Teaching Program 2: Technology, Building Cultures & Habitation

Teaching Program 2 offers study environments that harness the school’s vision of ‘Engaging Through Architecture’ and its three focus areas of transformation, habitation, and sustainability at both the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels. Teaching Program 2 has a specific focus on habitation through foundations teaching in the BA and specialised studios in the MA.

Having its origin in the Latin verb habere (to have, hold, possess), habitation alludes to very basic appropriative aspects of architecture. Housing and dwelling are therefore emphatic in studies affiliated to Teaching Program 2. However, rather than signifying merely housing or domestic space, we conceive of habitation as a widely encompassing approach to architecture, focusing on occupation of the built environment through conditions of tectonic and tactile reality; an approach which is firmly rooted in a Danish and Nordic context.

The practice of this approach requires meticulous studies of historical and emergent technology: the technologies employed in design processes, as well as in construction and in preparation and manufacturing of materials – and not least how technologies of conception and of realisation can merge and form a procedural continuum. This idea of technology, which is closely related to the concepts of techne and of the (arkhe-)tekton, encompasses the studies of all forms of technology, of digital computation and fabrication, of analogous model and drawing techniques, as well as ancient and cutting edge construction methods and materials.

These studies are underpinned by cultural, philosophical and historical investigations and reflections, not solely as isolated academic strata in the education, but as integrated practical resources in studio design work. Seeking acquaintance with not only local, but also a wide geographical and historical range of building cultures should, besides directly enriching the studies and design work at hand, provide the student of architecture with a “historical sense”, which, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”.