Armin Stocker: Konstruktive Grundlagen des Entwerfens

Armin Stocker (2025), Konstruktive Grundlagen des Entwerfens, Institute of Construction and Design Principles

Habilitation committee: Hans Gangoly, Tom Kaden, Petra Petersson, Andreas Trummer, Viktoria Haspl, Dorothee Hippler

Building construction provides an essential foundation for architectural design and for building as an act of human expression in space. The interdependencies arising among the activities of construction and architectural design are of reciprocal, mutually dependent nature and thus need to be carried out in a way that does justice to this reciprocity and dependency.

The classical processes that started spreading in the early days of modernism and that were dominant over the last hundred years of construction activity are increasingly put under pressure due to ecological and sociocultural aspects. Yet design, when understood as a technique and means that enables us to create a real built space based on an abstract idea, still remains the precondition for architecture of all kinds, since architecture consists of matter. Far from being neutral, this matter takes the form of materials and structures that, with their technical and cultural connotations, exert considerable influence on the design—and vice versa.

If building construction is situated on a pragmatic side of thought and action, then the design process can be equated with an intuitive act. Building construction and architectural design are hence comparable to that which Ferdinand de Saussure defined as a sheet of paper, whereby two distinct sides can be discerned, yet it remains impossible to ever separate them into two halves.

“Constructive Fundamentals of Architectural Design” focuses on the interplay between these two poles and counteracts the tendency to view, research, and teach construction and architectural design as separate entities, because architecture fitting to society can only arise through such interplay. The habilitation thesis researches and conveys building construction as an integral part of architectural design and form-finding in the reciprocal conditionality of their material manifestation, that is, of building and utilization in the world we experience. The thesis is centered on the establishment of a holistic view of architecture and of its creation process and further development.