In Conversation

A material rese­archer shaping the future of archi­tecture: Prof. Helga Blocksdorf

To build in a way that conserves resources and is climate-friendly in the future, a synthesis of practical experience, fundamental research and teaching is essential. The key discipline for this is structural engineering.

by Ulrich Stefan Knoll & Britta Krämer in July 2026

Nice to be able to speak with you, Pro­fessor Blocksdorf. Where are we rea­ching you today?

At the moment, I’m on my lunch break at the Tech­nical Uni­versity of Braun­schweig, where I have headed the Institute for Con­s­truction since 2021. Tog­ether with my team, I conduct research and teach there. It is both a won­derful oppor­tunity and a respon­si­bility: on the one hand, to engage with the subject through tea­ching, that is, through dis­course, and on the other, to make our own con­tri­bu­tions through research – for example on the subject of “con­s­tructive dis­o­be­dience”.

That sounds fasci­nating. “Con­s­tructive Dis­o­be­dience” is cer­tainly an intri­guing term. What exactly do you mean by it?

Today, we can no longer hand over a 1:100 drawing on a con­s­truction site and expect the brick­layer to know exactly what to do, as might have been the case in our grand­parents’ day. We are now sur­rounded by an ever-growing framework of regu­la­tions and requi­re­ments. The challenge lies in aligning these over­lapping demands while at the same time designing high-quality spaces without fun­da­men­tally com­pro­mising resource-related goals.

Our work is about bringing out Bau­kultur from the mate­rials that can be respon­sibly jus­tified. Of course, we cannot achieve this on our own. That is why it is equally important to gather and con­so­lidate expe­ri­ments from others. At the very start of my pro­fes­sorship, we the­r­efore orga­nised a major inter­na­tional con­fe­rence tog­ether with Mat­thias Bal­lestrem, who is now at the Tech­nical Uni­versity of Dortmund, and Katharina Ben­jamin from my team. The con­fe­rence explored how con­s­tructive expe­ri­ments can con­tribute to the trans­for­mation of building practice.

A publi­cation based on the con­fe­rence was sub­se­quently released. Owing to strong demand and the limited print run, however, it is now available only as an e‑book.

All of this stemmed from the com­pe­tition for the Erleb­ni­sportal in Weimar, which our practice won. The brief called for a tem­porary pavilion at a highly fre­quented tourist location that would provide infor­mation about tourist desti­na­tions across Thu­ringia. Since the com­pe­tition allowed for an expe­ri­mental building, we pro­posed birch bark as a façade material. Actually con­s­tructing it was quite a feat and only suc­ceeded because the client fully sup­ported the idea – despite all the letters of concern that landed on my desk.

That cer­tainly requires a certain degree of per­sis­tence. Alt­hough I do not mean that in a defiant sense. Rather, it is about encou­raging col­le­agues to pursue quality with deter­mi­nation while still building respon­sibly, which, of course, is always a balancing act. For that, we abso­lutely need uni­versity. On the one hand, it allows us to research more mar­ginal topics and bring a greater diversity of approaches into the con­ver­sation; on the other, it creates the dis­course in the first place.

Per­sis­tence is also needed when it comes to times­cales. I took up the pro­fes­sorship in 2021, the same year the pavilion was com­pleted. And only now, after five years of pre­pa­ratory work, have we secured funding from Zukunft Bau to inves­tigate the material’s potential for mem­brane-free green roofs.

Of course, birch bark can already be used with an easy con­science, but at present you would operate outside the estab­lished regu­latory framework. That means it is curr­ently only fea­sible in the private sector, and only with a great deal of goodwill on the part of clients. If we want to bring the material into the canon of reco­g­nised building mate­rials, we need research that estab­lishes the necessary fun­da­mentals, for example for its appli­cation in mem­brane-free green roofs.

So one challenge was con­s­tructing the tem­porary building itself; the other is now to make this material genuinely acces­sible to others.

How is the façade of the visitor pavilion per­ceived by the public, and how has the material per­formed over time?

I regu­larly receive mes­sages from col­le­agues and friends who send me pho­to­graphs from the site and share their impres­sions. Alongside their enthu­siasm, they often remark on how well the material has aged. Others say that it feels dif­ferent in reality from what they had ima­gined from the pho­to­graphs – rougher.

