Keep your ear to the ground and you’ll hear the rumblings of Raumlabor, the constantly evolving Berlin-based architecture ‘collec-tive,’ whose practice was recognised with the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. A major player in the turn-of-the-century generation of architects who saw through the false promises of contemporary architecture, Raumlabor works with critical spatial practice to realise the latent potential of urban environments and empower their inhabitants. As one of the group’s core members Markus Bader elaborates, for Raumlabor architecture is the starting point, not the end.
While often both subject to and the object of conflict, the urban is also what we know most intimately. It is what we share; it is where we come together and learn to feel what it means to be part of a community, a neighbourhood, a city, a place. For more than twenty years, Raumlabor has been devising methods and approaches for tuning into the urban realm, to what – and who – is there, and transforming what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled and tasted into more-or-less precarious structures that allow people to recognise themselves and connect with others. Their projects are always interventions into the existing, constantly pushing the limits of the possible, the conceivable, the believable. They cultivate new sensitivities and subjectivities that are attuned to the exigencies of the present, of what is present. They expose people to more intimate, more caring, more respectful, more supportive ways of relating to themselves, to one another and to the world at large.
Nick Axel: Raumlabor’s work has been an inspiration for many years. I don’t want to be overly retrospective, but I would like to start by understanding where your practice is coming from. Can you describe the context – the social and economic, but also the political and practical – within which Raumlabor emerged?
Markus Bader: Our beginnings are marked with both a search and an uncertainty. We’re based in Berlin where, when we began, the one-to-one experience of daily life contrasted dramatically with what was being done in the fields of architecture and urban planning. Vital discussions about the future were taking place in those latter circles through public competitions, but there was a strong conservative force at play, meaning someone like Daniel Libeskind would place second and Hans Kollhoff would place first. For us young architects just coming out of school between 1996 and 2000, this was both intriguing and frustrating. Seeing their outcomes, we doubted whether entering competitions – which at the time was suggested to young practices as the way to get into the field – would be the most interesting way of entering the conversation about the city’s future.
Instead, we started looking for other ways of practising architecture. I like to describe Raumlabor as a question much more than an answer; as a loose group of people, we shared a space and kept meeting to discuss this question of how can we practice architecture. What are we doing? Today, we’re actively working with the term ‘urban practice’ to describe a transdisciplinary approach to space that mixes architecture, urbanism, direct action, performance and all kinds of arts with ideas of the future.
Nick: It’s interesting to hear about this climate of competitions. You mention the vital discussion going on within this sphere, but I imagine that when you gathered with your colleagues, other issues were also raised, right? In large, speculative urban planning proposals, for entire new parts of a city, for instance, the questions that can be asked about what a city means, how it’s inhabited, and what sorts of rituals and habits take place within it are very different than if you start with your feet on the ground.
Markus: Absolutely. Our practice, in that sense, can be described as hyper-contextual. At the time, there was a debate about gentrification, Berlin’s futures and who gets to decide what those futures are. Competing narratives swirled around. Some propagated the idea of a city of six million inhabitants by the year 2000 while failing to promote Berlin as the site for the Olympics that same year. At the same time, a community of urban practice emerged and consolidated around self-organised spaces, still inspired by the idealistic and sometimes utopian mindset of the peaceful revolution that had led to the fall of the wall. We’ve always been interested in understanding what it means to be situated, to become part of a place and really listen to it. We’re working with potentials more than projections, looking for space to move and inhabit, people to engage and partner with. Working in a situated way means building relations, entangling yourself in your surroundings. This means allowing yourself to become porous, to connect on many levels. It also means working with limited resources, activating the ‘what is there’ and working together towards a common momentum.
Nick: Your questioning of what it meant to practice architecture applies not just to the discipline but also to the way that people inhabit and relate to the city. Cities, and the slow timescales they evolve over, can be alienating, and it can be difficult to feel any agency. But I understand much of your work as dedicated to empowering residents, sometimes finding ways of incorporating their voice back into the city.
Markus: Architecture is often experienced as big, abstract and monumental; impossible to influence due to sheer scale. We often see it as a given, like the weather. Our projects try to show that there are in-between spaces, which, when inhabited, allow us to imagine other futures. A constant question of ours is how to create spaces for this imagining. With this question, we design concrete situations to be experienced, where the look and feel, actions and relations, differ from daily life. We call these ‘real utopias.’
This approach started with an early project called Hotel Neustadt (2003) and continues with more recent projects like Floating University (2018–). Beginning as a Raumlabor initiative in 2018, it became a self-governed entity in 2019 and is now run entirely by its members: the Floating Association. The public is continuously welcomed to the site through various programmes, like monthly ‘Floating Thursdays,’ recurring festivals like ‘Climate Care,’ ‘Ecofutures’ or ‘Contaminations,’ and single-festival formats like ‘Re-Edo-Cation.’ The programme is made up of performances, conversations, movement practices, readings, film screenings, concerts and workshops, all with a focus on relating back to the neighbourhood and looking out into a more-than-human future, where we relate differently to each other and to the planet.
