 Well, it's great to be here today with Benjamin, Benjamin Forster Baldenius. I think it's, you could say that you're part of so many important things that have changed the way the world thinks architecturally. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say this, so it's a very important occasion and actually I'm very glad that we're having this discussion here today. I believe that the work that Benjamin stone himself, but always, or most times, together with others, and as part of collectives, like the Round Labor, of course, collective, or even the Beyond Round Labor, the floating university that brought together so many people. It's been not only been incredibly influential, but that's actually opening possibilities to think architectural practices, architecture, urbanity, beyond the hegemonies of capitalism or string capitalism, globalization, and other forms of domains. And I think that that is something that needs to be acknowledged because the possibility of thinking beyond these hegemonies is something that is often denied and the fact that there is an evidence, a number of big body of work of evidences that claim the possibility for alternative is something that is crucial in a moment of huge defiance, like the ones that we're facing now and beyond, and before as well, and probably after Benjamin's work has shown that it's possible to work beyond the frame of powers, markets, ideologies that present themselves as natural and excluding of alternative. And I think that that is something that comes also as a form of architectural mobilization. I think that that's also important, that this is not something that operates, let's say, as a side practice, but is growing from the very specificity of how architecture operates socially, ecologically, materially, technologically, as a process that mobilizes all those means and that it can be operating differently to perform a different political program. In 1997 Benjamin founded the Institute for Applied Architecture and three years later he joined Round Labore. Round Labore defines itself as a network, a collective of architects who come together in a collaborative structure to work at the intersection of architecture, city planning, art, and urban intervention. They address city and urban renewal as a process attracted to difficult urban locations, places torn between different systems, time periods, and planning ideologies that cannot adapt are the sites where they operate, places that are abandoned, left over, or in transition that contain some relevance for the processes of urban transformation. These places are their experimentation site where untapped potentials can be activated through other forms of architectural engagement. I still remember the first time I was close or I was part or in a way I witnessed Round Labore's work in Hotel Neustadt in Halley Neustadt that I visited in 2003 and actually I was shocked by the way architecture could operate beyond the divisions of form and program or architects and users and basically all those categories were thrown off to reinvent the world where entanglement was actually operated as a site for activism. Keon Park defined the Hotel Neustadt as the Hotel Neustadt directly developed into self-regulating informal urban strategies generated through participation of an cooperation between artists and populace, outsiders and locals, top-down and bottom-up movements just like a high-rise favela, Hotel Neustadt was a city without a master plan, a new city within fading context, a temporary city within permanence, a nomadic city within a settlement. Their influence, Round Labore's influence and Benjamin's work in many other networks has been huge. Here in New York in 2009 they launched the Space Buster, they presented this, they used for the first time together with others the Space Buster with a storefront for art and architecture and that kept running for many years and many iterations until now you were telling me that the car was falling apart right and it was somehow diluted into other material networks and many other works that together constitute a stubborn I would say commitment to enact architecture as a political practice. In 2018 the floating university was funded with Benjamin of course as a kind of a big part of its foundation. It was conceived as an intervention in the rainwater retention basin serving the temple hall filled in Berlin. It was from then an opportunity to rethink the way architecture was conceived as a process where basically acting was indivisible from designing, thinking, from doing. Those doing were also users, knowledge produced in this university was intrinsically connected to its materiality and the evolution of its materiality. No material was coming there without the history and was living there without already a more complex history. The experience there was I would say one of the most intense architectural experiments that has been happening in the last decades and that was also open to participation of many different institutions, many different people, many actually people here was part of that to certain extent and there were projects that were added to it and happened through and as part of the floating university as a way to claim architecture as a permanent experiment with social and ecological intensity that is often impossible to witness in conventional architecture. I wanted also to say that of course we could go in a very classic way to go through all the merits and distinctions that Benjamin himself accumulates I would say and that would be endless but I would say that of course the recognition that Ronald Borger in the past Venice Biennial with the Golden Lion was of course unanimously received by the community of architecture around the world as something that was fully deserved and that was also pointing to new direction for architecture to operate and that