Draft:Michael Hensel

• Comment: Thank you for having acknowledged a conflict of interest. -- Hoary (talk)^WWU 👍︎ 23:31, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

• Comment: This reads like a rather verbose and soporific advertisement for Hensel.
  As for sourcing, here's a sample: the fuller argument for moving architectural design thinking beyond the form/function division that has structured much of architectural theory and design since the early twentieth century is developed in his doctoral thesis and in his 2013 book Performance-oriented Architecture. In the view of a substantial percentage of (non-fringe) architecture theorists independent of Hensel, has Hensel developed this argument convincingly, or has he tried but failed, or has he actually done something rather different? The assertion comes with two references. Or rather, two of what are formatted as references, but are not references. Instead, they merely give bibliographic detail for the thesis and the book. Provision of such detail is welcome but does not constitute a reference.
  What have architects, architecture theorists, architecture critics, or architecture journalists -- anyway, people who know what they're talking about and who are independent of Hensel -- written about Hensel or his work? It's this that the article should summarize. Hoary (talk)^WWU 👍︎ 23:25, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

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Michael Hensel
Hensel in 2026
Born	Michael Ulrich Hensel (1965-09-01) September 1, 1965 Celle, Lower Saxony, West Germany
Occupations	Architect, academic
Employer	TU Wien
Known for	Performance-oriented architecture; Emergent Technologies and Design (AA)

Michael Ulrich Hensel (born 1 September 1965) is a German architect and academic. He is a professor at TU Wien, where he heads the research unit of Digital Architecture and Planning. He was a co-founder of the design research network OCEAN and, with Michael Weinstock and Achim Menges, of the Emergent Technologies and Design programme at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.

Education

Hensel studied architecture at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences (diploma 1992) and at the Architectural Association in London (AA Graduate Design Diploma, 1993). He received a PhD from the University of Reading in 2012.

Career

Hensel taught at the Architectural Association from 1993 to 2009. From 2008 to 2018 he was a professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), where he directed the Research Centre for Architecture and Tectonics from 2011 to 2018. He has been a professor at TU Wien since 2018. He also holds a part-time professorship for Architecture and Environment Integration at Leibniz University Hannover.

Work

Emergence and Design Group

With Weinstock and Menges, Hensel formed the Emergence and Design Group at the Architectural Association and guest-edited issues of Architectural Design on emergence and morphogenetic design (2004, 2006, 2008). Mario Carpo included their texts in his anthology The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992–2012, describing the group's work as a distinct direction within digital design that applied principles of self-organisation to buildings understood as material and environmental systems, while insisting on the difference between emergence in living systems and in computation. In his introduction to the anthology, Carpo wrote that the "emergence" theories of the early 2000s continued to inform performance-oriented design experimentation.

Performance-oriented architecture

In his doctoral thesis and in the book Performance-oriented Architecture (2013), Hensel proposed treating "performance" as a driver of architectural design from the outset rather than as a measure applied to a finished design. In a review of the building performance literature, Pieter de Wilde listed the book among selected key contributions, as later work extending the architectural view of building performance beyond the engineering-oriented definitions dominant in building science.

Hensel's department at TU Wien was a partner in ECOLOPES (2021–2025), an EU Horizon 2020 project coordinated by the Technical University of Munich that developed computational design methods for building envelopes serving as habitats for plants and animals as well as people.

OCEAN

Hensel co-founded OCEAN in 1994 as an international network of design studios. OCEAN north's proposal for the site of the World Trade Center, made for the Max Protetch Gallery exhibition A New World Trade Center: Design Proposals (2002), is among the exhibition material acquired by the Library of Congress. The exhibition was also shown in the United States Pavilion at the 2002 Venice Architecture Biennale.

OCEAN North's 1997 competition entry for the Jyväskylä Music and Arts Centre in Finland, by Johan Bettum and Kivi Sotamaa, was one of 25 projects documented in the Canadian Centre for Architecture's Archaeology of the Digital programme. A second version developed in 2004 with Hensel and Menges was shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale; its models are in the collection of the FRAC Centre in Orléans.

Selected publications

• Hensel, Michael; Menges, Achim; Weinstock, Michael (2010). Emergent Technologies and Design: Towards a Biological Paradigm for Architecture. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-49344-4.
• Hensel, Michael (2013). Performance-oriented Architecture: Rethinking Architectural Design and the Built Environment. Chichester: Wiley. ISBN 978-0-470-97331-8.
• Hensel, Michael; Turko, Jan (2015). Grounds and Envelopes: Reshaping Architecture and the Built Environment. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-63917-0.
• Hensel, Michael; Menges, Achim, eds. (2006). Morpho-Ecologies. London: AA Publications. ISBN 978-1-902902-53-1.
• Hensel, Michael; Nilsson, Fredrik, eds. (2016). The Changing Shape of Practice: Integrating Research and Design in Architecture. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-70345-1.

External links

• TU Wien profile