One major aim of architectural practice is to shape our future. Usually this is attempted by adding new buildings within planning structures, or by transforming existing architectures. This approach however is based solely on growth. It leads to a further polarization of the urban and the rural, a drifting apart form spaces of progression and spaces of regression. The mobile workshop will engage with the IBA StadtLand, which seeks “a perspective that presents an alternative to the prevailing notions of the city as the traditional motor of progress and innovation and the romanticised notion of life in the country”.
Can disappearance be designed? What about uncertainty? Is there room for design in regression? Making Futures is interested in protocols of spatial action, beyond existing administrative guidelines and material exploitation processes. Collective protocols of deconstruction, a ritualization of disappearance.
The mobile workshop will explore such questions by situating itself in a concrete scenario in the Thuringian Forest. The demolition of a building is, similar to its construction, a regulated process, but also a discourse. During this discourse, we foster ways of collective action as architectural practice. For this purpose, the mobile workshop will observe, accompany and participate in the demolition process of a building.
Mobile workshops are ambulatory learning constellations geared towards dialogue, collaboration and lasting relations that hope to expand the traditional field of academic research and its network. Most importantly, these real-time constructions constitute the project as an open, reflexive and practice-driven format.
Making Futures travels with its mobile kitchen and workshop to set up a camp on a deconstruction site and explore architecture in reverse. The site is located in the Schwarzatal in the Thuringian Forest and within reach of public transport (travel time form Berlin approximately 4h).
Please send us an intention letter (max 500 word) including a small introduction of who you are and why you want to join the workshop in Thüringen, also in what way you imagine yourself contributing to the programme, and your main interests or talent! During the workshop’s four days we expect full commitment and participation.
Email it to:
[email protected]– before February 25th, 2019. Selected participants will be informed on March 5th, 2019.