Locally, the project con­tinues to divide opinion. Some resi­dents are very fond of it, while others find it rather annoying. The way the pavilion relates to the listed context within the buffer zone of the UNESCO World Heritage Site is still viewed cri­ti­cally by some.

Everyone in our office remains very fond of the project, and the birch bark has per­formed without pro­blems. There is only one section that now needs replacing. Birch bark – or, more pre­cisely, birch cork – is under tension while attached to the tree and natu­rally curls when removed. In one area this led to a tear. Apart from that, there have been no dif­fi­culties whatsoever, not even on the side facing the city, where the bark was installed to a height of five to six metres.

In a large city one might expect van­dalism or graffiti, but nothing of that kind has occurred here so far.

As the client is also very pleased with the project, I have been asked to extend its tem­porary lifespan beyond the ori­ginal five years, which expire this year. However, that will once again require the full support of the Thu­ringian state aut­ho­rities, so I cannot yet say whether it will happen. We very much hope it does, not least because EU funding was invested in the project. Having to dis­mantle it after only five years would seem ques­tionable to me in terms of the energy that has already gone into it. Struc­tu­rally speaking, I believe it could easily last another sixty years.

So will bitu­minous mem­branes and other con­ven­tional mate­rials become a thing of the past in the medium term?

I do not think the goal is to replace bitu­minous mem­branes. Rather, it is to expand the range of available con­s­tructive pos­si­bi­lities. If I build a shed solely for storing chopped firewood, for example, I do not need a fibre-cement sheet roof. Instead, I can use a turf roof with several layers of birch bark beneath it, without having to worry about vapour dif­fusion beha­viour. We know from his­to­rical pre­cedent that this works. However, if we want such appli­ca­tions to gain official reco­gnition, we need to establish whether birch bark is vapour-per­meable or vapour-resistant and determine its Sd value. At present, this know­ledge does not exist in a struc­tured form.

And when such research is led by archi­tects, it must also engage with aes­thetic ques­tions. In my view, aes­thetic expe­ri­men­tation and con­s­tructive know­ledge belong tog­ether when it comes to shaping our Bau­kultur.

Do clients today still under­stand the com­plexity of a design, which arises from the multitude of stan­dards and regu­la­tions?

You do not need a uni­versity degree to con­tribute to the dis­cussion as a client. Intuition is per­fectly welcome because everyone has expe­rience of living some­where – or of sleeping badly behind a com­pletely sealed façade with plastic windows. These are all lived expe­ri­ences that have their place in the dis­cussion and can help us find better solu­tions.

What fasci­nates us about your work is the strong pre­sence of mate­riality and the quality of the staging within spaces that are simul­ta­neously reduced to the essen­tials, as can also be seen in Studio Uckermark. Where does this come from?

At our practice, we are inte­rested in the rela­ti­onship between struc­tural com­po­sition and expression. In other words, the primary structure may well remain per­cep­tible. We the­r­efore begin with the sub­s­tance of a building rather than from an interior design per­spective. Perhaps that is partly because I have never quite managed to grasp interior design as a subject in its own right. For me, the result has to be like a sym­phony con­taining not a single note too many.

Another important factor is the tra­jectory of the practice itself: over the past twelve years, we have deve­loped only very gra­dually from small pro­jects to medium-sized com­mis­sions. This means that, for most of that time, budgets were so limited that we simply could not afford to think in terms of mul­tiple layers. On top of that, I per­so­nally find it more com­for­table to sur­round myself only with the things that are necessary and to leave ever­y­thing else aside.

You do that very well, we think. Many of your pro­jects have an almost Zen-like atmo­sphere – clear and pared back, but never cold.

It is inte­resting that you mention Zen. In fact, that was the central theme of my doc­toral thesis. The question was: how do I actually do it? What is my per­sonal design method? Often it begins with a very simple idea, such as the window in Studio Uckermark and the way it stages the view.

Of course, there is also a reversal of time. In the past, people used to shield them­selves from the land­scape and the weather inside a four-sided farm­stead like this. Today, we have the means to reverse that rela­ti­onship, even without a large budget. What inte­rests me is under­standing exactly where such an opening needs to be in order to achieve a sceno­graphic quality. In this case, it was placed directly opposite the large barn door and in pre­cisely the same dimen­sions. It is not about creating the largest pos­sible struc­tural inter­vention, but about achieving the right pro­portion within a par­ti­cular site.

