Ben van Berkel

Ben van Berkel studied architecture at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at the Architectural Association in London, receiving the AA Diploma with Honours in 1987. His first projects were built almost immediately after founding Van Berkel & Bos Architectuur Bureau. Among the buildings of this first period are Karbouw, the Remu electricity station, and Villa Wilbrink. Being elected to design the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam (1996) profoundly affected his understanding of the role of the architect today and constituted the foundation of his collaborative approach to practicing, leading to the foundation of UNStudio in 1999. Recent projects, which reflect his long-standing interest in the integration of construction and architecture, are: the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and Arnhem Central.

Johan Bettum

Johan Bettum is a professor of architecture and the program director of the Städelschule Architecture Class. He has taught and lectured, amongst other places, at the AA, UCLA, the Berlage Institute, Innsbruck University, the EPFL in Lausanne and Oslo School of Architecture. Bettum studied at the Architectural Association (AA) after gaining a BA with a major in biology from Princeton University. His main interests reside in the intersection between materials, geometry and architectural design. Bettum was a research fellow at the Oslo School of Architecture from 1997-2001 and headed a nationally funded research project on polymer composite materials in architecture. Until 2000 he led the OCEAN group in Oslo whose work on polymer composites and advanced digital modelling greatly influenced the projects of the group in this period. Bettum's PhD is entitled The Material Geometry of Fibre-Reinforced Polymer Matrix Composites and Architectural Tectonics. His experimental practice, ArchiGlobe, conducts various small-scale projects, exploring related subjects.

Nikolaus Hirsch

Nikolaus Hirsch is a professor, the dean of the Städelschule and director of Portikus, the art gallery.

Daniel Birnbaum

Daniel Birnbaum is professor of art theory. He teaches philosophy seminars in the school. Over the last few years, Birnbaum has emerged as one of the most influential people on the international arts scene. He was co-curator of 50th Venice Biennale and the first Moscow Biennale, autumn of 2004. He is regular contributor to Art Forum and as well as Domus Magazine. Daniel Birnbaum has a Ph.D in philosophy (1997) on the topic: "The Hospitality of Presence: Problems of Otherness in Husserl’s Phenomenology." Before coming to the Städelschule in 2001, he taught in Stockholm, wrote on various topics in art and curated numerous exhibitions. He is currently on the board of the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo.

Andre Chaszar

Andre Chaszar’s work combines research and practice in architecture and engineering, with special emphasis on the collaborative potentials and mechanisms of these and related fields and it comprises over 15 years’ experience on more than 200 engineering and architectural projects. His doctoral dissertation entitled Beyond BIM concerns the use of digital models in multi-disciplinary design processes. He has been a university instructor, invited speaker and/or guest critic at various schools of architecture and engineering in the Americas and Europe, including the AA, Bath University, Columbia, Harvard, IIT, MIT, Princeton, RPI, Sci-Arc, UniCampi, U Penn and Yale. In 2002-3 as Trott visiting fellow at OSU he led an early digital design-and-fabrication seminar including full-building-scale CAM prototyping. He also serves on the editorial board of Architectural Design (AD) and has published as the editor/co-author of Blurring the Lines as well as various academic papers and other articles. Currently consulting at Bollinger+Grohmann, he is also teaching at SAC during the 2011-12 academic year on optimization and design space exploration.

Beatriz Colomina

Beatriz Colomina is an architectural theorist and associate professor in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. She has written extensively on questions of architecture and the modern institutions of representation, particularly the printed media, photography, advertising, film and TV. Among her books are Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), which was awarded the 1995 International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects; Sexuality and Space (editor, 1992), awarded the 1993 AIA International Book Award; and Architecture Production (editor, 1988). Her most recent books are Doble exposición: Arquitectura a través del arte (Double Exposure: Architecture through Art) (Madrid: Akal, 2006), and Domesticity at War (Barcelona: ACTAR and MIT Press, 2007). She has been on the editorial boards of Assemblage, Daidalos, and Grey Room. Colomina is the Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. She has lectured at various institutions and events throughout the world and is the recipient of several prestigious grants and fellowships, including the Chicago Institute for Architecture, SOM Foundation, Graham Foundation, Fondation Le Corbusier, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts in Washington.

Mark Fahlbusch

Mark Fahlbusch teaches structural design for complex architectural solutions at SAC. He is a partner and a project manager at Bollinger + Grohmann Ingenieure and is responsible for the structural design of various national and international projects in concrete, steel, glass and textile membranes. He has extensive knowledge in the design of geometrically complex free-form structures in combination with challenging façade systems. From 2000 to 2005 Mark Fahlbusch worked for the Department of Design and Structural Development at the faculty of Architecture of the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany as an assistant professor. During this time he received a PhD on post breakage behavior of laminated pre-stressed glass.