adds to many, many other words. Benjamin is also a professor, he's a professor of coin habitation defined by the institution as the Stadel Schule in Frankfurt Mine as the art of living together on a damaged planet right? I guess that there was a lot of thinking and discussion probably put into the definition of your position as professor of coin habitation right? And of course before has there's a long list of places where Benjamin has taught like the Prague Academy for Art, Architecture and Design, the Folk One University of the Arts in Essen, the Royal Academy of Arts in Danag and many, many other places. So I think that we're here in a very, this is a very special moment. I think we have the great opportunity tonight to discuss architecture from a very different perspective but the perspective that is totally needed and responding to contemporary defines probably much more intensively than any other practice and body of work that I can recall. And I want to include in this introduction the words of how labor defining themselves and Benjamin as a fundamental part of it, we call what we do research-based design. We're committed to dealing with places one to one, discovering and using what we find within the conditions of the site in the process of doing. We learn more through active design about the site of investigation and find new methods that are open to appropriation and upgrades the existing. We do not solve problems that resounds probably with many of the discussions that happened here and have happened here in the last decades. Rather we initiate processes that give actors the opportunity to know, understand and use the city and its dynamics as well as its possibilities. Please welcome me to, join me to welcome Benjamin here tonight. Hi, hi, hi, Andres. Thanks a lot. That was strong words. I'm not sure if they weren't a bit too strong, but let's see. So yeah, thank you very much. It finally worked. I'm here. I'm glad I'm here. And I'm glad you are here. Even though there's a storm out there, even though this is a very important and special day for the world, the funeral of Queen Elizabeth has already happened. But I can understand that maybe this is the time when people want to sit and watch it because it's still going on. And so I'm glad that you are, you know, you decided to see that later on YouTube or on the news and rather come here. And so hello everyone. I can see or not see also where's the camera because there's somewhere are there because I understand that there's also people out there in the digital desert watching this lecture. Sorry, I, we can't communicate, but, but I hope you enjoyed as well, especially and I have to say that because I know now that my friends Dusty and John are sitting in the trailer somewhere in an Indian reservation in Arizona watching this. So, yeah, so this, this event today, it leaves many people very, very sad. But it, and also asks a lot of questions. A lot of questions that, that are around the role of the common wealth. And maybe we should, maybe it's a good day to rethink this term. What is common wealth? And how should we deal with it? And maybe it's also a good day to think about democracy and the role of democracy and the way it's structured. And as I read yesterday on a bench at the river, it's a good day to be alive. And not dead. Okay, so let's get started. My name is Benjamin. I think that was said already. I am a trained architect, and, but I see myself more as a performing architect. So I'm exactly my role today. I'm performing the work we've, we've done. And this is actually not the image that I wanted to show. I wanted to show this image. This is the book that me and my colleagues from round level, we are nine architects, by the way, have published in 2008. That is the last book we have published. And in 2014, I received an email from the University of Vilnius in Lithuania. That sent me a file that was a transcript of a lecture that my friend and colleague Matias had given at that school two years earlier. Now, that lecture was on the 2nd of February, and later in May, he passed away. It was a strange thing to receive this kind of transcript, like a voice from the past somehow. And I just want to read to you the beginning of the lecture, which is really interesting, because it's also the first words on the book that we are publishing soon. Here it goes. Good evening, everyone. It's a great pleasure for me to be in Vilnius. It is the first time in my life, and it is also the first time in my life that I have experienced minus 30 degrees today. In Berlin, we have minus 16 at the moment. So let's start. Before I forget, I have to introduce our own book. It's called Acting in Public, and we published it in 2008. This was our first book, and in it, we collected our first works, and it is also a little bit about the background where we are coming from, why we are working and how we are working, and the things I will show today are mostly not in this book. So it will be a surprise for you if you have read this book. There will be something new. At the moment, we are thinking about a new book because we've had a lot of new experiences with our work. That's 10 years ago, and we still haven't published the new book. But since three years we're working on it, again, we've taken it up again. Matthias was kind of the main brain behind publishing the book, so we had to stop at some point and we tried again. We always had the problem that we didn't know how to deal with the archive of our projects because there are so many projects that we are going to different directions that we couldn't find an order that we would agree on in a book. So there is an order, for example, on our website that works quite well with all the links and so on, but in a book it's from the beginning to the end. And then three years ago, a friend of mine, Hermann Ferker, came to me and