Peter Behrens in Berlin and Brandenburg - Research-Based Teaching

The craftmanship of research, the evaluation of the found material, the documentation, the inventory and the presentation of what has been researched, learned through the example of Behrensbauten, provides the students with a tool that enables them to take a position in the discussion about our stock and to substantiate it in a well-founded way. A debate that is becoming increasingly important given the need to rethink all processes of building.

The aim of the course is to develop methods for seeing, representing, understanding and learning, and to use the methods of representation to convey one's own attitudes to the projects in question. Students learn to choose a focus through critical analysis and to reveal more about the buildings in the different disciplines than we can learn from purely technical drawings.

The research on Peter Behrens' work that Prof. Dr. Silvia Malcovati and Prof. em. Hartmut Frank have already done in the past forms the basis and is the starting point for a focused look at the buildings in the Berlin and Brandenburg region. For years, models were made by students in Hamburg, which have now moved to Potsdam. This collection is to be supplemented and processed by the emerging results of the current course through plans, renderings, photographs and further models.

Through the accompanying exhibition of the projects with the different methods of architectural representation, we hope to bring the appreciation for the diverse work of Peter Behrens out of the memory into the present in order to use it for the future.