Collectivity’: small collectives of people living in apartments with identical typologies, as well as variouscommon spaces, together forming a community of diversity.
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Nathalie de Vries, founding partner of MVRDV, has led many successful MVRDV projects with a focus on the invention of new building typologies and the creation of changeable, open systems. De Vries combines her work for MVRDV with a position as Professor of Architectural Design and Public Building at the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft, and as City Architect of the municipality of Groningen.
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Between 1998 and 2005, we engaged in the design and construction of the Dutch Embassy in Mozambique. Offering an opportunity to tap into local tacit knowledge, this project revealed the importance of culturally specific knowledge and skills in design and building projects.
During one of our visits, we chanced upon a craftsman renowned for his meticulous models of Land Rover cars made entirely out of Coca Cola tins and foam, without glue or other adhesives. Impressed by his skills, we commissioned him to build a model of our embassy. When the model arrived in Rotterdam, we were surprised. The building proportions were off, and a large palm tree stood in the embassy’s gardens, which to our minds made the model rather tacky and horrendous. The craftsman’s skills, it seemed, only extended to Land Rover models, and his expectation and appreciation of what constituted a good architectural scale model differed from ours.
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Kees Kaan is an award-winning Dutch architect, professor, and chairman at TU Delft. He is a co-founder of KAAN Architecten, known for projects such as the new Amsterdam Courthouse and the new Schiphol Airport terminal. Kaan is an international lecturer and jury member, actively engaged in policy-making for the urban environment in the Netherlands and abroad.
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The chozos are traditional huts that, up until about fifty years ago, were built by shepherds in rural Spain as they moved around the fields with their sheep. This chozo was constructed in September 2022 by sixteen students from the University of Stuttgart during an intense exchange with experts in southern Spain.
The students spent two weeks in Cabeza del Buey, a village in Extremadura, constructing two chozos. One was built in a traditional manner and remained on site; the other was demountable, and transported from Spain to Germany after the workshop, where it was displayed at the University of Stuttgart at a 1:1 scale.
As Spaniards and Germans poured their knowledge, doubts, and enthusiasm into building these chozos with 100% natural and local materials, situations arose that could only be solved through intuition and know-how, resulting in an intense exchange of tacit knowledge through learning-by-doing.
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Alba Balmaseda Domínguez, Kyra Bullert, Špela Setzen and Markus Vogl are members of the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Stuttgart. The Project “Chozos” is a collaboration between “e1nszue1ns” platform, founded in 2015 as a knowledge transfer project group at the faculty and the departments IRGE (Institut für Raumkonzeptionen und Grundlagen des Entwerfens, Prof. Markus Allmann) and SuE (Lehrstuhl Stadtplanung und Entwerfen, Prof. Dr. Martina Baum). The project has been strongly supported financially and in terms of content by the German Sto-Stiftung, the municipality of Cabeza del Buey and the Spanish Embassy in Switzerland.
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Physical urban scale models have the capacity to engage larger communities in architectural and urban debates.
A good example is the Swiss National Expo 02, which aimed to explore Switzerland’s identity under the banner, ‘Nature and Artificiality’. During the preparatory phase, which lasted ten years, countless concepts were tested. In this phase, models often had the role of negotiating between organisers and the public.
Time and time again, these models – their different scales, various materials, and colours – played a key role in tacitly presenting to the public what Swiss national identity was about. The Arteplagemodell by the Swiss artist and director of the exhibition, Pipilotti Rist, is exemplary in this respect.
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Maxime Zaugg is an architect and doctoral candidate at the Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design at ETH Zürich, and lecturer in the History and Theory of Urban Design at the Department of Architecture ZHAW, IUL (Institute Urban Landscape).
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Objects of belonging are found or ready-made objects that users adapt to redefine the conventional boundaries of a home. These objects’ tacit presence dissolves where the house begins and ends, blurring boundaries between urban and domestic spheres.
