News

On the occasion of his 100th birthday on May 31 of this year, Frei Otto is once again being celebrated with new publications, symposia and exhibitions – and rightly so. Less prominent, however, are some of his companions, as well as the question of how Otto appeared in their eyes and how people from his circle were perceived or categorised in public and professional discourse.

We are very pleased to welcome our first cohort of fellows for the saai | iaas Wüstenrot Foundation Residencies! In Summer 2025, Frederike Lausch, Nuno Grancho, Helena Huber Doudova, and Daniela Fabricius will spend several weeks researching in and with the saai's archival collections. As part of the fellowship, there will be a final workshop in the AS F Architekturschaufenster and a podcast episode in "Archive Gossip."

Was it really an educational impulse that prompted the architect and engineer to stop focusing solely on gigantic high-rise constructions and suspended cities and instead produce playground equipment? Or was it more a step out of necessity? Whatever the motivation, Roland's bold climbing constructions fell on fertile ground in the early 1970s.

Archives are based on classification systems that structure materials and facilitate access. In the best case, these are flexible enough to enable different contextualisations and to make estates for a variety of research questions interdisciplinary compatible. But how do you deal with a stock that comes with a specially developed, highly specific classification system?

Wir suchen eine neue Kolleg:in im Verwaltungsbereich (Teilzeit, 50%) mit hervorragenden Organisations- und Kommunikationsfähigkeiten für allgemeine administrative Aufgaben am saai | Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau! Für die gesamte Stellenbeschreibung dem Link folgen. Bewerbungen können nur über das KIT Bewerbungsportal entgegengenommen werden.

Felix S. C. Wong

At the ICAM (International Confederation of Architecture Museums) conference in Hong Kong in December 2024, saai co-director and professor of architectural theory Anna-Maria Meister was elected to the ICAM board. She is looking forward to working with Martien de Vletter, Co-President (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal) and Ikko Yokoyama, Co-President (M+, Hong Kong) as well as Zoë Ryan, Vice President (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Alison Fisher, Secretary General (The Art Institute of Chicago), David Peyceré, Treasurer (Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Paris), Birgitte Sauge, Membership Secretary (Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design, Oslo), Antonello Alici (Dipartimento di ingegneria civile, edile e architettura, Università politecnica delle Marche, Ancona), Deniz Ova (SALT, Istanbul), Saman Quraishi (CEPT Archives, Ahmedabad) and Shayari de Silva (Geoffrey Bawa Trust, Colombo).

As a schoolboy, Conrad Roland dreamed of traveling to the USA. But it was not until years later, after an apprenticeship as a carpenter and a degree in architecture at the Technical University of Munich, that he was given the opportunity to continue his studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Walter Peterhans thanks to a Fulbright scholarship.