Students from the m.a.c program participated in a week-long group study visit to Germany sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The trip was designed to inaugurate a new international exchange program between the University at Buffalo’s MArch+MFA dual degree program in Media, Architecture and Computing and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar’s post-professional program in Media Architecture.

The trip was timed to coincide with Media City: Situations, Practices, Encounters, a conference organized by the Bauhaus to investigate how the social settings and spaces of the city are created, experienced and practiced through the use and presence of new media. Mark Shepard delivered a paper titled “Situating Design, Designing Situations” at the conference and organized the trip.

Jessica Thompson

To kick-off the cooperation between the programs and spark student interest in the exchange, a workshop was conducted with students from the Bauhaus. The workshop brought together students from Buffalo and Weimar to collaborate on the creation of a large-scale, interactive light installation on the façade of a building in Weimar.

Media Architecture Workshop

Nicholas Bruscia

Heamchand Subryan

Thesis students Nick Bruscia and Heamchand Subyran presented their work-in-progress at a special session of the conference, and Assistant Professor Omar Khan presented work of recent graduates from the program.

Following the conference and workshop in Weimar, the group visited the Bauhaus Foundation Dessau, home of the Bauhaus from 1925 to 1933 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They toured the original Bauhaus Building and Masters’ Houses designed by Walter Gropius, providing an important reference for the contemporary collaboration with the present-day institution.

Additionally, the group spent two days in Berlin where they visited Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenman’s recently completed Holocaust Memorial. They also visited the Berlin office of ART+COM, an interdisciplinary media-architecture practice that researches and develops interactive media projects at an architectural scale, where Art+Com founder Joachim Sauter, Professor of Art at the Universität der Künste Berlin, presented the work of the firm and that of his students.

Overall, the trip provided an important opportunity to generate interest in this new international exchange program, foster international contacts between students from Buffalo and Weimar, and strengthen the existing relationships between the two Universities.