„The North Sea region is among the European territories most severely affected by sea-level rise, storm surges, salinisation, and hydrological instability. Conventional planning instruments, such as protection, fixation, and technical control, are increasingly reaching their ecological, economic, and political limits. Urbanism operates here at critical thresholds of irreversibility, where stabilization is no longer sufficient and where transformation, retreat, and regeneration become necessary.
The seminar addresses this condition as a core design and research question of contemporary urbanism. The seminar builds on the analysis of territorial systems, with particular attention to hydrology, soil, ecology, and infrastructure, and examines their interdependencies within the North Sea context. The focus lies on working with thresholds, scenarios, and temporal axes in order to understand spatial transformation not as a static condition but as a dynamic process. Cartographies, diagrams, and sections serve as key analytical tools to describe, interpret, and translate complex systemic relationships. Based on these analyses, regenerative design strategies are developed at the interface of architecture and urbanism. The emphasis is deliberately placed on spatial prototypes rather than formal solutions. The seminar is research- and project-based, combining analytical precision with speculative design.
The work is carried out in teams of several students from architecture and urban design. Interdisciplinary collaboration and the engagement with multiple spatial scales are explicitly encouraged. Proficiency in GIS is advantageous but not mandatory. The seminar takes place on a weekly basis. As part of the seminar, a collective exhibition is developed, curated, and realised.
The aim of the seminar is to read the North Sea region as a key territory of regenerative transformation and to develop new architectural and urban positions that operate with uncertainty, irreversibility, and ecological agency: precise, critical, and future-oriented.“
