The Faculty of Architecture’s Acting Dean has ascertained that we are experiencing a ‘profound paradigm shift’. As such, we must ‘learn new approaches to teaching’, to be ‘innovative, creative, and inventive’ while relying on our ‘ingenuity to carry us through these unprecedented times’. The Berlin Babylon Studio strives to do precisely this: utilizing not only Berlin’s deep and rich architectural and urban histories, but its often dazzling cinematic histories. By unleashing the intensity and power of the cinematic experience, we will gain the necessary insights—historical and contemporary—appropriate to imagining and designing an urban intervention in the contested terrain of Berlin.  

Ralph Stern has taught Architecture and Urban Design Studios as well as History and Theory courses (including cinema) in Berlin at the Technical University Berlin and the University of the Arts, at M.I.T., Columbia University, The London School of Economics, The University of Washington as well as at the University of Manitoba. Among a wide range of venues, he has lectured on these topics at Harvard, Yale, Cambridge University, Charles University (Prague), the Central European University (Budapest) and the University of Edinburgh as well as at numerous international conferences. He has also published widely on the topics of urban representation in books and journals.