Due to the retirement of Professor Dr. Werner Oechslin at the end of Autumn Semester 2009 the deputy chair temporarily takes over the teaching on the faculty for art and architectural history.
Since the beginning of the modern era in the 18th century people have been used to living with the perception of history as a sequence of past, present and future. We explain and understand our present as being influenced by history which is continuously evolving and being in a transient state. With this awareness Gottfried Semper set himself the task with regards to the architectural practice as a means to interprete the “work of art” as a result of a process, thus a “product” of chronological and diachronic factors. Also in the 20th century and even for the modern architects of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne CIAM the exact knowledge of the genesis maintained the prerequisite for a future-related design. This is in principle still valid today. In this context the students of architecture should not only impart historical knowledge but also a comprehension for the fact that a severe dealing with historical artefacts and incidents cannot be optional, but a task that is to be solved methodologically.