raumlaborberlin: Working on Common Ground
Members of the experimental German collective discuss their subversive approach to architectural practice.
April 17, 2023
Recorded on March 1, 2023.
Current Work is a lecture series featuring leading figures in the worlds of architecture, urbanism, design, and art.
In this lecture, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius and Jan Liesegang present raumlaborberlin’s ethos and creative process through four projects:
- Floating University Berlin, an experiment in collective learning housed in a temporary structure floating in a Berlin rainwater basin
- [Working on] Common Ground, a 100-day learning laboratory in a former brick factory in Kosovo’s capital city
- Allmänna Badet / Bathing Culture, a public sauna built above the harbor of a deindustrializing Swedish port city
- Haus der Statistik, the development of the GDR’s national statistics office’s abandoned headquarters, through which raumlabor is exploring the possibilities of cooperative city making.
The presentation is followed by a conversation with Mark Wigley, dean emeritus of Columbia University GSAPP. The conversation touches on the power of “non-threatening” temporary structures to make lasting changes to the urban fabric, the central role education plays in the practice’s projects, and raumlaborberlin’s impact on global architectural discourse.
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