Architecture is never autonomous. It is always shaped by forces that precede and exceed the design act, be they economic, institutional, legal, ecological, social. Die Macht der Bedingungen examines these conditions not as obstacles to be overcome but as the actual ground of architectural production: the field within which design becomes possible, legible, and effective.

The volume brings together voices from practice, research, and planning to illuminate how external conditions operate — how they constrain and enable, how they combine and shift, and how a precise understanding of them can make architecture more comprehensible as an activity rationally embedded in society. Rather than claiming to cover the topic exhaustively, it offers critical entry points and provocations for discourse for students, practitioners, and the wider public.

Published by Spector Books, Leipzig, 2025.

Co-editors: Benedikt Boucsein, Elettra Carnelli, Daniel Zwangsleitner
Publisher: Spector Books, 2025 (Design Lyosha Kritsouk)

Contributions by:
ANA Kollektiv, Benedikt Boucsein, Elettra Carnelli, Roberto Dini, Ulrike Gölker, Hermann Grub und Petra Lejeune, Anna-Maria Meister, Matthias Ottmann, Christiane Thalgott, Daniel Zwangsleitner

The Blissful Futures Project departed deliberately from the crisis framing that had structured earlier studio work. Rather than asking students to respond to emergency, the studio asked them more directly to imagine otherwise: to speculate, to propose, to design toward futures worth wanting.

We Need to Represent: Finneran Casey A two-part investigation into the gap between legislators and constituents, combining policy research with direct engagement in the political process. The project asks what design can contribute to the problem of democratic representation.

Mirrored Tails: Gabriela Salkič & Sophie Marshall Through the mechanics of predator-prey dynamics, this video game builds a critical commentary on cycles of power and oppression. The game asks players to inhabit the position of the oppressed and to think through what resistance actually requires.

Resonance: Asya Staferska A speculative social media platform that replaces passive scrolling with structured, trustworthy news consumption and direct pathways to civic action. A design proposal for a different relationship between information, attention, and agency.

Mind the Gap: Kenya Baker & Megan Fisch An investigation into gender bias embedded in design practice and its material consequences. The project develops a set of Woman-Centered Design Principles addressing four structural failures: safety, body difference, stereotype enforcement, and data skew.

Mode Method Operation: Christopher Khauv Refusing to produce a conventional product, this project turns the design process itself into the subject of inquiry. Drawing on critiques of enshittification and extractive corporate practice, it proposes designing the designer rather than the object: pluriversal rather than universal in orientation.

«I think that it is easy for us to agree that, in modernism, people are not equipped with the mental and emotional repertoire to deal with such a vast scale of events; that they have difficulty submitting to such a rapid acceleration for which, in addition, they are supposed to feel responsible while, in the meantime, this call for action has none of the traits of their older revolutionary dreams.»
(B. Latour, Agency at the time of the Anthropocene, New Literary History Vol. 45, pp. 1-18, 2014)

«I feel it coming, a series of disasters created through our diligent yet unconscious efforts. If they’re big enough to wake up the world, but not enough to smash everything, I ‘d call them learning experiences, the only ones able to overcome our inertia.»
(Denis de Rougemont, 1979)

The future, which we thought we had maybe another decade to prepare for is now suddenly here. In all likelihood, we can expect further crises of similar severity, especially in the context of climate change. The 21st century will, therefore, be radically different from the 20th. Conventions, techniques and social practices we are familiar with will disappear. Our responsibilities and roles as architects and urban planners will also change fundamentally. Until now, science and society have played down or denied the vulnerability of our urban structures to the risks that are direct side effect of our current way of life. In the search for alternative and, in a sense, more realistic perspectives, Jem Bendell’s concept of “deep adaptation” (2018) calls for a shift: He urges us to prepare for the collapse of certain systems that currently govern our lives – and to see this as an opportunity for positive change. In this context, we conduct the Urban Design Research non- Studio in the summer semester 2020 (UDRnS) by taking Munich as a case. On the one hand, our goal is to create an “emergency plan” for upcoming crises. On the other hand, we are deeply interested in how urban spaces will change over the next decades.