she said, Benny, I've just finished the book about my work, it was so much fun. Maybe then I thought I want to make a book about Berlin and then I thought, actually it's better to make a book about you, Raumlabour, because it's also telling the story of Berlin somehow. And I said, OK, let's try it, we've tried before. And then we started. And the question of the order somehow remained. And I have something to read to you from page 66. My favorite writer, Georges Perec, and in this book, brief notes on the art and manner of arranging one's book. He has this article that has exactly that name. And under 2.1, he says, and that's interesting because we're sitting under the library. I figured out when I was out there that the library is just up there in the basement for the ones who are not here. Ways of arranging books, ordered alphabetically, ordered by continent or country, ordered by color, ordered by date of acquisition, ordered by date of publication, ordered by format, ordered by genre, ordered by major period of literary history, ordered by language, ordered by priority for future reading, ordered by binding, ordered by series. I think it could go on, ordered by color, ordered by size, ordered by the books I have read, the books I haven't read, the books I want to read, the books I have read half. So there's many ways to order things. That's also why it's so difficult to agree. But then we decided that we should not order, put order into our projects, but more talk about the topics that we are interested in. So what we did for the new book that is called Pulli Lema is that we've met lots of friends and colleagues and cooperators and we talked together about the topics that we are interested in. And then with a system that we don't reveal, we show images of our projects. And this is also what I will do with you today. But I'm not gonna read, of course I'm not gonna read the text from the book, but I'm gonna show you the projects and explain, give you a bit the subtitles of the projects. Now, as we are on this important day for democracy, I have decided that I don't decide what I talk about, but that we decide on it together. And what you see here is different kind of small slide shows, you can see how long they are by looking at the amount of megabytes that they have. And these are topics and in a minute, I will tell you what's behind that. So you have an idea and a way to decide. And then with something like an applause or meter, we will decide what I talk about. There's one exception, as Andres has invited me, I gave him the first choice. So he is a kind of the monarch on the side. And as you could imagine, he wants me to talk about the floating university. So we have to have a little bit of time in the end to hear the story behind the floating university, which also makes sense because lots of these topics kind of lead into, stream into the floating university. So, wait a minute, there's a thing here. Building the city together is mainly talking about hands-on architecture, us going somewhere with a car or a truck full of machines and a bit of an idea what the outcome should be and then we try to gather through the building together, the neighborhood or the people around or groups of people and we build things together and by that kind of raise a bit of identification towards the outcome. Then transforming urban practice, well that's a big topic for us, but I've reduced it a bit to the story of the Temple of Airfield, which is for Berlin a very, very important site because it's super big and it was given to the city as a kind of a present, a new public space that is maybe half as big as Central Park and has nothing on it. There is things on it, but there's no kind of design features there yet. And we have made a couple of interventions there. We've been part of the planning of the opening of the site and I think it's an interesting story. So if you're into a story, that would be this. Then water culture. Now this is about, there's many topics that we are super interested in and that we try to bring into our work and one of these things that is always coming back is the sense of water and trying to design with water and bringing water into it. This is talking a bit about that and it ends with the swimming pool that we are building at the moment in Gothenburg. Then the mobile activator units. This is, if you're interested in all these kind of bubbles and cars and machines that we build to go into places and activate them, like the space buster, obviously. Then I go down, the end of the fossil age, you can see that's a big topic. Because it will be a big topic for all of us very soon or maybe the end of the generation is coming then. So there's many aspects kind of lead into our work where we're dealing with that. So that's many, many crazy projects. How to become a room laborer is, we can also leave that for later for the Q&A, but it's, I didn't want to miss it because I know that it's also interesting. Once you've seen a couple of these projects, you're wondering how is this possible? How could you, how did this happen that you are not sitting in an office like Skidmore Owings or a smaller office making ventilation planning for universities. Floating university, that's clear. Space is of encounter. That's a nice one because it's one of these things that we always try to attempt is bringing different people together and making, attracting people with architecture. So that the social dynamic that actually is the one that makes the space is not the architect, it's not the builders, not the walls and ceilings. It's mostly people that are coming and doing things. This is what this is about. LearnScapes is about kind of learning environments that we've been doing like programs and workshops and different, our own universities that we are founding from time to time and that are vanishing it again. Fast Hotels