Nick: It’s been quite beautiful to see Floating University evolve over the years. That time-span is quite rare for your projects, is it not?
Markus: Yes, our projects often have diverse temporalities. One perhaps extreme example is The Kitchen Monument (2006), which is a pneumatic structure attached to a trailer that can be moved around and appear in the most unexpected places. Reflecting on how people are so used to cooking at home for themselves, largely isolated from others, it questions what actions can be collectivised, and looks for the potential of mutuality, solidarity and building deep relations when acting together. Our projects allow people to experience the spatial potential of existing cities openly and imaginatively. With The Kitchen Monument, in a very short time and with very little material, a large, strange, mysterious and attractive space appears, almost magically. It would often bring people to places they’d otherwise not see, let alone where they’d have a collective dinner. We inhabited spaces under motorways, neglected playgrounds and brownfield sites. Even a car park above a shopping mall can be turned into a place for collective exchange and social energy.
Floating University is an extension of this thinking; that with very minimal but precise generous intervention we can open up an existing space – a municipal rainwater retention basin – as a place to inhabit. Floating University specifically looks at the Anthropocene, within which inhabiting means being inside the contradictions of our systemic approach to the planet. The site looks so beautiful, but is contaminated. Mobility is widely enjoyed thanks to cars, but toxic rubber particles from tyres and exhaust fumes are the main contaminants of the basin’s ecosystems. The rare amphibia living there nevertheless are not aware. In an ambition to save them, the local environmental protection authorities restrict people from walking on the concrete surface of the basin, but don’t stop the influx of toxic surface waters, nor the bulldozers in charge of maintaining the technical infrastructure. Inhabiting Floating University means exposing yourself to these contradictions as material to work with.
Nick: Your material palettes are precarious, which is brought to an extreme in The Kitchen Monument; the space is only there when the trailer is there, or even only when air flows through its fans. In other projects, including Floating University, you use a lot of repurposed wood. There’s a vulnerability to the materials you build with; these structures are not necessarily going to be standing in ten, twenty years. Or they might be, but only with care and maintenance. What effect do you think this has when inhabiting those spaces?
Markus: The design of Floating Uni-versity is very precise, careful, even minimalist. Its first edition, from 2018, had scaffolding, wood and inflatable roofs. It allowed us to inhabit a configuration, acting as a support structure for a multiplicity of collective actions. I like to see it as an architectural support for producing meaning in a place. Is being ephemeral a threat to good architecture? Imagine if architecture would involve our actions more; if architecture would need more repair, more hands, more adaptations. Architecture is a way to relate to the world. The stability of our buildings seduces us into thinking that the relations they create are OK, just because they last. Maybe an architecture with more of a softness, a sensitivity, a vulnerability – one that exposes us more to the conditions we live in – is valuable to thinking about how to address today’s fundamental questions, like the climate crisis. In Japan, the culture and skill of making elaborate wood constructions is valued more than the physical object of, let’s say, a temple. The focus is on the practice, not the object. We can learn from this shift. If we keep redoing the places we inhabit, we maintain a much stronger connection to our real agency.
…‘Autoconstruction’ deeply relates to sensing your agency while weaving a fabric of personal and emotional relations with others in the team…
Nick: I love this idea that the way we understand what’s expected of us as inhabitants of our built environment might orient us towards an ethics of care – not just for our surroundings but also for each other. We don’t really need to care for a concrete wall; it stands pretty much on its own. But a configuration of scaffolding and wood, a soft roof – a more fragile, adaptable structure – almost forces us to relate differently.
If a space can be changed, you also know that what you’re experiencing inside it might never be possible again. If the space is unique, the experience will be too.
Markus: That suggests architecture becomes less reliable. Architecture would no longer be this fixed frame that you can look out from and have the same perspective on the world around you every time. Most of our projects develop similarly to a traditional architecture project: there are different phases of preparation, planning, con-ceptualisation, etc. But then there’s the moment of building together. We actually produce most of the structures we design. We open this process, and people become part of the experience of transforming a place. This is an important shift away from a mode of citizenship in which the closest connection people have to the development of their urban environments is standing in front of a building site fence watching people working with big tools. Our material palette is more accessible; you can actually do it. By participating in our building teams, you can go from being a beginner to quite a skilled builder. These skills could change the way you relate to the material world far beyond the project’s frame. Also, constructing spaces together is based on building a level of trust, mutual understanding and negotiating live with those involved about how to reach a common goal. ‘Autoconstruction’ deeply relates to sensing your agency while weaving a fabric of personal and emotional relations with others in the team.