Professorship of Urban Design – Technical University of Munich
with Benedikt Boucsein, Elif Simge Fettahoğlu-Özgen

Students: Joris Allemann, Theresa Bader, Aida Demchenko, Georgy Frolov, Konstantin Flöhl, Nora Guzu, Tim Keim, Anna Laura Kamm, Caspar Kleiner, Spyros Koulouris, Wolfram Meiner, Georg Meck, Cristiana Martinelli, Lara Nixel, Miguel Pérez Mur, Antonia Pielmeier, Freya Probst, Stella Sommer, Theresa Thanner, Mylène Jakob-Wendel, Julia Wolf, Leonie Wrighton


The Perivàllonistic Manifesto: Joris Allemann, Tim Keim, Wolfram Meiner, Freya Probst, Julia Wolf

In light of the fact, that the (Capitalocene) society is doomed to fail, we see it as our responsibility to herald in the era of the Perivàlloncene (Perivàllocene?) (greek περιβάλλον [perivallon] = the environment). We are convinced that a new, global way of thinking and living in harmony with nature is essential to sustain existing and future generations, as well as other species on the planet. Contrary to the widespread belief, that the climate crisis and the extinction of species can be prevented solely by reducing greenhouse emissions, we believe that a fundamental change in social values and norms is crucial. Under this pretext, it is our duty to make an urban and social premise on the path towards perivàllonism. In accordance with our visions of a perivàllonistic city, it is time to rethink and redesign the old city ring of Munich. Our goal is to free the heart of the city from its oversized ring road and implement sustainable and liveable urban situations.

Antifragilemon - A Guideline to an Antifragile Mindset: Nora Guzu, Anna Laura Kamm, Caspar Kleiner, Lara Nixel, Theresa Thanner

The crises of the future are coming our way. In all likelihood, they will be even more extreme and intense than we can imagine. To grasp the extent of this, we must use scenarios to transport ourselves into a future marked by crises. This approach is essential in order to achieve anti-fragile action in the present and to be able to take appropriate interventions.

Based on extensive analyses and scenario techniques, we examine urban contexts for their resilience. It quickly becomes clear that resilience is not enough. We came across the approach of researcher Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which has accompanied us as a mindset throughout the semester and beyond: anti-fragility. This means not only learning from mistakes and shortcomings, but also transforming them into something positive – true to the motto “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” In order to emerge anti-fragile from the scenarios we have chosen, we select measures and apply them to the urban space. We then analyze the newly acquired state and work on further interventions.

We move in a continuous spiral:
“Prepare – Absorb – Improve”

With our work, we contribute to further developing the mindset of anti-fragility.

Die Lokalen Urbanen: Theresa Bader, Aida Demchenko, Spyridon-Nektarios Koulouris, Stella Sommer, Leonie Wrighton

Economists say “crises are to be expected,” politicians say “crises must be combated,” this project says “you have to prepare for crises.”
What kind of response can be given to the inevitable challenges of the future? Our thesis is: the more global the problem, the more local the solution. The city, as a result of globalization and a driver of imminent crises, should also act as a catalyst for their solution.
The path to this goal is based on the activities of residents, who take on the roles of various actors and thus change urban reality. The milestones set in the project can be achieved through a variety of locally targeted actions that can be integrated into everyday life. On the one hand, these allow for urban resilience and adaptation in the event of future crises and, on the other hand, increase the quality and comfort of the urban space in the here and now.
Through local interventions, the narrative of the milestones develops from the small scale of the house and neighborhood to the city level, where it enters into dialogue with the goals already set by the city of Munich. This creates a strong connection between the individual and the collective, and vice versa, in every decision. Overarching “top-down” measures on a large scale are replaced by small-scale “bottom-up” interventions and are thus always within the framework of democratic decision-making.

Infratecture - Towards a new Food-Architecture: Cristiana Martinelli, Konstantin Flöhl, Georg Meck

Having learnt more about the inefficient food supply chain and its lack of sustainability, we developed a food supply chain based on regional sources. As climatic and pandemic emergencies become more and more part of the futures and the present, the question arises, how to achieve a resilient food industry that is relying on local production and local consumption. There is enough food planted in Germany to supply all humans living in Germany. This makes it mostly a question of distribution. In order to establish an ecofriendly and reasonable regional food-supply-chain without years of planning and building, we made intensive use of the already existing infrastructure. Tracks and ware-houses in the rural areas as well as in the city are the key-elements together with the selling units placed at tram and bus stations all over the city. By uniting the partners from the various sections, a regional value chain is created. The project and its infratectural approach has the potential to start now and being adjusted to its growth during the next years. Its goal is not alone to create a regenerative agriculture and a healthier supply system for all participants and users but to make it autarkic and to stabilize it for upcoming threats.

