Shaping Change

The principles of modern architecture and urban planning have become so widely accepted since World War II that they have destabilized the Earth’s ecosystem and climate system. Today, they are facing a profound transformation: the architectural transition. Marking the 50th anniversary of Lucius Burckhardt’s tenure as the first chairman of the Deutscher Werkbund, the exhibition “Shaping Change” looks in two directions: back at the tradition of ecological building since the 1970s and forward to the present era of digital transformation.

The exhibition is curated by Felix Dölker and Alexander Stumm and was developed in collaboration with students from Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and Lübeck University of Applied Sciences.

The first part of the exhibition is dedicated to the Werkbund’s diverse exhibition, event, and publication projects from 1976 to 1983. During this period, the Werkbund championed a fundamental critique of the conventional construction industry and the top-down, car-centric city—and it advocated for new participatory structures and ecological concepts. Lucius Burckhardt, a sociologist, was, however, merely the leading figure in a much larger network of actors, which also included Michael Andritzky, Ot Hoffmann, Rudolf Doernach, Gernot Minke, Walter Segal, and Eilfried Huth. Her radical openness to a different kind of architecture can serve as a model for a new direction in architecture. “Shaping Change” aims to bring to light a largely unexplored chapter in the history of the Werkbund.

In the second part, the exhibition turns its attention to the present and asks how the Werkbund’s critical themes and Lucius Burckhardt’s own planning approaches—particularly promenadology—can be applied to the challenges of the digital age. In doing so, it focuses on the invisible architectures of digitalization, spanning the spectrum from algorithmically controlled platforms and AI-supported planning tools to the climate impacts and social problems of digital infrastructures. Just as Burckhardt, with keen insight, once dismantled the fossil-fuel-driven logic of the car-centric city, the task today is to decipher the power dynamics, environmental impacts, and design logics of digital spaces—and to seek participatory alternatives.

The exhibition is accompanied by books featuring Lucius Burckhardt’s texts on promenadology, which were developed in a typography seminar under the guidance of Su Korbjuhn, Vincent Brod, and Rade Matic.

Opening: September 24, 2026, 6:30 p.m.