The opening then hap­pened to be pre­cisely where a ring beam and a sup­porting beam already existed, having been added during roof repairs in 2010-11. We then designed the staircase to be situated at this point, allowing us to stage the act of moving up and down at the most important point in the building. From a con­s­truction per­spective, this is initially a highly mys­te­rious junction because at the beginning of the project nobody knows whether the geo­metry will actually work.

At that point, the simple idea becomes complex. Yet if that com­plexity can be resolved through drawing or model-making, the entire project falls into place and arrives at what I would call the Zen moment.

The tran­sition from window to staircase in Studio Uckermark is indeed very beau­tiful. Was it an expensive solution?

Not at all. The important thing was that we brought the model to the con­s­truction site and showed it to the craft­speople. They looked at it, imme­diately understood it and simply built it – for exactly the same price as any other timber staircase of com­pa­rable design quality.

The building was ori­gi­nally con­ceived as a pho­to­graphy studio. So its current use as holiday accom­mo­dation was not part of the ori­ginal brief?

Correct. The owner is a pho­to­grapher himself. The idea of creating a tem­porary retreat only emerged later during the pan­demic.

Have you used the house yourself?

I have actually stayed there twice. Once pri­vately with my family and once tog­ether with Katharina Ben­jamin and Mat­thias Bal­lestrem for a working retreat. Both occa­sions were very special.

This is also some­thing I always discuss with clients beforehand: how won­derful it can be, when changing one’s sur­roun­dings, to encounter unusual spatial situa­tions and to realise that life can be lived dif­fer­ently, that comfort can take other forms. For example, that you might walk into a wardrobe to take a shower.

And that, tem­po­r­arily, there may be only four cen­ti­metres of wall unit between you and the rest of the world. In my view, engaging with these comfort zones and allowing oneself to expe­rience them can become a moment of rela­xation.

Have you designed other holiday retreats? 


As a matter of fact, the publi­cation of the project on your platform reached an incre­dible number of people and gene­rated several enquiries for the con­version of existing buil­dings into holiday homes. One project in Arnims­walde is curr­ently nearing com­pletion, and there are another two or three pro­jects in deve­lo­pment.

Let’s briefly return to the question of staging: you were once part of the artists’ coll­ective après-nous. Are there par­allels between the artistic work you pro­duced then and your archi­tec­tural approach today? Or perhaps even further deve­lo­p­ments?

Catharina Förster, Flo­rence Girod and I got to know each other at Berlin Uni­versity of the Arts. Like many of our fellow stu­dents at the time, we were deeply inte­rested in what was hap­pening in other depart­ments, espe­cially among painters and sculptors. Being part of that Berlin scene and par­ti­ci­pating in the dis­cus­sions it gene­rated ulti­m­ately led to the for­mation of the artists’ coll­ective – or archi­tec­tural band, as we called it – towards the end of our studies. At first, this was not a par­ti­cu­larly reflective process. More than any­thing, there was a desire for expression, for moving beyond the A3 sheet of paper that repre­sented the largest prin­table format available to us as stu­dents.

For me, the great con­ti­nuity lies in pre­cision. That has remained with me to this day and was already present during my time at Staab Archi­tekten, where I worked among other things in site management. Seeing these aes­thetic, artistic expe­ri­ments through to the end – that is, thinking them through right down to the last mil­li­metre – was cer­tainly an important foun­dation.

At the time, we also spent a great deal of time dis­cussing the artistic subtext that archi­tec­tural work can convey.

That has always inte­rested me, given the fact that archi­tecture does have a strong craft-based dimension. That said, I do not wish to invoke the myth of the architect as artist. Rather, it is about a con­ceptual and abs­tract way of thinking. What spatial effects do par­ti­cular inter­ven­tions create? How can such ideas actually be rea­lised?

For all three of us, that way of thinking remains a driving force in everyday practice. We are still close friends and, offi­cially speaking, we never actually ended our col­la­bo­ration – we’ve just taken a tem­porary break. (smiles)

Our impression of the art pro­jects was that they, too, created spaces with a distinctive atmo­sphere – spaces that deli­berately inter­rupted the flow of everyday per­ception and thereby encou­raged reflection. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes. What we staged as après-nous – or perhaps more accu­rately, pre­sented in the city as a stage – was always about the question: who does this city belong to? It is a question that con­tinues to concern younger gene­ra­tions deeply: who actually owns public space? For us, it was always important that these informal dis­cus­sions should be enjoyable. The inter­ruption of everyday rou­tines should feel cele­bratory, almost like a party.

