IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION B
Abstract
Architecture has always been caught between art and science, between architectural design and structural engineering. Since the 1950s at the latest, a period in which structural engineering achievements have become increasingly influential in architecture, construction has become a problem for architects. Which architect calculates hyperboloid shells or amorphous three-dimensional lattice structures themselves? The necessary knowledge from the discipline of structural engineering is too vast to be covered in sufficient depth in an architecture degree program. (In addition to covering many other disciplines.) This is compounded by the conflicting models of thinking that underlie the two disciplines involved in construction. While architecture is committed to an inductive model of thinking, civil engineering is based on a deductive one. This makes the subject of structural engineering, which is still common today, an unpopular evil for architecture students. Today, we find ourselves once again in a period of maximum change, driven by advances in information technology. For architects, this offers a unique opportunity to reclaim construction. Instead of laboriously struggling with outdated models of strength analysis and analytical statics, the didactically guided use of deformable structural models enables architects to approach construction in a way that suits them. In a collaboration between Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain and Universität Siegen in Germany, we have begun to develop a new teaching method for structural and design-oriented architecture education that is specific to the skills of aspiring architects. Understanding through seeing and applying
Katja Wirfler is a practising architect and teaches as a research assistant at the Chair of Structural Design in the Department of Architecture at Universität Siegen. Her research focuses on didactics in structural design. In her doctoral thesis, she dealt with Curt Siegel and his significance for static-constructive architecture teaching. She studied architecture at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and Universitat Politècnica de València. After graduating in 1999, she worked in renowned architectural firms in Germany and abroad until returning to university as a lecturer in 2009.
David Gallardo Llopis – Architect and university professor since 1997, passionately teaches structures to architects (teaching excellence award 2011), together with an intensive professional activity as structural consultant on architectural projects with high structural demands (national and international awards), and various stays abroad, mostly in Germany. As a result of his latest year-long stay at the Universität Siegen, he has developed research into the use of digital technologies for a new approach to teaching structures to architects, based on the intuitive and visual potential of architectural learning.
Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thorsten Wimar studied civil engineering at Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH Aachen University) and received his diploma in 2001. Afterwards he was assistant professor at Chair of Building Structures of Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH Aachen University) until 2005. From 2006 to 2011 he worked and received a doctor degree at Institute of Building Construction of Technische Universität Dresden. Since 2011 he leads the Chair of Building Structure at Universität Siegen with the main research in glass in buildings.
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Thursday 25th June, 2026