Renovation and gentle extension of a late-1960s cabin. The existing structure no longer met contemporary energy standards nor current spatial requirements. The project continues the logic of the original timber-block construction—quietly extending the house in the same material and constructive language.

The most straightforward and stylistically coherent solution was chosen: a modest addition pushed directly into the slope, minimizing the building’s visibility in the landscape. Nature-based slope stabilization with coconut mats and local vegetation ensures structural safety and a sensitive integration into the terrain.

Alongside the energy retrofit, the design focuses on simplicity of detailing and a resource-aware approach throughout, while advancing the architectural language of the existing fabric.

Space is never neutral. Behind every infrastructure decision, every regulation, every design choice, there are assumptions about who matters and who does not. These texts examine those assumptions: who the built environment is made for and what kinds of bodies and futures it imagines.

The work moves across scales and forms, from embodied observation on a Munich bicycle lane to speculative fiction set in a post-pandemic Turin, from critical dialogue on electric mobility to dictionary entries on accessibility, the Anthropocene, and Polycrisis. What connects them is a persistent question: when we design infrastructure, regulate movement, or imagine technological solutions, whose conditions of life are we actually improving?

The techno-fix imagination (Haraway) runs through all of it as a recurring target. Not because technology is irrelevant, but because it is never innocent. It encodes priorities, distributes access unevenly, and displaces ecological costs onto those least able to refuse them.

The Bicycle-Machine-Age. Being part of the Bicycle-Machine and its implications on (self-) perception, 2018

Living in the Bicycle-Machine Age in 2019 Munich. Are we maybe still caught in the age of the automobile?, 2020

Don't Look Back in Anger – Script for Conversations in Post-COVID Futures, 2020, with Chiara Basile

Angelus Novus. Part I. Scattered dialogue on bodies, space and mobility in late capitalism, 2021, with Chiara Basile

Angelus Novus. Part II. Inner dialogue on machines, accessibility and regulations in the world-ecology, 2021, with Chiara Basile

Sport and Geopolitics of Power, 2025, with Chiara Basile

Accessibilità, Antropocene, Policrisi, Entries for an anthropological dictionary, with Chiara Basile, Forthcoming

All published in Italian in the Mimesis Eterotopie series edited by Vittorio Marchis and Marco Pozzi, Politecnico di Torino, between 2018 and 2026.

Utah accumulates contradictions. Evaporation ponds and mine tailings, the shrinking Great Salt Lake, Spiral Jetty half-submerged and half-exposed. Mining and Land Art as two versions of the same colonial impulse — to measure, claim, and mark territory.

The future, which we thought we had maybe another decade to prepare for, is now suddenly here. In all likelihood, we can expect further crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic or of similar severity, especially in the context of climate change.

With contributions by Benedikt Boucsein, Elettra Carnelli, Elif-Simge Fettahoglu-Özgen, Mona Mahall, Flavia Alice Mameli, James Miller, Eric Nay, Uroš Pajović, Franziska Polleter, Mathilda Rosengren, Josefine Sarkez-Knudsen, Junichi Satoh, Asli Serbest, Taylor Stahle, Marie Ulber, Ana Jayone Yarza Pérez, Daniel Zwangsleitner

Technical University of Munich, Professorship of Urban Design

This Urban Design Research Studio was built around expanded student agency: rather than following a fixed path, students co-defined the site, the structure, and many of the steps we took. Within a clear thematic framework, they shaped the direction of the work, designed context-specific spatial strategies, and engaged directly with local actors. The studio functioned as an experimental, collaborative environment that that empowered students to move beyond passive learning and take on the active, future-oriented role of urban designers capable of initiating real change. The project was developed through a community-of-practice approach in which the entire student cohort worked toward a shared vision with differentiated roles throughout the design process.

Set within a district of Mainz undergoing profound transformation, the work reimagines mobility and public space while advancing landscape design through ecological corridors, natural and ruderal habitats along infrastructural edges, and a more connected, resilient urban landscape.