In the city of Bangkok, everyday objects like a tarpaulin can be used to claim parts of the public urban realm for the intimacy of the private home by appropriating it into a shelter or window screen.
This matrix presents twenty-five idiosyncratic objects frequently appropriated by residents of Bangkok. These objects of belonging recall how communities of inhabitants critically question conventions of the domestic sphere.
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Ariel Bintang and Samantha Ong are Master of Architecture students at the Yale School of Architecture, with interests in informality and extractive industries.
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For architects, hand drawing is not only an important tool to grasp the history, experience, and knowledge of a place, but also a space of tacit negotiation with peers and others.
After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, Atelier Bow-Wow began to produce collective hand drawings on large paper sheets, on which several people worked simultaneously, to jointly find a better future. This approach was further developed with students in different public spaces.
In 2018, inspired by the veduta, Atelier Bow-Wow initiated an international workshop for public drawing with various groups of people in cities like Hiroshima (2014), Venice (2018), Rome (2019), Zürich (2019, 2020), and Prague (2022). During the pandemic, students of the Chair of Architectural Behaviorology produced public drawings focused on a hospital and cemetery in Zürich. In the most recent international workshop, held in Paris in 2023, child psychiatrists and children collaborated to produce a public drawing with Laurent Stalder.
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Momoyo Kaijima is a co-founder of Atelier Bow-Wow, an architectural firm based in Tokyo, and professor of Architectural Behaviorology at ETH Zürich. While engaging in design projects for houses, public buildings, and station plazas, etc., Momoyo has conducted numerous investigations of the city through architecture.
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As early as the Middle Ages, a Bauhütte referred to a place of cooperation and interaction between craftspeople.
The Austrian architect Eilfried Huth, a pioneer of participatory housing, used this notion to express his reliance on the embodied knowledge of future inhabitants who gathered as an advocacy group to design a new housing estate called Eschensiedlung in Deutschlandsberg, Styria, in 1972–1990.
At the Eschensiedlung, the Bauhütte would not only be the marketplace for construction materials, but also the centre of communication and strong neighbourly support structures. Huth initiated lectures, discussions, and consultations, while future residents contributed to the planning process with their tacit knowledge, to realise 110 low-cost single-family houses.
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Monika Platzer studied art history at the University of Vienna. She is head of collections and curator at the Architekturzentrum Wien. Monika has engaged in curatorial undertakings at leading international institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and the Getty Research Institute (GRI).
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This kind of drawing is a synthesis. Made after the project is built or after the competition is over, it gathers all the key ideas and responses that have been formulated into one drawing. Like a poem, it simultaneously reduces the new reality of the project, while describing it very precisely.
It is also a very personal interpretation or reading. Although the drawing depicts a project that has already been resolved, it is still the product of a subjective choice. It can be about a space, or it can focus on a figure, or it can explore the idea of proportions.
Within our practice, the production of these drawings enables us to think and talk about our own work. Holding the middle ground between a sketch, a photograph, a model, and a plan, these drawings are about the constellation of ideas.
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Maria Conen and Raoul Sigl studied architecture at EPF Lausanne and ETH Zürich. In 2011 they founded Conen Sigl Architekt:innen, which mainly works with existing structures. Conen and Sigl have taught as guest professor at different universities. Since 2022 Conen is professor at ETH Zürich.
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At the last CIAM conference held in Otterlo in 1959, members of Team 10, including Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, Daniel van Ginkel, Blanche Lemco, and John Voelcker, enacted an ironic funeral procession, presumably carrying CIAM to its grave. It was captured on film by Jaap Bakema.
After the demise of CIAM, Bakema initiated a newsletter to keep the network updated. Between 1959 and 1981 he compiled eighteen such newsletters, which comprised a summary of contributions he received from around the world. ‘Postman Bakema’, as he called himself, would send these to CIAM’s old guard, the core of Team 10, institutions such as UNESCO, and a broader circle of fellow travellers including Yona Friedman and the Japanese Metabolists.
