Rolf Gerstlauer is full time professor at the institute of architecture. He received tenure in 2006, conducts experimental teaching for master levels and produces a body of personal and free artistic research in the fields of architecture, photography/filmmaking, multimedia installations and performing arts.
Born and educated in Switzerland, he worked in the early nineties with Peter Zumthor before establishing Studio Gerstlauer Molne with ateliers in Chur and Oslo. Studio Gerstlauer Molne gained early international recognition and was widespread published before it withdrew from architectural production and concentrated on the studies of Body and Space Morphologies: playful artistic research on the inconspicuous in urban living gazed through photographic and filmic investigations. Outed online through various web2.0 avatars, the films were streamed in combination with contemporary dance, depictions of nudity, improvisational music and life installations on various international venues and led in 2004 to the creation of the Body and Space Morphology teaching and research program with the elective course series on Architecture & Film.
Gerstlauer entered AHO in 1995 and works since 2002 at the research by teaching program unit Studio B3. Maintaining the Body and Space Morphology elective course on Architecture & Film parallel to the teachings in Studio B3, his approach to research by teaching is experimental, focusing on the further reading and adaption of and to architectural space, the mingling and mangling of the collective as well as on the individual students creative process and capacity. He keeps workshops, is visiting professor in various institutions abroad and talks on Perturbative Spaces & Moving Mass, Sticks & Wells and the constant need for attempts to Explode/Implode the White Cube and while searching for the New Collective, Creative Commons, Sound Motilities, Subsistence, Synchronicity, Creativity, Intuition, a Phenomenology of before Perception as well as ponderings on the Hard Problem of Consciousness. He sculpts and carves messy, has talking hands, writes on and for tiny animals, likes Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, makes sappy music and is usually happy to work day in and day out.
Teaching at AHO
Studio B3 – research by teaching program 2005 – 2016
Body and Space Morphology – research by teaching program 2004 - ongoing
Units/fields
- Architecture & Culture