Victor Sardenberg

The work of eight selected students presents a culmination of the first year program of the Staedelschule Architecture Class (SAC) of 2015.  This year, in collaboration with Architecture Summer Rhein Main 2015, the chosen topic of the final project was ‘Active Borders’, and the students were asked to design a small scale structure on the border between Frankfurt and Offenbach.

Instead of focusing on urban, political or programmatic problems of a given situation, SAC chose to remain true to its devotion to the formal problems in architecture, which we understand and champion as its disciplinary basis. The Active Borders topic became a pretext for exploring various transitions between formal properties of objects, as well as investigating the spatial effects engendered through formalizing the border.

Ultimately, each project serves as a proof of concept for a certain idea of disciplinary specificity, as the main question addressed in the first year at SAC is ‘What do architects do?’. Leaving the notions of inter- or trans-disciplinarity to others, the SAC first year program is devoted to a very powerful yet deceptively simple idea: Architects draw and model. ​

With works by: Sara Ezz El Arab, Huey Hoong Chan, Wonseok Chae, Victor Sardenberg, Jonathan Sutanto, Hossein Hamdieh, Jorge Ruiz Cordero, Wu Kaixun

Active Borders Virtual Environment by Damjan Jovanovic

Curatorial team: Johan Bettum, Damjan Jovanovic, Adil Bokhari, Jenny Choi