The habilitation thesis brings together a series of selected essays that deal with various aspects of the forms and media of architectural knowledge transfer in the Protestant territories in the early modern period. These studies are largely based on the analysis of architecture-related sources that are closely linked to the collection history of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel and the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig as well as other archives such as the Lower Saxony State Archives in Wolfenbüttel.

As an introduction, two studies are dedicated to the questions of the Brunswick dukes' collecting intentions and the historical context of their building and collecting activities. The introductory article on the collection of architectural and engineering drawings in the Herzog August Library is conceived as a thematic introduction and summary at the same time. The construction industry in the Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and its protagonists around the master builder Hermann Korb (1656-1735) are the focus of the subsequent section. The third section is dedicated to various aspects of architectural perception and knowledge transfer from the perspective of travelling master builders. Publications by the architectural theorist Leonhard Christoph Sturm, who taught as a professor at the Wolfenbüttel Knight's Academy at the end of the 17th century and received significant impetus for his influential writings on architectural theory, form a fundamental source here. At the same time, the section looks at the Jewish architectural presence in Amsterdam and Hamburg as well as the Architectura Militaris, providing a broader cultural-historical framework. The fourth and final section contains analyses that deal with the training of the master builder from various perspectives. The focus is on individual holdings or groups of holdings of architectural and engineering drawings, which are analysed with regard to specific questions about drawing standards, training situations or training structures.

In the synopsis of these studies, a complex insight into the processes and positions as well as the protagonists of the architectural transfer of knowledge in the Protestant territories between about 1550 and 1800 is revealed. This presentation incorporates the latest research and source analyses, which in this scope represent a novel gain in knowledge for the European architectural history of the early modern period.

Hardly any other building project in West Germany after 1945 was accompanied by such expectations of a democratic new beginning as the school building. The architecture of the school and its location in the urban context were the focus of politicians, planners and educationalists. A central theme of modernism, the history of the ‘new school for the new man’ seemed to be repeating itself, but this time under the opposite sign. Whereas in the 1920s and 1930s the impetus for school construction came primarily from Germany and Switzerland, reform-oriented school planners in the Western Allied occupation zones were now pursuing a return to the developments in the Western industrialised nations. For the US military and later occupation authorities, the school was the place where the re-education and later re-orientation policy had to prove itself. Schools became a vehicle for transatlantic democratisation efforts and a test case for a modern society. During the Adenauer era, however, school construction was also characterised by the dictum ‘no experiments’; continuity and a relapse into educational policy and architectural restoration always ran parallel to the reforms.

In his habilitation thesis, Ulrich Knufinke summarises several of his publications on Jewish architecture written in recent years. Overarching reflections on the term ‘Jewish architecture’ and on the history and current state of research introduce the contributions, which are organised into five chapters. They cover a wide range of topics - from architectural onographical studies of individual synagogues to questions about changes in the functional-spatial design of Jewish buildings and their architectural-historical categorisation to biographical studies of Jewish architects. The topics covered range from the early 18th century to the present day. The final chapter is dedicated to questions of the history of reception and the current social discussion about synagogues as ‘architecture of remembrance’, when Jewish architecture in the present has acquired a relevance of its own that goes beyond architectural and architectural-historical concerns.