Markus Miessen

Markus Miessen is an architect and writer. In 2002, he set up Studio Miessen, a collaborative agency for spatial practice and cultural inquiry, and in 2007, he co-founded the London- and Berlin-based architectural practice nOffice. In various collaborations, Miessen has published, amongst other titles: Waking Up From The Nightmare of Participation (Expodium & Sternberg Press, 2011), The Nightmare of Participation (Sternberg Press, 2010), Institution Building: Artists, Curators, Architects in the Struggle for Institutional Space (Sternberg Press, 2009), East Coast Europe (Sternberg Press, 2008), The Violence of Participation (Sternberg Press, 2007), With/Without: Spatial Products, Practices, and Politics in the Middle East (Bidoun, 2007), Did Someone Say Participate? (MIT Press, 2006), and Spaces of Uncertainty (Müller+Busmann, 2002). His work has been published and exhibited widely, including at the Lyon, Venice, Performa (NY), Manifesta (Murcia), Gwangju, and Shenzhen Biennials. He has taught at the Architectural Association, London (2004–08), the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam (2009–10), and as visiting professor for architecture and curatorial practice at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe and HEAD Geneva (2010-12). In 2008, he founded the Winter School Middle East (Dubai/Kuwait).

Anton Savov

Anton Savov has been teaching at the Städelschule Architecture Class since 2008. In addition, in the past year, he has taught workshops in NRRU (Thailand), ICD (University of Stuttgart) and Akademie Schloss Solitude. He is currently completing his PhD in computational design at UACEG, Sofia. His interest lies in the impact of computer technologies and networks on the ecology and politics of space. He received his M.A.(AAD) degree from Städelschule, Frankfurt in 2008. Anton has won the Günter Bock Prize and the Architecture and Energy Sofia Award. From 2009 to 2011 Anton worked as part of the Performative Building Group at Bollinger+Grohmann Ingeniuere as an architect on the interface of architecture and computational design. His work has been published internationally.

Parnian Tabib

Parnian Tabib is the director of the Theory Programme and a research fellow at SAC. Her main responsibilities involve teaching theory and the ethics of research as well as generating research projects, on a national and a European level, for the Architecture Class. In 2008, she graduated from The Glasgow School of Art with a PhD in design. Her doctoral research investigated the connection between love and intellect, in order to see whether there is any evidence to support the hypothesis that sexual passion has the potential to influence creative development. Tabib also works freelance for Laurence King Publishers in London on a series of Interior Architecture books while having supervised a number of PhD students.

Oliver Tessmann

Oliver Tessmann is a Guest Professor at SAC heading the specialization “Architecture and Performative Design”. He currently works with the engineering office Bollinger + Grohmann in Frankfurt at the interface between architecture and engineering. After graduating in 2001 at the University in Kassel he was working with Coop Himmelb(l)au in Mexico and Vienna and Bernhard Franken in Frankfurt. In 2008 Oliver Tessmann received a doctoral degree after four years of research in the field of "Collaborative Design Procedures for Architects and Engineers" at the University of Kassel. The research sought for novel strategies to use structural analysis as a design driver in architecture by establishing digital interfaces between the disciplines. His work has been published and exhibited in Europe, Asia and the US.

Christian Veddeler

Christian Veddeler is Associate Director and Senior Architect at UNStudio in Amsterdam, currently lead architect of the Singapore University of Technology and Design project. Concurrently, he is the head of UNStudio’s Design Research Platform IOP, with a focus on emergent typologies in digital design processes. At UNStudio, Christian has collaborated on several projects, as the Galleria, Seoul, the Lelystad Theater, the Star Place in Kaohsiung and the St. Petersburg Dance Theatre. He was project architect for a series of pavilion projects, that focused on digital design and fabrication, including: The Holiday Home at UPenn's ICA, the Changing Room for the 2008 Venice Biennale, Chicago’s Burnham Pavilion, the U-turn pavilion in Sao Paulo, Motion Matters at Harvard GSD and the New Amsterdam Pavilion in New York City. Christian has taught and lectured widely, amongst other places at TU Delft, the Berlage Institute and University of Illinois in Chicago. He received the degree Master of Science in Architecture from TU Delft, with Honours.

Mark Wigley

Mark Wigley is a renowned architectural theorist. He is professor of architecture and the dean of the faculty of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York. Wigley studies architecture at the University of Auckland in New Zealand where he received his Ph.D in 1987. In 1989, he had a resident fellowship at the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism. He has won several awards, among them the Triennial Award for Architectural Criticism in 1990 and the Graham Foundation Grant in 1997. In 1988 Mark Wigley co-edited with Philip Johnson the exhibition and publication Deconstructivist Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This may be seen to be the first of his many influential, international pieces of work, to which also belongs a series of books, including Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (010 Publishers, 1998), White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (MIT Press, 1995) and Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt (MIT Press, 1993). Wigley is a frequent lecturer and guest at various events and institutions throughout the world. For a number of years, Mark Wigley has been a guest-professor in the Städelschule, teaching architectural theory.