The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved the new Research Training Group “Organizing Architectures” at Goethe University Frankfurt and TU Darmstadt. The research training group investigates architectures as symptoms and tools of modern institutions, networks and discourses and will be funded for five years with 8.1 million euros. Co-speaker is TU professor Sybille Frank.

Architecture is created through multi-layered social processes that materialize in the built environment. Spaces that have already been built have an impact on society and in turn influence the projection of new architecture. The new research group examines this area of tension of architecture as a product and at the same time an impetus for collective processes.

With this approach, the research group shifts the focus from the architectural concepts that have dominated to date to a consideration of their processual conditions. Architecture is not only seen as a representation of social ideas and power relations, but also as their trigger and catalyst.

The research group therefore sees architectures as spaces of dynamic negotiation processes that are directly and indissolubly linked to organizational forms such as institutions, networks and discourses. As fields of work, they structure the research program of the research group. In this way, it will be possible to productively combine diverse theoretical-conceptual, disciplinary and methodological approaches and to analyse the complex field of organized and organizing architectures at the interface between theory and practice.

Twelve researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt, TU Darmstadt, the University of Kassel and the Max Planck Institute for History and Theory of Law in Frankfurt from the fields of Architectural History, Social, Cultural, Legal and Historical Sciences as well as Architecture and Urban Planning are working together in the new research group. The spokesperson is Professor Carsten Ruhl from the Institute of Art History at Goethe University; the deputy spokesperson is Sybille Frank, Professor of Urban and Spatial Sociology at the Department of Social and Historical Sciences at TU Darmstadt.

Funding for the “Organizing Architectures” research group will begin on 1 November 2024 and run for a period of five years.