Paper(less) Architecture: Medial and Institutional Superimpositions

As part of the Bartlett School of Architecture's „Prospectives Lecture Series Autumn 2020“, Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister looked at two different German architecture schools which tried to introduce design computation four decades apart: on the one hand the HfG Ulm, arguably the first school to introduce cybernetics to the curriculum to automate design processes toward ostensibly objective "good design". On the other the TU Munich, the self-labeled "entrepreneurial" polytechnic school where the introduction of computers in the 1990s found much institutional and disciplinary resistance. Contrasting the two institutions, this lecture will investigate the medial and institutional superimpositions where the obsession to "dematerialize" the act of drawing was ultimately buried under ever higher piles of paper.