Prof. Benjamin Albrecht
Projekt:
Housing is never neutral. It structures how we meet, withdraw, share, negotiate, and coexist. In Munich, the shortage of affordable student housing has reached a critical level: rising rents, limited availability, and increasing pressure on shared apartments have made access to adequate living space a pressing social issue. The question of student housing is therefore not only architectural, but urgently political and economic. In this studio, we approach student housing in Munich not as a problem of efficiency or density, but as a question of collective life: How do we live together? At a moment when social structures, economic systems, and cultural identities are in constant transformation, architecture must reconsider its role in shaping forms of community. The design of housing becomes a proposal for society itself.
This semester explores collective dwelling as both a spatial and political project. We will investigate historical and contemporary models of communal life — from monastic orders, hippie communes, to cooperative housing — to understand how architecture can define shared rituals, boundaries, hierarchies, and solidarities. The aim is not to replicate past utopias, but to extract spatial intelligence from them: how plans organize coexistence, how thresholds define degrees of privacy, how shared infrastructures produce new forms of belonging and how the potentials of unused spaces are reinterpreted for new communities.
The site for the project is a residual urban area, compressed between highway and railway infrastructure, next to the Studentenstadt in the north of Munich. In its constricted form and fragmented condition, it embodies the pressures of the city’s housing market in both spatial and social terms, and demands a creative architectural response to a complex urban situation. Each student will develop a housing proposal that articulates a clear position on collective living. The result will be a project that operates simultaneously as dwelling, institution, and architectural statement.
The outcome should not merely accommodate or house students; it should propose a coherent framework for living together. Through typological research, formal experimentation, and rigorous design development, the studio will ask: What kind of collective does our time require — and what architectural form can sustain it?
- Teacher: Albrecht, Benjamin