New to the department: Prof. i.V. Ir. Bart Lootsma

Bart Lootsma is a historian, theorist, critic and curator in the fields of architecture, design and visual arts. He was professor of architectural theory at the University of Innsbruck and visiting professor at several other universities. Bart Lootsma published numerous articles and was editor of several international journals. His books include "Media and Architecture" (1997), "SuperDutch" (2000), "Reality Bytes, Selected Essays 1995-2015" (2015), Italian Collage (2020). Bart Lootsma lectures all over the world. He curated, among others, ArchiLab 2004 in Orléans, the Montenegrin pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2016 and Radical Austria, Everything is Architecture, for the Design Museum Den Bosch in 2021. He is a member of the advisory board of the IBA 2022 New Social Housing in Vienna and a board member of Europan Austria.

Bart Lootsma founded architecturaltheory.eu, the department of architectural theory at the University of Innsbruck, which he directed from 2006 to 2022. Initially, architecturaltheory.eu focused on contemporary architectural theory and criticism and actively participated in the international debate with articles, lectures, books, exhibitions, and an internet presence with three different websites: architecturaltheory.eu, architecturaltheory.txt, and architecturaltheory.tv. They include works by Lootsma and his collaborators, student work from the studios, theses, dissertations, and podcasts from lecture series, symposia, and the like.

architecturaltheory.eu does not consider architecture as an autonomous discipline. It is interested not only in design processes and their outcomes, but also in the research that architects and urban planners do to embed their work in society and base their design strategies on it.

The city, landscape, and society are important as traditional contexts that give architecture a place, but also as fields for possible intervention. In his attempts to continually rewrite the history of architectural theory, Bart Lootsma emphasizes how architectural theories implicitly or explicitly relate to these larger contexts. The reciprocal relationships between architecture, media, and the (urban) landscape are therefore themes that architecturaltheory.eu constantly considers.