Whose Building Science? Last Lecture with Claiming*Spaces Collective

Last session of the lecture series "Gender Aspects of Building Sciences and Environment"

The CLAIMING*SPACES Collective is a bottom-up group of students, graduates, teachers and
researchers at TU Wien which seeks to foster intersectional feminist perspectives in architecture and
spatial planning. It was founded in 2019 to curate and organise the first CLAIMING*SPACES
Conference in November 2019.

We, the collective of CLAIMING*SPACES, invite students, teachers, architects/urban planners and
researchers to participate in the discourse and to design intersectional feminist positions and tools
together, to create different forms of doing architectural and spatial planning with regard to the
following questions:
→ How can mechanisms of exclusion be uncovered and deconstructed?
→ How can feminist architecture/ planning/ research be brought into the main discourse as a
productive implicitness?
→ How can discriminating forms of knowledge production and historiography be questioned, newly
phrased and done differently?
→ How can feminist vocational practices induce much needed changes in planning and building?
www.claimingspaces.org

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Anne Altmeyer is an urban and architectural designer and theorist. She studied architecture and
studies spatial planning at the University of Technology in Vienna. Her thesis ‘From A as in
Appropriation to Z as in Zeichensäle’ set its focus on the social production of space and knowlegde in
architectural education. She has worked in several architecture offices in the area of exhibition
design. Working at the intersection beetween art, technology and architecture, she likes to explore
transdisciplinary approaches. Interested in urbanism, architecture, arts and media history in the
aspects of technological, political and social transformation, in her current research Anne also looks
into counter-cultural strategies as artistic and spatial practices, i.a. situated in (cyber)feminism,
commoning, hacking and open source culture. 

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System Exploit
Cybernetics, the self-proclaimed theory of communication, aims to understand anything as systems,
including spaces, cities and society. Systems, which are represented by models of networks of 
information processing. As the underlying idea of automation and surveillance technology as well as
artificial intelligence, it was first established in military technologies and brought to use in capital
markets. With its ongoing abstraction processes it not only misses diverse perspectives, but also
(re)produces normative structures within its paternal conceptions of systems. This lecture explains the
concept of cybernetics as well as its spatial and social implications. It then looks into cyberfeminsm as
an emancipative counter-strategy.
https://www.ramasuri.xyz/

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Viola Wagner is an architecture student at TU Vienna and a member of the intersectional feminist
collective Claiming*Spaces. As transactivist Vio:la is involved in Vienna based organizations such as
trans femme fatale and Venib, a group for non-binary individuals. Their work focuses on increasing
visibility for non-binary and trans realities, creating trans spaces and community work. Notable efforts
include founding trans and non-binary youth Vienna and organizing regular meetups for trans people
in Vienna. Ex research is focused on transing architecture theory.
Transfeminist Studies

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Julia Nuler is an architect and senior lecturer in the Research Department for Spatial Design at TU
Wien. As a member of the queer-feminist collective Claiming*Spaces, she co-organized the
international conference Whose History?“ (AzW, 2022). She is currently engaged in a collaborative
project that bridges the research fields of art history, heritage and conservation, and spatial design,
titled Unvoiced Heritage - Queer-Feminist Care for Tabooed Spaces within the Existing Urban Fabric.
Her dissertation examines the work of women architects in socialist Poland (1945-1989), with a
particular focus on Halina Skibniewska, and links it to contemporary discourse on feminist spatial
practice.

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Sophie Stackmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Heritage Conservation and Building
in Existing Fabric at TU Wien. Prior to this, she was affiliated with the Centre for Heritage
Conservation Studies and Technologies (KDWT) at the University of Bamberg. From 2019 to 2021,
she contributed to the research project Architecture and Planning Collectives in East Germany:
Institutional Structures and Creative Processes in the Socialist Production of Architecture, funded by
the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her doctoral dissertation explored the concept of integrity
and its significance in heritage discourses. Supported by a PhD scholarship from the Johannes Rau
Gesellschaft, it was published in 2023.

Unvoiced Heritage – Queer Feminist Care for Tabooed Spaces in the Existing Urban Fabric
https://raumgestaltung.tuwien.ac.at/lehre/stummes-erbe/