The second year is entirely organised around the commencement and completion of the project thesis work. The majority of teaching and activities are specific to the three, respective specialisations. However, the second year also provides common sessions for all students and most of the work is undertaken within SAC. Collaborative tasks between students in the three specialisations are also organised and can take place on a project-specific basis. The latter defines the framework for SAC’s cross-specialisation activities.

This specialisation explores architectural building design in a holistic manner by focusing on architectural problems arising from technological as well as cultural, social or economic issues.

By establishing two new areas of specialisation that have emerged from SAC’s research endeavours, the programme in Advanced Architectural Design is improved by being better able to respond to and address select critical issues within the field of architecture and building design. Some of these include architecture’s assimilation of system performativity. This comprises how architecture is understood as a collection of component systems or subsystems that affect how it behaves with respect to contextual considerations. Examples of this are environmental as well as infrastructural, programmatic and economical systems that can be used as drivers for select design processes and projects.

Through this paradigm, SAC’s AAD situates architectural design creativity within a context increasingly pressurised by an extreme influx of various technological developments. The approach considers, for instance, increasing rates of economic or cultural exchange between individuals and/or various interests groups - such as clients or users. AAD indicates how cultural and social factors contribute to the ever-escalating complexity of designing buildings that reflect the standards in Western international architecture as a body of theoretical and practical intelligence. SAC’s revised AAD leads to a sharpened thematic focus preparing the students for one emerging future architecture.

This specialisation is informed by a range of material, constructional and environmental considerations and technologies. It focuses on how computational techniques are changing the methodological and strategic make-up of architectural design by yolking projective and analytical phases in the work process informed by technical data.

APD draws on the transformative role of digital computational processes in architecture bridging the abstraction of geometry with the performative aspects of contemporary and advanced material, technical and constructional systems. These affect architecture in a new and profound way by enhancing its environmental, functional and aesthetic performance potential. This specialisation equips the next generation of architects with an understanding of how material, technical and constructional systems can be utilised as design drivers with a particular focus on how performative potentials are embedded in system organisations on scales hitherto inaccessible and invisible. These potentials become realisable through using digital feedback loops of projective design, analysis and evaluation to establish a process in which architectural and structural solutions evolve and adapt to meet specific requirements.

Students choosing to specialise in APD will gain an intimate comprehension of the emerging synthesis of architecture with engineering design, advanced material technology, and technical and constructional systems. Through this they will learn how to execute their architectural design to contribute to all facets of a building project in a financially and environmentally responsible manner.

This specialisation navigates architecture as a critical cultural tool taking full advantage of SAC’s positioning within an art academy. This specialisation embraces architecture as a spatial, organisational and material artefact with which cultural intervention and critique can be strategised and staged.

ACSP draws on the playful and culturally discursive potential of art to reinvigorate architecture with creative as well as cultural and social criticism. It will establish a productive dialogue with the other half of the Städelschule benefiting from the friction that intrinsically exists between art and architecture. Spatial considerations are not the sole prerogative of architectural design as the discipline of art has, for a long time, been preoccupied with it in various forms.

In ACSP students are introduced to a critical, creative field with input from a wide and open range of considerations. With central contribution from Städelschule art professors, the students enjoy highly personal consultations on topics that emerge from their own personal interests. The work in ACSP is forged at the interface of the disciplinary specific practices and discourses of architecture and the arts. Hence, ACSP gains from cross-disciplinary fertilisation through intensive collaboration with the art department and a vital interaction of the student bodies. Select collaborative projects will also be undertaken. This specialisation will prepare the next generation of architects for using architectural design as a critical tool within a larger societal and cultural context.