Bakema’s personal archive holds various address lists related to this correspondence network. These objects trace a global community bound together by the sharing of architectural and urban ideas around the notion of habitat.
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Dirk van den Heuvel teaches architecture at TU Delft and heads the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, the research collaboration between the Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, and TU Delft.
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Bodies interact with their surroundings. We learn through bodily experiences. ‘Anthropomorphe Form’, an installation that responds to people’s movement through space, draws upon such embodied learning to forge a collective. ‘Tactiles’ similarly uses shared performative experiences to unlearn pre-ordained spatial codes and activate an intuitive process of re-learning.
Embodied experience appeals to different senses. ‘The stool called WALDE’ demonstrates how tacit knowledge is acquired through touch – by direct physical engagement with furniture and its production – while ‘Invisible Elastic Structure’ activates our sense of sight: observing the leaf, we gain insight into its structural and aesthetic behaviour.
Capturing, transmitting or even evoking embodied tacit knowledge is challenging. ‘55°42’14.8”N 12°33’18.4”E’ does so through film, ‘Ulrich Mahler’s Exkursionszettel Wagbachniederung’ uses a map, and ‘Infra-thin Magick’ proposes a performative extended reality model to activate our senses.
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Bed Chamber is a work from the Recreation Areas series of 1:100 miniatures of islands that mimic or suggest a place. Recreation Areas are objects of power and models to believe in. They are substitutes for places and non-places full of fantasy and memories. They can balance your life in turbulent times.
Guidance: ‘Be sure to close the gate after entering the room. On the right, take your cocktail; it contains common mugwort, valerian root, and asparagus racemosi. Sit down at the dressing table, put on lipstick 110 Rouge Pur Couture. Lay down in this bed. Inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth.’
We dream of spaces, experiences, and conditions that the real world should have. Neurologically, it makes no difference whether we dream or experience something consciously. However, we tend to believe that our dream life is separate from our waking life. Can we change the world without physically moving a single stone?
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U5 is an artist collective that opposes individual authorship and actively seeks out historical and contemporary approaches to research in art and architecture. Their focus is on approaches that go beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and create thought-provoking forms of art and knowledge.
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‘In the beginning, everything was alive. […] Stones could think, and God was everywhere’. Paul Auster, Report from the Interior
Behaviour rather than form: nature as a worldview. Nature as technique, posture, and condition. A perpetual ongoing construction, nature is meant as an ‘artifice’ appearing in the encounter between thought and the world: both in the project and the leaf, a minimal resistant force and a maximum space potential cohabit in a tensional condition. Architecture is a continuous experience of the world.
The leaf moves the focus from the object to our glance. Continuously mingling with the environment, the architectural project acts with the space. It is a necessary condition. The leaf we observe expresses structural and aesthetic behaviour.
Architecture knowledge is a physical experience, non-stop learning from reality. Thinking is expressed by the practice of architecture over time through tangible shapes and environments.
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Francesca Berni is a PhD architect based in Milan. In 2021 she was the Enel Italian Fellow in Architecture and Landscape at the American Academy in Rome. With installations, texts, and drawings, her design research is about the relationship between landscape and architectural projects.
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Anthropomorphe Form, an installation produced by an interdisciplinary team led by Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin Architekten and Fabian Bircher, explores the potentials of an architectural space that moves and interacts with people. Its anthropomorphic qualities do not refer to an ideal image of an imaginary individual, but rather to the behaviour of a real collective.
The installation thematises an architecture of the Second Modern Age in which things and phenomena can no longer be calculated or follow a simple relationship of cause and effect, but are rather contradictory, hybrid, and complex. Every action produces a reaction that is difficult to predict. The rational conditions the irrational, and the concept demands a narrative.
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Ron Edelaar, Elli Mosayebi, and Christian Inderbitzin founded their architectural firm, Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin, in Zürich in 2005. The firm’s broad scope of work encompasses building projects – from design to construction – and urban planning along with exhibitions and publications. Housing is a main focus of their research, teaching, and practice.
