Architekturen unserer Arbeit

When a well-known literary scholar remarks that research requires “nothing but peace and quiet,” this thesis is based on a conception of the spaces in which humanities research should take place. Where the university, in turn, is described as a “factory of knowledge,” a production principle of contemporary research is named by analogy. The architectural model invoked here, the factory, is not subjected to any analysis. As contradictory as these images may be, they both point to the necessary spatialization of the humanities. As metaphors and comparisons, as utopias and horror scenarios, they simultaneously reveal the relationship between the university and society—or rather, the relationship that should exist between them. Not least, university buildings, as cathedrals of the mind or “architecture as technology”, therefore say something about the image a society has of itself.

With contributions by Jens Baumgarten, Peggy Deamer, Entwurfskollektiv, Ines Hülsmann, Reinhold Martin, Karl Marx, Joan Ockman, Morten Paul, Andreas Rumpfhuber, Bettina Vismann, Felix Vogel, Anselm Wagner, and Robert Zwarg.