Keynote Address by Prof. AA Dipl. (Hons) Achim Menges, Member of the Mathematical and Natural Sciences class

"Rethinking Architecture: Bio-based and Bio-inspired Construction"

Looking to nature allows us to rethink construction in architecture. Biology offers a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of principles of form, function, and process. Many of these challenge existing approaches in construction engineering in astonishing ways or even reveal entirely new possibilities.

Achim Menges, who was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award by the DFG in 2023 for his scientific work, discusses in his lecture how a bionic approach in architecture enables scientific, interdisciplinary, and lateral thinking. He also uses a few selected projects to demonstrate how this can give rise to architecture that is at once effective and exploratory, efficient and expressive.

Additional program highlights: Opening remarks by Hans J. Reiter, Ministerial Director and Head of Department at the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts; a report by the Academy President, Hans-Georg Kräusslich, on the academic year, insights into the Young Academy | HAdW from a spokesperson for the Academy’s research group, and the presentation of the endowed Awards.