Bavaria, Germany

In the winter semester of 2025/26, Water Ever Bavaria will open a new chapter in the studio's ongoing chronicle of designing with water. Each semester has traced water’s shifting roles across continents. This time, the focus shifts to Bavaria, a region where rivers, lakes and springs are cultural as well as physical entities. 

This Semester will discuss water as more than just the substance of life. Water in Bavaria is embedded in culture, a line that shapes settlements, a setting for festivals and a silent record of rituals. Yet beneath this layered presence lie urgent contradictions. Drought and deluge alternate. Tamed rivers strain against regulation. Alpine torrents are harnessed for energy production. The fragile economies of tourism encroach upon the lakeshore. Scarcity and excess, reverence and exploitation coexist, like a paradoxical fable. 

This semester, students at Bachelor's and Master's level are invited to consider how architecture can be inscribed into these dualities. How can it give form to cultural memory while responding to ecological necessity? Projects may take the form of precise interventions along rivers and lakes or find other ways to connect to water and thereby explore various scales from large systems to smallest details. They will address hydro-social landscapes, adaptive flood infrastructures and civic architectures that reconnect with water. Water Ever Bavaria also firmly places itself within the discourse of the Anthropocene. In this era, where human action is inseparable from planetary processes, water embodies both crisis and continuity. Each project becomes part of an ongoing narrative in which water is the author, subject and medium, and architecture is tasked with imagining new forms of coexistence.