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.