is the one that's including that. I didn't know that you were at Hotel Norsche. That's so long ago, it's 20 years ago. But it's talking about the notion of sleeping and how that can play a big role in our cultural life. Ambiguity Tolerance, that's, I just have to have that word in every lecture because I like it so much. I think it's a skill that we all should be training, that we're bearing, that things are being seen in different ways from different angles. With different perspectives and then the outcome is also maybe different. That's part of democracy for sure, but it's also part of the world that we live in. This one is mainly talking about the project that we did in St. Louis, Missouri for the Pulitzer Foundation because I think it's the most kind of crazy situation maybe that we've worked in. And then space democracy, this one I like very much, I can say that because it's the day of democracy today. So how do we do this now? Maybe I need one person who has a better ear than me. And you have to decide which applause was the loudest. Do you want to do this? Yeah? Okay, great. That's only because you're sitting in the front row. I could take somebody from the back row as well. Maybe two people, maybe the guy in the back row. Yeah, yeah, you? Yeah? And you decide together which one was louder. So, okay, moment to make up your mind. I would think that each one is about 10, 15 minutes. So, and I've spent already so much time on the introduction. But anyways, I hope you all brought some time so we can spend a bit of time. So let's say we pick two of them for the moment, right? Reduce it to two. Okay, we start with building the city together. Okay, transforming urban practice. Okay, water culture. Mobile activator units. Well, okay, that's an old shoe, I understand. The end of the fossil age. How to become a roundabout? We skipped floating university. Spaces of encounter. I wonder where it comes. Learnscapes. Fast hotels. Okay, ambiguity tolerance. Wow, okay. And space democracy. Come on. Okay, it's difficult to decide. Do you know? And the second, she says ambiguity tolerance. What are you saying? Huh? Ambiguity tolerance. Yeah, and the other one, the second one. Okay, so we start with ambiguity tolerance. Here we go. You can see I did a lot of work just to hold this lecture, just for you, just to have a kind of base of a democratic decision-taking. Okay, so ambiguity tolerance. I already said what I understand about it. You probably all know the Pulitzer Foundation building. And we were invited. And 2016, actually in 2015, we were invited to produce a work for them. Now the team of the Pulitzer is super cool and they knew who they are inviting. So they weren't inviting somebody who was just gonna put a nice artwork in the middle of the gallery, but they wanted a kind of social interaction. But of course they also wanted something in the gallery. Not only out there. So they reserved the biggest gallery, the one on the left. And then we had a very super simple idea. And it goes like that. Oh no, different other side. Okay, St. Louis is interesting for us because of different reasons. First of all, I was an exchange student in St. Louis. So I was twice in St. Louis when I was 15, 16. And I remember it like faintly. But all my colleagues haven't been there so they didn't have the same reason to go there. But what we all know is the destruction of the Proudhaï Go buildings because it's part of the Kouyanis Katzi movie. And because this is, that was a very iconic moment in the time of architecture. The Proudhaï Go settlement that was built by Yamazaki, I always forget his name, but you probably all know him because it's not the only building that got destroyed that he designed. There must be a strange feeling in your career if you know one of them is declared as the end of the day when modernism died and the other one created a mess for the next 100 years in the city. But the idea was very much coming from this Bauhaus disciple, Hilba Seimer, who at that time made this design for the city of Berlin that looked very much the same. But in Berlin it was also at the same, almost at the same time with the Proudhaï Go settlement. We had a design that was realized that was already slightly different because Hilba Seimer's design was already 30 years old. So there were other ideas of urban design at that time. That was the International Building Exhibition built at the same, almost at the same, a little bit later, of course, than the Proudhaï Go. And the East Berlin reaction to that was the, at that time it was the Stalinan Lee, now it's the Karl-Marx Ali, buildings that were kind of serving the same ground. But in St. Louis it was a bit of a different story because they didn't, obviously in St. Louis there was no war before that destroyed the whole city like it wasn't built in. But there was this kind of housing that you see here in the front that was coming from this time when St. Louis was very dense and that had a certain history that led to the fact that the inner city houses or parts of the inner city houses were accommodating lots of not so wealthy people. So it was seen more or less as a slum and it needed something that should be done. The reaction was that there was maybe one of the few times in the history of the American urban planning there was a big housing settlement built that was social housing. Now, because it was one of the first there were a lot of decisions that were made wrongly. And that was for sure not the architecture because the architecture is as neutral as the queen. Of course it's not. But there was a lot in the rules and regulations and the way that the tenants of the houses were being chosen was only, there was still kind of a racial segregation. So some of the buildings were for white people, others were for black people, then in the houses of the black people there could only be mothers