EntwerfenKonstruieren

The departments of Building Construction, Design Methodology, and the teaching area Fundamentals of Building Construction convey as a team in common premises under the unifying generic term Design and Construction a comprehensive core competence of student education in the Bachelor's and Master's programs of the KIT Architecture program as well as a well-founded research on selected and complex questions of planning and construction.
The design and construction of buildings continues to play a key role in architectural work. It is important to keep to this and to stabilize, expand, and constantly compare these basic qualities with current and future developments in university education, but especially with practice. These learned and experienced skills should be based on knowledge of as many areas of our lives as possible. For example, the examination of political, sociological, psychological, economic, aesthetic and especially creative content is an indispensable prerequisite.

The ability to grasp as many of these connections as possible during the course of studies in order to create special rooms and buildings during the design and construction process that offer suitable platforms for everyday life and the greatest possible quality of use and appearance for people living together is our postulated goal.

The focus of design and construction is still on space, whether from an urban planning point of view, in context with other buildings or from the interior of a house. Each room generates its design, material and atmospheric qualities from the successful interaction of material, detail and spatial concept. Design and construction are not independently parallel disciplines, but are directly connected and mutually dependent. Only from a successful synthesis of these two activities does architecture emerge. This can also lead to contradictions and aberrations, in the end it is the measurable result that counts.

In the Bachelor's and Master's programmes, the central topics of building construction and design are taught to students in coordinated lecture cycles, drafts, seminars and impromptu courses, building on each other didactically and successively, and thereby stimulating the students to engage in professional discourse. The lectures are enriched by excursions, external lectures and guest critics.

The bundled subject and teaching areas of Design and Construction offer, both in terms of content and space, in the close context of Institute II but also in the important exchange with the other institutes of the faculty, the links between the most diverse subject and knowledge areas that are elementary for the development of architecture and in doing so also make use of the diverse networking opportunities of the faculties within the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

A well-proportioned constructed and sensually materialized space can only be created by networking and holistically considering many parameters. Only in this way can a plan also become a building. Architecture is always concrete matter and never just abstract.

In addition to imparting knowledge, it is essential and important for us teachers to listen to the students in dialogue, to encourage them in a targeted manner and to ask them what they want to say and represent with their thoughts and student projects. After all, the best in studying architecture should come from the students themselves.