Despite changing styles and fashions, certain basic elements in architecture have always survived: the façade is the face of a building to the public space, entrance and windows form interfaces and thresholds between inside and outside, walls divide and divide the space, the stairs mediate between above and below, the pedestal forms the lower, the roof the upper end, at the corner different construction directions and views of the building collide.

Any sophisticated architecture, no matter at what time, must reflect on and take a stand on the nature and meaning of these basic elements that constitute it, in parts through conscious marking and overstaging, in other parts through deliberate negation and reinterpretation.

The lecture series deals with the most important elements of architecture in a diachronic, i.e. epoch-spanning manner from antiquity to the information age by investigating both their archetypal function and connotation as well as their changes of meaning in the course of architectural history.