4th Lucius Burckhardt Convention
Minimal Intervention and Strollology
On the occasion of his 100th birthday
Kunsthochschule Kassel
Menzelstraße 13-15, D-34121 Kassel
27-29 June 2025
The Swiss sociologist Lucius Burckhardt would have been one hundred years old on 12 March 2025. We are celebrating his birthday at the Kunsthochschule in Kassel on the last weekend in June. Lucius Burckhardt (1925–2003) and Annemarie Burckhardt (1930–2012) have shaped the perception and shaping of our world since the 1950s with their critical eye and great foresight. They opened up new perspectives for many students in Europe – not only in the design professions. Both were active in the Department of Architecture, Urban Planning and Landscape Planning at the University of Kassel from 1973 to 1997.
"Who plans the planning?", "Why is landscape beautiful?", "Design is invisible“, "Destroyed by maintenance" or "Minimal Intervention": these Burckhardtian questions and formulas are still relevant today. As a student, Lucius Burckhardt fought against the destruction of Basel's Gothic old town, which was to make way for car-friendly redevelopment. In the 1980s, the Burckhardts spoke of the science of walking, promenadology or strollology.
Intervento Minimo and Strollology are the focus of the contributions on Saturday, 28 June 2025 from 9:30 a.m. in the lecture hall of the Kunsthochschule Kassel. It begins with the idea for a new city with the architect and writer Max Frisch and Lucius Burckhardt through to applied walking science: agglowandering and changing the administration en passant. The day ends with pasta, salad and wine. Admission is free!
The convention and birthday party will be organised by Prof. Martin Schmitz and students from the Product Design department. During the entire convention:
Georg-Christof Bertsch
The smallest possible conversation
The smallest possible conversation comprises a good two dozen interviews with a single, short question and a single answer - which may be very detailed. The project follows on from Lucius Burkhardt's text "Der kleinstmögliche Eingriff: Oder die Rückführung der Planung auf das Planbare" (1979–1980). It is about the perception of the effect of a question on the interviews and an answer on the interviewer. Finally, the edited recording is offered to listeners. In Buckhardt's context, the play with the semantic interpretation of the term inter-view (in-between view, in-between view, connecting views, structured asymmetrical two-way conversation ...) is appealing.
Friday, 27 June 2025, at 6 pm
Welcome of the birthday guests by the Rector Prof. Martin Schmidl, filmexcerpt "31 Spaziergänge", work in progress by Marie-Catherine Theiler and Jan Peters, Apéro & Börek in front of/in the foyer of the Kunsthochschule
Saturday, 28 June 2025
9:30 Martin Schmitz
Minimal intervention and Strollology
10:00 Petra Hagen Hodgson
Looking closely: Positionings, influences, reorientations in the work of Max Frisch.
From his father, the talented architect Franz Bruno Frisch, Max Frisch inherited the joy of looking closely. It was the construction of the Letzigraben swimming pool in Zurich, now a listed building, that prompted him to make increasingly socio-critical and political observations. This lecture will focus on key elements of Frisch's reflections and decisive external influences that led him on his path
to a socio-politically motivated commitment to urban planning issues and to his acquaintance with Markus Kutter and Lucius Burckhardt. For "Wir selber bauen unsre Stadt" (1953), Frisch wrote the foreword, and subsequently collaborated on the publications "achtung: die Schweiz" (1955) and "The new city" (1956).
Coffee / snack
11:00 Eric Pfromm
The Burckhardt method: storytelling as a method of gaining knowledge
If scientific methods in the natural sciences (and increasingly also in the humanities) concentrate mainly on analysing accumulations of data, Burckhardt's approach is fundamentally different. For him, truth is sought and found in the individual narrative. It is essentially a creative approach that begins with perception. The insights gained become more substantial and relevant as a result. Without Burckhardt's preoccupation with the false and the genuine, this method of understanding the world cannot be applied. From these considerations, the question of what can be learnt from Lucius Burckhardt in design and teaching can be developed.
12:00 Jill Denton
Burckhardt in English?
Jill Denton has translated Lucius Burckhardt's books "Who plans the planning?“, "Why is landscape beautiful?", "Design is invisible" and "Minimal Intervention" into English.
12:15 Nikolaus Wyss
The sensation of a walk through everyday life
In 1978, the two Swiss folklorists Walter Keller and Nikolaus Wyss founded the magazine "Der Alltag - Sensationen des Gewöhnlichen" in Zurich. As the title suggests, the focus was on the unsensational and the everyday, a bold undertaking at the time in that it omitted the conspicuous, the newsworthy, the stories that make our everyday lives bearable and dealt with the grey monotony of everyday life, albeit in such a way as to present it as extraordinary. Years later, Wyss extended the activities surrounding this magazine by offering walks through urban areas that were not characterised by anything worth seeing and therefore normally escaped the public's attention. Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt were amused by this endeavour and assigned it to their discipline of promenadology.
13:00 –14:00 Lunch
14:00 Wolfgang Müller
Iceland: Handicap Beautiful landscape
The volcanic island of Iceland, like the Alps, has been considered beautiful on the European mainland since the Romantic period. Wolfgang Müller has visited the country every year since 1990. "The foreign eye sees more" is a (foreign-friendly) Icelandic proverb. However, the foreign eye also carries prefabricatedimages in its travelling baggage. This debate characterises his book "Blue Tit - Das deutsch-isländische Blaumeisenbuch" and "Neues von der Elfenfront - Die Wahrheit über Island". Wolfgang Müller presented Lucius Burckhardt’s "Landscape-Theoretical Watercolours" to the public for the first time at the Eisenbahnstraße Gallery in Kreuzberg in 1986. A conversation with Martin Schmitz.
14:30 Francesco Careri / Patrick Düblin
Walkscapes. A conversation about walking as an aesthetic practice
In "Walkscapes - Walking as an Aestehtic Practice", Francesco Careri combines mythical and prehistoric perspectives on walking with lessons learnt from the excursions of the Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists as well as the works of American Land Art artists. The book was published in 2002 in an English-Spanish double edition, has been reprinted eleven times and translated into French, Italian and Portuguese. In conversation with Patrick Düblin, the two artists analyse the genesis, popularity and topicality of Walkscapes and shedlight on the connection between Careri's own walking practice and the Stalker collective. (The talk will be held in English.)
Coffee / snack
16:00 Anne Brandl, Anette Freytag, Caspar Schärer
Agglowandern jetzt! Changing administration en passant
Now! means ...
- taking the state of our urban landscape personally
- learning (and teaching) through experience rather than just knowledge.
- not only thinking, but also feeling.
- Anchoring abstract contexts in everyday life.
- Participation rather than information.
- Experiencing instead of experiencing.
- Becoming aware through the unexcited.
- Taking responsibility.
Changing administrations en passant means ...
- starting the transformation to a sustainable society where decisions are made.
- Understanding walking as a transformative force for institutions.
- planning, steering, controlling and organising through experience rather than just knowledge.
- To lose official hierarchies between the edge of the forest and the kerb.
- Breaking the power of agenda items with sunbeams, bumps and everyday noise.
- ...
17:00 Reinhard Franz
The sermon - Film screening (25 min.)
After the inauguration of the Department of Design, which began its work at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in 1993, founding dean Lucius Burckhardt held a "sermon" in Weimar's Jakobskirche on 30 June 1994 at the invitation of the student pastor. Reinhard Franz turned the event into the only existing film document of a complete lecture by Lucius Burckhardt.
18:00 Aperitif, from 19:00 Pasta, salad and wine
Sunday, 29 June 2025
11:00 Bertram Weisshaar
Walk "making visible", meeting point town hall