with kids but no husbands so it had to be single mothers with kids. And of course there weren't enough single mothers with kids so they kind of faked the absence of the husband and at the moment that the buildings were built there was a new law that segregation is not allowed anymore so all the apartments had to be given to all kinds of people and that meant that more and more black people moved into the white corners and then the white flight happened and all the white people ran away and became a completely colored neighborhood with a lot of, already at that time I think a lot of social problems and then the political system changed and there was no money anymore for the maintenance and then everything that broke got repaired and that led to situations where you had a window where a lot of the pipes broke and nothing got repaired and you had these like long stalact needs of ice hanging down and that again was the argument that was not well taken care of also by the tenants so it had to be torn down and as Charles Jenks said that was the day that modernism died and what he meant was that the ugly modern architecture has to die so he can build his post-modern architecture but of course it was not the fault of the architecture and that was the site when we came was still this wild forest, we have some areas in Berlin that were the same state so it was, nobody ever wanted to build there again. Also in the moment that we arrived the whole plot got sold to the NGA not NSA so the National Geographic Agency there's another image coming and this is things I have to tell to other people but you all know what St. Louis looks like and you all know why it looks like the way it looks like, you also all know that Ferguson is part of the St. Louis County and that this site is almost downtown and what is happening now is this whole site this is the Proud Aigo site that we've seen before with the high rises plus three times as much above there is a big construction site for basically a server farm and it's interesting because sometimes I look again when it looks like because you can still see it I wonder when it vanishes from Google Earth now this whole story was interesting to us because we couldn't understand how a city is taking itself apart mainly, how can it be that a city in the center of the city has so many falling apart buildings, brown fields, green fields and so on and then we made a big research about that I mean we have to, maybe you don't have to because you already know it but for us as Europeans it really is strange phenomena going on there what we see here is this is the Pulitzer Foundation this image is actually to show that it's also built on the same plot like all the other part of the city and it's built by this guy and the interesting thing is that when I looked at that I was wondering what critical regionalism is because I'm not so good in architectural history and I found out that critical regionalism is actually the opposite of post-modernism which I thought was an interesting thing and also a good reason to deal with these topics in this building because we thought that Tadawando would like it so why I'm showing this is because what is pretty clear is that as this building is made out of three normal St. Louis building lots we would probably fit a house in there and you can see it here as well now this is a research plan that we made after we have been explained that there was this law of the red lining where the city of St. Louis at some point decided that there's parts of the city that they would maintain and where they would put effort into keeping the urban structure and that is everything underneath the red line the red line is a street called Delmar and that everything above that line would be basically from an urbanistic point of view left to itself and of course you can guess who lived at that time on the lower part of the map and who lived on the upper part of the map and what was going on there and I think it's also interesting that you can see on this map very well that the density here actually remained better than density of this area so what we have here is a severe case of racial discrimination in urban planning and that's how neutral urban planning is or not okay so what we wanted to find is a neighborhood that wants to get rid of a house and we found the Lewis Place neighborhood that is very well organized already and there was somebody to talk to and we went there several times and had a lot of potluck dinners with the neighborhood association and walked around the neighborhood and decided that on a house together that we would take and that's here the 4562 Enright Avenue which was exactly the size of a house that we needed and we decided to look at it and find out how we do this now of course it was clear that it's a bit difficult to take the whole house I mean the budget of the polluter was okay but not okay enough to actually transport the whole house so we decided that we'd take mostly there everything but the bricks and everything but the stuff that was lying inside and that was a story on itself anyways so but I like the colors of that house somehow so we decided to take everything that's wood the floors, the windows, the doors and find ways to bring that over what we another thing that we found out by looking closely at this building because the building, the Lewis Place neighborhood used to be a neighborhood exclusively for white people and when we looked into the papers, the documents of this building, it was clear there was a moment when the house was bought by somebody by somebody and then three days later sold again to somebody else and it turned out that the somebody who bought the house was a white person who was working as an agent for a black person that was wanted to buy this house and the black person was I think a doctor or a teacher, the teacher came later