Nick: I’ve always understood Raumlabor to be a collective. I’m curious to hear how this open way of organising projects gets reflected in the organisation of your practice itself. What does it take to build a collective, not to mention maintain one?
Markus: When describing ourselves, we tend to use the word ‘group.’ At this moment, we’re around twenty practitioners who all take care of the common practice, with nine long-standing members at the centre. This configuration reflects how architecture is always a conversation. Architecture is not about sitting down and doing your own design; the hero-genius narrative. It’s about dissolving hierarchies of decision-making, about who we are and what we think can be read through our projects. We are a diverse group, and so are our works. Conversations about where we’re going take place through works and real situations.
Nick: Can you give an example of how this has played out?
Markus: Making Futures (2018–2019), which was a collaboration with the University of the Arts, Berlin, addressed the question of future space-related education. Universities are not built to accommodate agency. Most schools are designed to follow a written curriculum step by step. But this way of approaching education is based on the idea that all learners have the same background and the same knowledge, and like to learn at the same time and same pace. Contemporary educational models, however, propose the opposite: a learning trajectory shaped by the learners’ motivation and capacity. Schooling built around the learner provides them with a great deal of agency over their education. In Making Futures, we were inspired by what a fully interest-based learning environment might look like, one that accommodates a wide variety of learners from different disciplinary backgrounds, ages and levels of professionalisation.
We found the term ‘emergence’ very inspiring. We built the school environment in a way that allowed for orientation and linear learning, while simultaneously introducing a series of horizontal disturbances, mostly parallel offerings – mini-workshops, drop-in lectures. Students also took a role in building and maintaining the school itself, for example by helping in the kitchen to prepare meals. I’d often repeat an understanding of the school; that ‘everything is equally important,’ whether that’s working on a publication, a complex idea or an installation, or building a rammed-earth oven, stapling fanzines or chopping carrots. What if the school community takes care of the school collectively? What if it decides where it moves? Everyone was able to position themselves within the learning landscape through both individual decisions and collective conversations in daily assemblies.
Nick: Can you reflect on the role of education within your practice? You’ve started a number of schools, from Making Futures to Urban School Ruhr (2016) and many others. I also understand a number of your other projects, though not explicitly labelled as schools, to be pedagogical. Even your collaborative process as a whole – you mentioned the learning curve on the building site.
Markus: Around 2015 we started reflecting on the learning processes that happen in our projects. There are many different ways of engaging, from building and conceiving to designing, programming and operations. We came to the realisation that maybe we’re not an architecture office. But if not, then what are we? We decided to apply another lens and call ourselves the Open Raumlabor University, where by going through a series of Raumlabor projects you receive lectures alongside the different layers of spatial production. Sometimes you’re part of the construction team, sometimes the concept team, sometimes the cooking team. In this way, conviviality merges with the conceptualisation and realisation of architecture.
…A collaborative environment is a space of negotiation, which means looking for a way to actively live with conflict. In my understanding of democracy, we cannot stop negotiating…
Nick: Collaboration often entails a degree of friction, as does daily urban life. How do you deal with this in your practice?
Markus: A collaborative environment is a space of negotiation, which means looking for a way to actively live with conflict. In my understanding of democracy, we cannot stop negotiating. As soon as we do, we become authoritarian. One dominant idea would govern. Avoiding this dominance by staying open, by keeping the conversation open, can be quite demanding and energy intensive. From a perspective of the commons, decision-making is collectivised, as are the joys of collectively benefiting from the common good. So there is an effort, but there are also rewards.
Nick: How does your ethos – of hospitality, communality and care – translate into the space of an exhibition?
Markus: We design and participate in exhibitions with a human, experiential approach. For example, our installation Instances of Urban Practice (2021) at the Venice Architecture Biennale was located two-thirds down the Corderia dell’Arsenale. This is an incredibly long space, and we knew that everyone who reached our installation was already going to be a bit overwhelmed, or at least inspired but saturated with information. We thought that offering a place to rest and contemplate would be a nice way to activate the scenography, which otherwise spoke about the dynamics of spatial collaboration. Our scenographies not only act as a support for the exhibit but also welcome the viewer into the exhibition space – both intellectually and physically.
Nick: So in a sense your exhibition works are not so much installations as they are instantiations.