Teaching Team: Benedikt Boucsein, Elif Simge Fettahoğlu-Özgen, Daniel Zwangsleitner

Students: Anastasia Bos, Julia Carstens, Anna Ghillani, Anne-Sophie Hofmann, Anna Jaggy, Paulina Knodel, Jodok Kroitzsch, Myriam Künzel, Alexandra Lischke, Leonie Pokorny.

«a problem, once freed from the generalities that take it hostage, once it is given a chance, might spread out to unexpected dimensions, becoming something that obliged one to think, that is, something that makes one go from refusal to creation»
(Isabelle Stengers et al., Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, 2014)

«Speculative fabulation is a mode of attention, a theory of history, and a practice of worlding»
(Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016)



A memorial’s function is to physically perpetuate the recollection of a certain event or the legacy of a particular occurrence. The material languages and the visual codes are often devoted to construct a timeless durability and communicate an everlasting story. Meanings have different ways at different times in history to assemble around and attach to those objects, no matter how their significance was meant to endure. In the case of the “Monument to the Fallen Miners” (completed in 1973 to a design by Bogdan Bogdanović) in the Kosovar city of Mitrovica, the story that the monument is to narrate is the one of coexistence, particularly the one between the two main ethnic groups in the city – Albanians and Serbs. Yet, interpretations of the social significance and factual displaying of that coexistence vary through the different historical and political settings of Mitrovica; they challenge semantically the same geographical site, anchoring contradictory and rearranged symbolic meanings to its 19 meters tall pillars.

This contribution aims to discuss the symbolic transformations of a monument. It examines a case in which an iconic monument persists in its physical presence although the original meaning has become obsolete. It analyses the political dimensions of this reframing process and the role of the new interpretations in the afterlife of the original ones.

Conference contribution with Chiara Basile.

The MCube lighthouse project “Transformative Mobility Experiments (TrEx)” aimed to systematically understand experiments for sustainable and scalable mobility transformations, to further develop them in a participatory manner, to test them in practice and to strengthen them with new tools and perspectives. Such experiments are becoming increasingly popular - in the course of the project, TrEx took a transdisciplinary approach to three types of experiment relevant to mobility transformations:

Co-PI and Subproject Lead with Stefanie Ruf 2021–2024

MCube: Munich Cluster for the Future of Mobility in Metropolitan Regions

«Radical feminist work around the world daily strengthens political solidarity between women beyond the boundaries of race/ ethnicity and nationality.»
bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody.

Parity Jour Fixe 33

The Val Gardena master plan draws a picture of the future of the valley. It represents a long-term planning tool for the municipalities and defines which goals of spatial development are to be pursued and achieved jointly in the coming years. The plan not only shows the status quo but illustrates how the Gardena Valley should develop in the future – preserving the quality of life of citizens, securing livelihoods, and protecting the environment. The Master Plan is a pilot project for South Tyrol in terms of intercommunal land-use planning and mobility strategy.

Institute for Regional Development and Location Management - EURAC Bolzano 2010
with Lisa Kofink (project lead)
→ Press coverage: Provinz Südtirol News

In the 1970s Cairo started expanding into the open desert. Most of these new towns, built to cope with the city’s fast growing population, fell considerably short of expectations. A photo essay explores the desert cities Al-Shuruq and New Cairo.

Article for Failed Architecture
Cairo, since its foundation more than 1000 years ago, continues to be the political, economic and urban centre of Egypt. Like many other cities, the population of Cairo multiplied in the last few decades. From an estimated 3.3 million in 1960, the Metropolitan Area of the Greater Cairo Region has risen to consist of some 17 million inhabitants (estimates vary between 14 and 20 millions) which represent more than one-fifth of Egypt’s population. Traditionally situated in the Nile-Valley, Cairo is surrounded by desert plains to the east and to the west. It was not until the 1956 Cairo Master Plan that these desert badlands, often owned and utilised for training by the Egyptian military, were thought to be a place of settlement. It took another two decades, when in 1976 the first desert-city, 10th of Ramadan, was officially launched. Other desert cities were soon to follow, amongst which 6th of October, 15th of May and Al Obour...

