I served primarily as the budget controller for the joint European partner institutions in this programme, the first time for me to manage this kind of complex international collaboration within an institutional context. After the education component of the programme started, I was invited to also teach in the summer workshops offered as part of the exchange.

 

The Chair for Theory of Architecture of Bauhaus-University Weimar together with its partners from TU Delft, The Netherlands, and IUAV Venice, Italy as well as the University of Pennsylvania, the IIT Chicago, and SciArc Los Angeles proposed the project ‘Global Imperatives for Architectural Education’, and were granted three years of funding to realize a dense programme of student and staff exchanges including three summer workshops and the publication of a final book.

Subsequently, from 2001 to 2003 more than 90 students of the six partner institutions had the opportunity to participate in the summer workshops in Delft (2001), Chicago (2002), and Rome (2003) and the consecutive one-term exchanges. The programme also established on-going institutional relations, exchanges, and research projects between the collaborating institutions that continue until today.

 

The project was funded through the ‘Joint Consortium for Higher Education’ programme of the European Commission and its US-counterpart, the Department of Education in Washington D.C., to support transatlantic research collaborations between Europe and North America.

 

Further reference: Ruth Baumeister, and Sang Lee (eds). The Domestic and the Foreign in Architecture. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007.