Jan Silberberger

Position

• PhD Student

Office: 327.1

Phone: +41 26 300 xx xx / Fax: +41 26 300 97 46

Email: jan DOT silberberger AT unifr DOT ch

Personal Homepage : http://www.unifr.ch/geosciences/geographie/silberberger

Please contact me via email or phone to fix an appointment

Jan Silberberger is conducting an ethnographic study on the work of the jury boards in four recent urban design competitions in Switzerland. His studies revolve around three major research topics / questions:

a) Jury deliberations as fields of knowledge creation – judging as designing. Sound, clearly defined evaluation and assessment criteria do not exist in advance, they emerge within. Briefs of design competitions just feature highly generalised criteria (such as “architectural quality� or “quality with regard to urban planning�). Only by the jury’s examination of the submitted projects these criteria can be sharpened or defined respectively.

b) Design competitions and openness towards unforeseen, high-quality solutions. Design Competitions provide juries with the ability to tolerate or even embrace certain violations against programme givens or specifications, that is, to keep projects that promise to be high-quality solutions although they - according to brief - had to be excluded from the competition.

c) How do juries in design competitions make their decisions? How do they produce a stable, robust jury report? How do they transform internal debates into coherent, consistent final reports?

d) What happens before a design competition is officially announced? How is the client’s wish (and the so-called “preparatory study�) translated into a competition programme that generates some scope for the competitors but at the same time communicates the obligatory requirements (some of the client’s ideas, the budget, the building law, and urban regulations)? How is a design competition’s space of possibilities is determined?

• Silberberger, J.M. (2012), Jury sessions as non-trivial machines: a procedural analysis, Journal of Design Research (in press).

• Silberberger, J.M. (2011), Organizing the space of possibilities of an architectural competition, Geographica Helvetica, Vol. 66 No. 1, pp. 5-12.

• Van Wezemael, J.E., Silberberger, J.M. and Paisiou, S. (2011), Assessing 'Quality': The Unfolding of the 'Good', Scandinavian Journal of Management, Vol. 27 No. 1, pp. 167-172.

• Van Wezemael, J.E., Silberberger, J.M., Paisiou, S. and Frey, P. (2011), 'Mattering' the Res Publica – Swiss architectural competitions as a Foucauldian dispositif, disP 184, pp. 52-59.

• Paisiou, S., Van Wezemael, J.E. & Silberberger, J. (2011), Le jury et la 'connaissance dans l’action', ARQ / Architecture Québec 154.

• Silberberger, J., Van Wezemael, J.E. & Paisiou, S. (2011), Der Architekturwettbewerb unter Aspekten von Wissensmanagement, Modulor 05|2011, pp. 50-54.

• Silberberger, J.M., Van Wezemael, J.E., Paisiou, S. and Strebel, I. (2010), Spaces of knowledge creation. Tracing 'knowing-in-action' in jury-based decision-making processes in Switzerland, International Journal of Knowledge-Based Development, Vol. 1 No. 4, pp. 287-302.

• Van Wezemael, J.E., Silberberger, J.M., Paisiou, S. and Liang, Z. (2010), A 'Qualculative' Inquiry into Urban Design Competitions, in Rönn, M., Kazemian, R. and Anderson, J.E. (Eds), The Architectural Competition, Axl Books, Stockholm, pp. 549-560.

• Silberberger, J.M., Van Wezemael, J.E., Paisiou, S. (2010), Hinter den Kulissen, werk, bauen + wohnen 04|2010, pp. 20-25.

• The Honourable Mention

International Competitions and Architectural Quality in the Planetary Age, 16-17 March 2012, Montreal

• Self-organisation within jury boards of architectural competitions

AESOP Thematic Group on Complexity and Planning, 29-30 April 2011, Istanbul

• In or Out? Following a controversial architectural project through three days of jury sessions

Constructions Matter, 5-7 May 2010, Copenhagen

• Architectural Competitions and Openness towards unforeseen Solutions

AAG annual meeting, 14-18 April 2010, Washington DC

• An Introduction to Complexity Thinking

Group Lecture „New Approaches“, March 2010, University of Fribourg

• Design Competitions – a procedural analysis on two spatio-temporal scales

Geocolloquium, March 2010, University of Friborug (together with Sofia Paisiou)

• How does an architectural competition actually produce its outcome?

AESOP annual congress, 15-18 July 2009, Liverpool

• An architectural competition as a series of sorting processes

Group lecture, April 2009, EPFL

• Urban design competitions – an exploration into messy construction sites

AESOP’s Thematic Group on Complexity and Planning, 16-18 October 2008, Thessaloniki