KNOWSPACE was founded in New York by Erhard An-He Kinzelbach and has since functioned as a studio for practice and research on architecture and cities.
KNOWSPACE matured in Vienna and to Hangzhou and is currently operating from Berlin.
KNOWSPACE is concerned with spatial and programmatic organisations that combine local differentiation with overall coherence. Its objective is to identify synergies between practice, design research and teaching and to proliferate them as sources of knowledge, The organization of this knowledge serves as the foundation for the conceptual engagement with spatial and programmatic
complexity, and the making of space, material and form – both at the scale of
the building as well as the city.
Many of the studio’s projects view façades not as mere interfaces between inside and
outside, between building and city, but use the spatial depth of façades as a key means to organise and zone space, define programmes and orchestrate atmosphere and affect. Operative and performative façades play a key role in dealing with the dichotomies between tabula rasa and contextual integration, between global and local, monolithic and differentiated, singular and multiple.
KNOWSPACE understands its role as that of a moderator and organizer of the complex
interactions between cultural, political, economic and material forces and the
multiple agents that determine a project. In this sense, we act rather as competent trans-disciplinary mediators than as narrowly specialized experts. Many of the studio’s projects have been realized in project-based collaborations, most notably was the collaboration with Christian Kronaus since 2005, that resulted in two of the studio’s most important realizations to date, the Hainburg nursing home and the Sankt Poelten courthouse extension.