NEWS

SOLAR SPECULATIONS - FINAL REVIEWS MASTER STUDIO 22.07.2026

Solar Speculations is a master’s design research studio that engages with the sun not as a neutral source of energy, but as a material, atmospheric, cultural, architectural, and speculative force. Rather than assuming a single desirable future, the studio explores how different relationships with the sun might give rise to plural futures: collective or unequal, restorative or extractive, hopeful, unstable, or dystopian.

Throughout the semester, participants worked across anthropology, art, architecture, and critical design to imagine and develop situated future scenarios in which the sun plays a decisive role in reorganizing social, material, and energetic relations.

Within these speculative cosmologies, each participant developed a Solar Instrument: a device that mediates the relationship between bodies and sunlight, alongside a corresponding Solar Space that functions as a collective infrastructure, ritual site, or spatial typology shaped by the political, ecological, and cultural implications of their scenario. 

SOLARIS ACTIVATION WEEK 21.07. - 27.07.2026

From 24. - 27.7, fragments of the pavilion and images of the process will be exhibited as part of the SORTIMENT Exhibition organised at HCU Hamburg. 

SOLARIS - FINAL REVIEWS BACHELOR STUDIO 21.07.2026

Our Bachelor students presented SOLARIS, two experimental pavilions in Hamburg’s Oberhafen that explore the Sun as an architectural force.
Designed and built over the course of the semester by first year architecture students at HCU Hamburg, the pavilions are the material outcome of an extended process of reflection, design, and material experimentation around the Sun as a source of energy, a marker of the passing of time, and a cosmological force.

Guest reviewers: Elisa Balmaceda, Arne Lösekann, Nicolas Rolle & Hannes Stiefel. 

ACT V 
ASSEMBLY & WORKSHOP16.-17.06.2026In ACT V, we welcome Organizmo (Ana Gutiérrez & Natalia Guarnizo) from Colombia and Sename Koffi Agbodjinou from Togo, whose work unfolds at the crossroads of neo-vernacular architecture, ancestral craft traditions, and cosmological ways of understanding and shaping space.

JOIN OUR TEAM
Apply until 19.02.2026


We are looking for two new collaborators to join our team at HafenCity University Hamburg, working at the intersection of architecture, art and anthropology through experimental teaching and research.

(1) Teaching and research associate with a focus on 1:1 design-build processes, material experimentation and the coordination of summer schools (50% working time, TV-L E13).

(2) Teaching and research associate with a focus on transdisciplinary teaching, publication work and curatorial formats (50% working time, TV-L E13).

Both positions start on 1 April 2026 and are limited to a maximum duration of two years.
Application until 12.02.2026.
The application deadline was extended until 19.01.2026.

more information: 

Job description (1)
Job description (2) 

LAUNCH OF THE CENTER FOR SPATIAL COSMOLOGY
03.12.2025 - 22.01.2026


We’re thrilled to launch the Center for Spatial Cosmology (CSC) with a four-part Spatial Cosmology Assembly together with friends and collegues hosted by Kunstverein in Hamburg, Kunsthaus Hamburg, HafenCity University Hamburg, and Hamburger Kunsthalle.

From December 2025 to January 2026, four assemblies bring together artists, architects, anthropologists, and thinkers to ask how cosmologies and spaces shape each other in times of ecological crisis, technological transformation, and social fragmentation. Join us as we test what spatial cosmology can be—through conversations, screenings, lectures, and situated constellations of practice and thought.

ACT IV
CENTER FOR SPATIAL COSMOLOGY ASSEMBLY
22.01.2025 
18:30
Hamburger Kunsthalle 


In the fourth act together with Monica Narula/Raqs Media Collective, Anna-Sophie Springer, and Michael Taussig we weave these threads together, focusing on the entanglement of cosmic imaginaries and terrestrial struggles. It proposes space as a dynamic network of material as well as immaterial relations and asks how spatial cosmologies might be reconfigured—and re-practiced—amid planetary transformations.

ACT III
CENTER FOR SPATIAL COSMOLOGY ASSEMBLY
18.12.2025 
18:30
HCU Hamburg



The third act presents the film Cosmographies directed by Juan Francisco Salazar, followed by a conversation with the director. “Cosmographies” refers to the writing and storytelling of the cosmos. Filmed in collaboration with communities in the Lickanantay Territory in the Salar de Atacama, on unceded lands in Australia, and in Aotearoa New Zealand, the work offers a careful, situated approach to living cosmographic relations.

ACT II
CENTER FOR SPATIAL COSMOLOGY ASSEMBLY
11.12.2025 
18:30
Kunsthaus Hamburg


In act II together with Silvia Franceschini, Morad Montazami, and Joana Warsza we turn to terrestrial spaces as ecological, social, and political terrains, foregrounding extractive frontiers, contested territories, and curatorial and artistic practices that negotiate resources, belonging, and possible futures.