Markus: Absolutely. A good example of this is our recent project Zombie Punk Love (2022) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The installation was intended for audience moments, programmed lectures and talks, in a very transient, in-between space: the below-ground foyer. We aimed to offer a space that wasn’t prescriptive or boring like a set of chairs and a screen, but was open to interpretation. We created a focal point with a figurative, blob-like structure propped up on bamboo. Its natural shapes and materials contrasted with the hard, rigid environment of the space. It operated as a scalar translator, from the vast dimensions of the foyer to the small scale of the individual. The installation came across as friendly, even a bit weird, perhaps introducing a smile into this fantastic, functionalist space. In a context that by design tries to accommodate everybody and everything, we tried to introduce a bit of a surprise. And it’s fun doing architecture with hair, cuddly monsters, fragments of fictional bodies on skateboards, blobs, heads and eyes! Where do these polygenic geometries lead us? Its figurative performance almost completely hides its functional performance.
Nick: Before we end, could you speak about the Haus der Statistik (2015–) project that Raumlabor has been involved in?
Markus: Within the scope of Raumlabor’s projects, Floating University and Haus der Statistik are quite special because of their long timespans. But while Floating University began as a Raumlabor project, Haus der Statistik started as a collective initiative by many different groups in Berlin, which we took part in. The initial claim to re-inhabit the huge empty office site of Haus der Statistik in the centre of the city – originally slated for demolition – was made in 2015, and said: we need a hybrid space for arts, culture and social activities. We were talking earlier about different understandings of architecture between planning and action. Haus der Statistik works with idea of learning through use, and planning with feet on the ground.
Nick: Can you describe the structure of the project?
Markus: Our group got together and formed a legal body, the Cooperative for Urban Development (ZKB). This was important, not just because it allowed us to sign contracts, but because it gave us a degree of legitimacy when speaking to institutions. In 2018, we signed a contract of cooperation with the Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing, the Mitte district municipality, and two state-owned companies (Berliner Immobilienmanagement GmbH and the housing association Berlin-Mitte), to guarantee the inclusion of civic society in the development of the project – not as a client, but as a partner.
Nick: What has it meant to plan with your feet on the ground at this scale?
Markus: After the contract of cooperation was signed, ZKB initiated a series of open participatory workshops in the Flöckner bicycle shop on Karl-Marx-Allee that was reopened as WERKSTATT (Workshop). This space served as the first point of contact, as a hands-on information centre for everything to do with the development of the area. After a couple of months of workshops, new dynamics started to emerge along with new coalitions around specific issues that transgressed disciplinary boundaries or professional categories. A space for art, culture, education and social use became a space of specific clusters: now we have collaborations around food, resources, theatre, urban practices… In close connection with these unfolding dynamics on the ground, the visioning and planning process continued towards a redevelopment plan that was successfully agreed upon with the municipality in 2021. It’s a plan for the renovation of existing buildings; three courtyards (‘city rooms’) for communal use; new residential developments; a new town hall; three ‘experimental houses’ for changing uses; and roof gardens and community terraces.
Nick: What is the current status of the project?
Markus: The existing building looks like it’s being demolished, but it’s actually in the process of renovation. While this is happening, most of the people who have been active in and around Haus der Statistik have been relocated to a temporary architecture that surrounds the existing building. For me, this is an important layer of the important layers of Haus der Statistik as a model project: it’s being developed while active. Its tenants have been there from the very beginning, not arriving only after the project is complete. This allows for other decision-making structures, other inspirations and imaginations of what the future of the place might be. Rather than being organised according to disciplinary boundaries, people involved in the project very quickly built alliances around shared interests and modes of practice. One outstanding example is the ‘house of materialisation’ – an alliance of actors posing questions of urban material flows, reuse, and re- and up-cycling. While the original claim was a need for spaces for ‘art, culture, education and social issues,’ the new landscape of actors is much more precise; they can be involved in planning discussions with their specific lens and knowledge base.
Beyond reprogramming the existing, a set of new buildings is in development. Three that I find particularly exciting – called experimentierhäuser, meaning experimental buildings or houses for experiment – are looking at new ways of living and working together. They’re laboratories for new architectures.
Nick: When Raumlabor started, the competitions in Berlin for these types of massive districts would move quite quickly and all according to plan. But to what effect? I’m thinking of Potsdamer Platz, but there are many other examples. Your work with ZKB on Haus der Statistik is a model that actually grounds these types of projects, and gives them the time they need for meaning to be made, for figuring out who they are for and why they are being built in the first place.
Markus: Haus der Statistik has many possible readings. It can, for instance, be read as saving the architecture of the GDR. But the architectural legacy of the GDR, and the question of how we as a society allow this period to be visible – and to what extent it’s already been demolished, overwritten, removed, destroyed – is another discussion. You can also read Haus der Statistik from a climate perspective: it’s simply not being demolished. Grey energy is kept on site as much as possible, and we’re constantly looking for ways to continue building rather than replacing. However, we just had municipal (re)elections, and Berlin now has a more conservative coalition government. With the previous ‘red, red, green’ coalition there was a lot of productive discussion and collaboration, but it’ll be interesting to see how the project sustains in changing political climates. That said, I’m optimistic.