The Department of the Built Environment advances our knowledge of the built environment through its education, research and impact. It addresses urgent societal challenges on a systemic level by combining a unique, broad, and inspiring range of design, technology, and engineering disciplines. With over 250 talented scholars and approximately 1500 students from various nationalities, the department is organized across four disciplinary units:
Architecture, Urban Design and Engineering (AUDE).
Urban Systems and Real Estate (USRE).
Structural Engineering and Design (SED).
Building Physics and Services (BPS).
While each unit has its own in-depth specific disciplinary focus, they work closely together in the department’s education programs and research projects. The department is equipped with several state-of-the-art facilities, from laboratories to robotic facilities and workshops, where scientific curiosity is explored and materialized in providing comprehensive answers to some of the most pressing societal transitions.
AUDE
The unit AUDE integrates (urban) architecture with engineering principles to address complex spatial challenges, focusing on creating high-quality built environments. With a commitment to both historical and theoretical discourse as well as the contemporary practice of (urban) architecture, AUDE approaches the built environment from a combined perspective where thinking and doing are mutually reinforcing. Such position is made explicit in both education and research. Ultimately, AUDE stands for critical and innovative attitudes toward social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental issues, leveraging scholarship, design and technology to propose inventive solutions for the pressing issues in our built environment.
Currently, the unit AUDE consists of five chair groups:
The Chair of Architectural History and Theory (AHT) examines design artifacts, designs, and design practices within specified cultural and societal contexts. Research areas include architectural history, heritage studies, architectural theory, philosophy of design, and architectural criticism.
The Chair of Architectural Design and Engineering (ADE) focuses on the essence of the architectural profession: creating good buildings. This chair operates under the assumption that good architecture results from the harmonious fusion of architectural design and technical expertise. Key research areas include sustainable concepts, evolving typologies, new building technologies, and exploring materiality’s role in architectural design.
The Chair of Smart Architectural Technologies (SAT) concentrates on integrating innovative technologies into the built environment to create responsive buildings. Specifically, the chair emphasizes the balance between architecture, technology, and users, encapsulated in the concept of the ‘Empathic Environment.’
The Chair of Rational Architecture (RA) analyzes and critiques the typology and morphology of existing cities at both the urban and building scales.
The Chair of Architecture and Transformation (AT) focuses on the transformation of the architect’s role, existing building stock, and the design, construction, and production processes of buildings and cities.
The Chairs of AHT, ADE and SAT are currently occupied and remain as they are. The Chairs RA and AT are currently free and are being reconsidered: they can remain as they are but may also be subject to change. Urban Design is covered in the unit USRE.
Job requirements
- You are an (internationally) renowned figure in architecture practice, demonstrating a record of outstanding designs that advances the architectural discipline through creative inquiry.
- In a single 5-year parttime appointment, you support and expand upon the Department’s mission of addressing pressing societal challenges and their implications in the built environment.
- You will achieve this by demonstrating a systemic, considered, and innovative approach through an architectural design and education agenda of contemporary relevance and urgency (design based and research oriented).
- From one of the three complementary positions, you will emphasize original disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to architectural design.
- You will develop a 5-year design and education agenda that advances the current understanding of architectural practice and spatial design by engaging with broader societal challenges including (but not limited to) the housing crisis, adaptive reuse, energy transition, the climate crisis, sustainability, and circularity.
- Beyond having a clear line of design inquiry that contributes to the department’s ongoing engagement with these themes, you are expected to collaborate and develop design assignments with various chairs within AUDE and the department.
- With your design agenda, you will stimulate different approaches to (urban) architectural design, further strengthening the polyvocal approach to the built environment fostered within AUDE and the department.
- Your teaching responsibilities will be primarily focused on leading design studios, delivering lectures for the department’s bachelor’s and master’s degree programs, and supervising graduation projects (master theses) in architecture.
- You are an effective and experienced teacher with clear pedagogical plans supported by practical and didactical teaching models that can contribute to a multidisciplinary environment.
- Additional qualifications include a commitment to excellence, the ability to connect across disciplines, leadership experience, a strong national and international collaborative network and, most importantly, the ability to inspire.