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

Any architecture worthy of its name, no matter at what time, must reflect and take a stand on the nature and meaning of these basic elements that constitute it, whether through conscious marking and overemphasizing or through deliberate negation and reinterpretation.

The lecture series takes a look at those fundamental elements of architecture in a diachronic, i.e. an epoch-spanning manner from antiquity to the information age by investigating both their archetypal function and connotation as well as their changes in meaning during the course of architectural history.