Studio 12: Building Systems – The art, science and craftmanship of making buildings
Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects presented building as a form of accumulated intelligence. Across different climates and cultures, architecture historically emerged through precise adaptations of materials, construction methods and social practices. Building components are shaped by the knowledge of those who made them: local expertise, tools, techniques and forms of labor responding directly to available resources and environmental conditions. Building Systems investigates the art, science and craftsmanship of making architecture. It asks how the tectonics of building structures, can give construction a poetic presence, elevating it to an art form through the symbiosis of technical requirements and creative design. The studio unfolds through 3 technological inquiries: Material Agency follows what materials do, register, enable, resist, transmit, and become; Labor Geographies follows how knowledge, skill, technology, care, and collective practices are situated; and Territorial Cartographies unfold these material and labor processes through buildings, landscapes, infrastructures and socio-ecological relations.
Context of Investigation
Resourcefulness provides the lens through which the studio investigates Nordic building cultures. The studio asks how this accumulated construction intelligence can inform new low-impact architectures that mediate ground, climate, energy, water, ecology and habitation, testing how structures support more-than-human life. Building systems are examined as repositories of historical memory, construction culture and situated intelligence: the knowledge through which architecture responds to available resources. This repertoire will become an atlas for architectural invention. Each building system is examined across scales through its material, labor and territorial implications: how local expertise, tools and economies shape construction; and how components, methods and resources are situated within specific landscapes. Practices of repair, adaptation, retrofitting, low-tech methods and other contemporary techniques are subject of investigation.
Studio Agenda and Methodology
The studio operates as a laboratory of construction, using Research-by-Design to move between the territory, labor, material, component and building, developing architectural vocabularies. Buildings emerge through acts: to shelter, to store, to dry, to gather. Cumulative construction, structural and architectural explorations build a body of investigation through drawings, physical and digital models, material tests, mock-ups and prototypes. These exercises progress from ground foundations to structure, envelope, joinery as well as material cycles and whole-building integration. A sequence of theoretical research seminars critically examines the ideas behind each act of construction, allowing students to learn by making, design by testing and explore by research. UMA4 students investigate systems and methods; UMA5 use the framework to prepare their field of investigation and preliminary thesis.
Teaching team: Alejandro Haiek Coll (studio responsible), Rebecca Rudolph, Thomas Löffler
Latest update: 2026-08-30