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In contrast to space, we come into direct contact with furniture. We can see it, touch it, move it, carry it around, etc. Users feel what meaning a piece of furniture holds and what distinguishes it from others.
During my time at the Institute of Spatial design at TU Graz, students were invited to design and realise a piece of furniture. One of the conditions was to work with solid wood, as a representative material we use in architecture. The behaviour of wood – such as shrinkage and swelling, the constructive possibilities, but also the grain of each individual piece – holds enough potential to embody one’s own experiences.
In contrast to a chair, you tend to sit on a stool for only a short time. Yet a certain seating comfort must be provided. Philip Waldhuber’s design, displayed here, is characterised by a minimised construction. Nevertheless, it gives the sitter a feeling of stability.
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Irmgard Frank was born in Vienna and studied interior design and industrial design as well as architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She is a licensed architect with her own firm, and between 1998 and 2018 she was full professor of Spatial Design and Design at the University of Technology in Graz, Austria.
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This film, 55°42’14.8”N 12°33’18.4”E, is produced in collaboration with Vandkunsten & Arkitema Architects as part of the EU-funded project, CIRCuIT. It focuses on strategies for circular construction in regenerative cities, exploring a post-industrial area in Copenhagen before it undergoes urban renewal.
In search of strategies to identify valuable and transformable built structures, we assessed the site using a set of epistemes addressing different but juxtaposed lenses.
The film conveys our reading of the site and the tacit knowledge embedded in our bodily movement through it, as it explicates implicit frames of understanding rooted in the phenomenological. Through its multi-sensual character, adopting multiple viewpoints – the presence of the author, interviews with residents, and resonance in the bodies of the audience – the film conveys an atmospheric understanding of the place, anticipating its regenerative design.
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Sofie Stilling is a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen researching how film can capture and communicate relational character in the early stages of architectural project development. Sofie holds an MSc in landscape architecture and a BA in film and media studies. She is a curator and self-taught filmmaker.
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Tactiles are relational objects that foster interactive approaches of un-learning restrictive spatial codes, re-learning through encounters of intimacy, embodiment and connectedness, and co-learning through shared performative experiences.
As a way of un-learning, tactiles identify urban infrastructures that determine spatial actions such as pavements, traffic bollards, traffic islands, and fences, and withdraw their prescribed purpose through alienation. Legible architectural codes are translated into unidentified objects that function as perceptive mediators between the acting body and the social forces of urban reality. By creating embodied experiences of spatial proximity, tactiles unravel tacit associations and layers of meaning and activate a process of re-learning.
Forms of co-learning were probed and enacted through various performative workshops. These workshops initiated an embodied and non-predefined communication through the objects that translated intuition, new thinking processes, and ideas performatively, while merging into a collective choreography.
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Katharina Kasinger holds a BA in Interior Architecture from the Hochschule Mainz in Germany and an MA in Interior Architecture: Research+Design from the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Katharina works as an artist, interior architect, and teaching assistant at Hochschule Mainz teaching ‘Material’ and ‘Spatial Design Processes’.
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It is well known that spatial perception is multi-sensory, and the interplay of our senses goes beyond the cross-fertilisation of sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. Yet architectural design tools only scratch the surface of what we can feel regarding our spatial environments, such as our sense of gravity, balance, and orientation, our ability to feel time passing, or our knowledge of where each of our body parts is without having to look at them. Some of these ‘always-there-but-never-felt’ sensations can be physically experienced when we enter an immersive virtual environment. As our brain adjusts to these novel surroundings, we can suddenly feel our senses at work.
The performative extended reality model, Infra-thin Magick, allows you to experience how such insights can be purposefully evoked by displacing and reassembling the components constituting your multimodal and synaesthetic spatial perception. It invites you to co-create embodied spatiality through active participation and play.
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Paula Strunden is a transdisciplinary artist with an architectural background who studied in Vienna, Paris, and London, and worked at Raumlabor Berlin and Herzog & de Meuron Basel. In 2020, she began her PhD research as part of TACK at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.