Are there par­allels with your built archi­tecture – special spaces that tem­po­r­arily alter per­ception?

Yes, there is often an overlap between the artis­ti­cally moti­vated pro­jects and certain archi­tec­tural pro­jects, par­ti­cu­larly when the latter are also designed as a tem­porary expe­rience for the visitor or user, as in Weimar or Studio Uckermark.

People who hap­pened to drive past the junction of Stre­litzer Strasse and Anklamer Strasse in Berlin, for example, will remember that encounter for years to come: sou­venirs.

I think that, as desi­gners, we all carry within us the ability to reveal the par­ti­cular qua­lities of places, each in their own way.

What does a project or place – whether public or private – need to have in order to spark your interest and make you want to take on the com­mission?

I would say that, in the broadest sense, it needs some form of cha­racter. That cha­racter may even be generic.

With Karel and Jana from Studio Uckermark, the appeal was imme­diately obvious when we first arrived. We already knew how limited the budget would be and that we would only take on the project because we found the place itself so beau­tiful.

Of course, there is also a pro­gression over the course of an architect’s life. Today, I would like to work on more pro­jects in the public realm again, alt­hough I often find myself blocked by the com­pe­tition system and public pro­cu­rement in Berlin fre­quently appears rather opaque to me.

I’d abso­lutely love to design a school or a nursery one day, not least so that I could con­s­truct a two-storey building using mixed earth-and-brick masonry, the type we are curr­ently rese­ar­ching at TU Braun­schweig tog­ether with Moritz Scheible, Linda Gehrke, Eli­sabeth Endres, Evelien Dor­res­teijn and Thorsten Leussmann.

Beyond pure archi­tecture itself, I am also be inte­rested in such pro­jects so that I can better address the asso­ciated social issues. And I would very much like to dis­cover whether seismic points can also be rea­lised at scales beyond those I have worked with so far. It may sound trivial, but I suspect it is not.

How do you manage to balance tea­ching, research and practice?

Of course, it can some­times feel like a balancing act. But as Baharak Taj­bakhsh from Birk­häuser Verlag once put it so well: if, as an architect, you are working on the major factors influencing climate and resource issues, striking a balance between practice, tea­ching and research is a pre­re­quisite for deve­loping a deeper under­standing of these issues.

You have to bear the chal­lenges con­stantly in mind if you want to bring about change. In that respect, prac­tical work at the limits of what can be built is a great advantage. Basi­cally, it gene­rates five ideas every day as to what research needs to be carried out.

Thank you very much for this won­derful and insightful con­ver­sation, Pro­fessor Blocksdorf.

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Prof. Helga Blocksdorf studied archi­tecture at the Bauhaus Uni­versity and the Berlin Uni­versity of the Arts (UdK). In 2013, she founded her practice, HB/A. She has been Pro­fessor of Struc­tural Engi­neering at the Tech­nical Uni­versity of Braun­schweig since 2021; prior to that, she was a visiting pro­fessor at the Bauhaus Uni­versity in Weimar. In 2025, she was awarded her PhD at the Tech­nical Uni­versity of Berlin as part of the Design-Based PhD pro­gramme.

Interview: The interview was con­ducted by Britta Krämer and Ulrich Stefan Knoll.

Photos: Prof. Helga Blocksdorf © Helga Blocksdorf / Archi­tektur (Cover photo), Con­s­tructive Dis­o­be­dience © Birk­häuser Verlag (1/2), Kul­tur­portal Weimar © Simon Menges (3–8-) © Ruben Beilby (9–11), Studio Uckermark © Karel Kuehne (12–16, 19–21), Seis­mische Stellen © Edition Detail, DETAIL Archi­tecture GmbH © Katerina Tra­kakis, Any Studio (18), Arnims­walde – Plans/Visualisations © Helga Blocksdorf Archi­tektur (22–24) Photo © Lukas Beer (25), après-nous © après-nous (26), Jam Session © Maria del Pilar Garcia Ayensa (27–30), Gut Fal­kenhain © Matthis Pabst (31/32), Grünes Dach © Marcus Ebener (33/34), Blaues Dach © Marcus Ebener (35/36)