Read the full article on Failed Architecture
All photographs: studiozwa

The Wipptal and the surrounding valleys are exposed to natural hazards that influence the lives of their inhabitants. Avalanches, floods, debris and landslides, and rockfalls are the most frequent dangers in these alpine settlement areas. The goal of the IREK project is to provide the responsible authorities of the affected municipalities with a comprehensive, risk-based planning method that guarantees the sustainable development of the area. The study is also applicable to other alpine regions. It includes the municipalities of the northern Wipptal: Obernberg, Vals, Schmirn, Trins, Gschnitz, Navis, as well as selected areas of the municipalities of Brenner, Sterzing, Pfitsch and Ratschings in the southern Wipptal.

Technicians from different fields of expertise, local authorities and residents work together to develop a functional guide for the implementation of sustainable spatial development concepts. The IREK project unites experts and the population in order to find innovative solutions oriented toward protection, growth and safety. The initiative is divided into several working phases: investigation of the safety systems and identification of the hazard zones; assessment of the potential damage and analysis of the possible consequences; definition of sustainable and innovative protection strategies for the affected areas, ordered by priority. From this results a catalogue of measures that follows the criteria of feasibility and urgency of the situation.

My work package within the IREK project focused on conducting qualitative interviews with stakeholders from the participating municipalities in order to explore local development needs and spatial requirements. Based on these insights, future development scenarios for the municipalities of Gossensaß, Mareit, Kematen, and Sterzing were formulated using the scenario method. These scenarios were subsequently discussed and refined in participatory workshops together with the local stakeholders, fostering a shared understanding of potential spatial strategies and priorities for the sustainable development of the Wipptal region.

Institute for Regional Development and Location Management - EURAC Bolzano 2010
with Lisa Kofink (project lead) and Michael Volgger.

The project was funded within the framework of the INTERREG IV Italy–Austria program and is featured in the Best-Practice Report (2015), pp. 62-63

This study offers insight into a crucial period of the provision of housing in Austria. Modell Steiermark was a set of public policies that highly valued the importance of architecture and spatial-planning and led to the creation of subsidized housing projects that integrated the future inhabitants in the process of planning and use.
Two research interests are at the core of this study, on one hand it aims to shed light on this period and its accompanying discourses as a whole, on the other hand it investigates the motivational background of the involved architects.
The methodical framework of Situational Analysis (Clarke 2005) based on Grounded Theory Methodology (Glaser, Strauss 1967) is used to delve into the first aspect, to understand the framework, the surrounding parameters, to depict the actors and actants and to discuss the major and minor discourses that are entangled in the situation. This part of the study is based on historical sources.
The second aspect, the individual motivational background of the involved architects, is investigated using the methodical framework of biographical research based on narrative interviews (Schütze 1976, Rosenthal 2004). Documentary Method (Bohnsack 2003) provides the framework to analyse these narrative interviews. It empirically extracts the orientation framework that formed the basis for actions of these architects.
Ph.D research project carried out at Politecnico di Torino (Italy) 2014-2018.

Related publications:
Künstlerhaus - Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz, 2017

Complex Modernism maps a strand of post-war Italian architecture that rejected the placeless purity of the International Style without abandoning modernity itself. Rogers, De Carlo, Gardella, Albini, Rossi, Aulenti, Gabetti e Isola, Gregotti, Valle each developed a practice grounded in continuity, territory and cultural memory. This is a position that Casabella Continuità had been articulating since the mid-1950s, well before Venturi gave it a North American name.

The hand-drawn network diagram traces their connections across buildings, publications, institutions, and collaborations. It renders visible a richly interwoven architectural culture in which place and modernity were not opposites.

It emerged from several years of reading and repeated fieldwork, including three study trips to Northern Italy between 2014 and 2017. Die Schwierige Moderne (ISSN 2363-7943), a ten-volume thematic series on architectural theory and practice developed at OTH Regensburg, Germany, followed.

This off-season photograph shows an apartment tower from Italy's postwar building boom, Alpine modernism cobbled together from chalet references and raw practicality. The building sits abruptly in the landscape, caught between traditional architecture and simple vertical mass, showing all the contradictions of Alpine touristic development.

Sonderegger, Roger & Bätzing, Werner. “Second homes in the Alpine Region.” Revue de géographie alpine, 2014.
Camanni, Enrico. La nuova vita delle Alpi. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002.

The Alps are characterized by unique natural and cultural landscapes. These have produced a wide range of characteristic building types, which emerged out of a long-term adaption to climatic and geographic conditions. Today they form an important element of the attractiveness of the Alps as a space for living and recreation.