Chair of Building Construction

Prof. Ludwig Wappner

The Department of Building Construction is home to elementary and well-founded core competencies of the Karlsruhe architectural education, which are indispensable basics for the study and are taught and applied in teaching and research.

Building Construction
Within the framework of a coordinated modular structure of the Bachelor's and Master's programmes, the field of building construction plays a central role in the education of architects. In addition to the extensive construction and design teaching in the course of the study programme, the first semesters provide targeted and comprehensive basic teaching.
Here, students essentially learn the basics about the nature and development of architecture with a focus on building construction and the necessary elementary links to other fields of study and knowledge.
The general and special conditions of thinking, designing and constructing buildings, the necessary building and supporting structure, the appropriate detailing, materiality and building materials, building physics and technical building equipment are meaningfully combined here to form spatially functional relationships and thus to create an architectural space.
Architectural space continues to play a key role in the training of architects. Space only becomes a comprehensible and sensual experience when the matter that limits space becomes material.
Knowledge of the overall system of a building and thus the ability to put what has been learned into practice are still basic requirements for successful studies and later professional practice.

Building Construction Bachelor
In the Bachelor's programme, students learn to apply these skills holistically in special studios in initial exercises, in drafts as well as in seminars and excursions and, building on this knowledge of the basic principles, develop their own profile step by step.
Knowledge, emotionality and curiosity are to be rekindled and led to maturity through this continuous and professional examination.
With the first steps of a constructive design, every student gains important experience, he learns to transform what he has seen and experienced into design processes, he has to free himself from ordinary ways of looking at things, to think the unusual and to add new things. In the bachelor's programme, the cognitive abilities and the visual memory of the students are filled with spatial and constructive experiences, border crossings, experienced cooperation in a team and with other disciplines, as well as with memories of sensual experience or movement in space.
This cornucopia of impressions creates the best conditions and skills for a solution-oriented approach to every design and construction task and the indispensable consolidation and rounding off of the education with the Master's degree.

Building Construction Master
In the master's programme, the knowledge acquired in the bachelor's degree and in internships is intensified and applied in depth in complex designs and special seminars as well as in supplementary research projects, and forms the prerequisite for the successful completion of the architectural studies with the master's thesis. We want to promote and actively support this important maturing process in the Bachelor and Master studies with our range of courses in the field of building construction.

Building Construction Research
With the Bachelor's and Master's degree programs for the study of architecture, an accompanying research area has developed for the field of building construction in addition to teaching in the close context of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT. This research area is currently dedicated to the scientific processing of current and future-oriented architectural questions in the broad field of planning and building as well as to the qualities and properties of new building products, the comparative consideration of different building technologies, building in existing structures, and resource-saving construction. In the future, it will be necessary to increasingly demand and articulate the potential of architecture for research and to exploit the potential of design and construction to become a research discipline by allowing a comparative and explicit examination of the requirements for qualified research.

In theory and practice, we face up to the constant changes in the professional profile of the architect in teaching and research. We try to perceive changes at an early stage by seismography in order to react appropriately and promptly.
During their architectural education we offer students a protected place for their own development and individual maturation.