and what you can see here is a strange effect, a strange part of the planning and that is you have two staircases one staircase is the staircase when you enter the house and you go up and these are the rooms that are connected to that then you have the living room here and so on and then there's another staircase and that was hidden in a drawer so it was not visible and it's connected to the kitchen and the rooms up there so there is the same division that you have running through the whole city is actually running through the house here where you have the servants on one side and we can only guess what color they had and the master is living in the front and they had completely separate kind of ecosystems that they were working, living in only connected by little kind of openings and doors where the food would be brought in and so anyways, so we made a big party with the Neighborhood Association we installed a big dinner table there was a children's zoo this is my colleague Jan there was an ice cream van the fire truck opened up the hydrant so the kids could play underwater he also got a bit wet this is Amy Pulitzer who also came there to say goodbye to the house and with this goodbye party we had already achieved one thing and that was that a lot of people that would normally go and see each other at Pulitzer but wouldn't really dare going into a neighborhood like that or not walk around there like in a normal city came and visited the place because it was, we were there and Amy was there and everyone was there so they all came and made this kind of step into a world they normally are avoiding and then we brought the house there this is an image that we've already seen it was a bit difficult I see, I flipped through this very fast so you can see the design of it and in the front it was quite intact in the back we left it a bit open and made an exhibition of all the research that we did and yeah and the most important part was that the Neighborhood Association who also had never been on the other side of Delmar to visit the Pulitzer Foundation also came and with them also all the people that knew about the story and what we did then was when we made this tour with the Space Buster three years after this exhibition we came again to this site because in the meantime the staff of the Pulitzer had discussed with the Neighborhood Association what to do with the site now now that the house is gone and they have decided to install a butterfly garden which I think is very good because we need pollinators and we have to make space for pollinators and we have to plant plants for pollinators so we can keep them and the Pulitzer found a young landscape architect and then together with him we kind of inaugurated the site and prepared it for the planting there was a dinner and the Space Buster and the picnic and we've also made a little work with questions we like questions as you know and we started building a new kind of staircase up that was then later on designed with the bricks of the house because the bricks is the only valuable thing of the house and part of it, like two pallets I think were used for the staircase and the other five pallets were given to the Neighborhood Association so they can finance their youth activities with it this is, is there any questions at this point? maybe it's better to ask about this now than later what does all this have to do with ambiguity, tolerance? No, okay, that seems to be clear, very good I'm glad that it's so clear the other one was transforming urban practice okay so we go there so the Temple of Airfield is in the center of the city we have three airports in Berlin or we had three airports one was Temple Of that was the first airport also the first airport in Germany and then there was Tegel that got closed two years ago I think and now we only have Schönefeldt Temple Of and Tegel are closed and the question that arose was what to do with Temple Of but going back a little bit into history so Temple Of was made into an airport because it was a big lawn outside the city that was used for all kinds of field trips and also the first kind of flying experiments and it was also used by the Prussian Army to make exercises and then we had all these kind of Lindbergh, Lelyenthal kind of flying experiments and then the first German airport was installed there also the founding airport of the Lufthansa and these zeppelins and so on looked like this, funny to see what an airport looked like at that time and then at some point in the late 30s the government at that time decided that we need a bigger airport and we all know what government that was and so there was a design competition and this kind of massive building that you see up here that half moon shaped building was decided upon there was a time when we had two airport buildings because actually the government didn't need an airport they needed a place to produce bombers for the Second World War and they also installed the first concentration camp beside Temple Of Airport for the workers in that factory and I go very fast through this because it's not what I really want to talk about but you can ask questions if you want and that's also why the area around Temple Of Airport was heavily bombed during the Second World War and then the notion of Temple Of switched a bit at the time, the years between 65 and 67 I suppose it was when Berlin was cut up from the rest of western Germany or west Berlin was cut up from the rest of west Germany and had to be fed by these aeroplanes there every two minutes they loaded an aeroplane to feed the 2 million people in Berlin and so that was kind of a positive notion and then after 89 when the war came down and the reunification happened there was a decision that maybe an inner city airport is not the hot contemporary thing to have anymore so there was a decision to close it in 2008 now the question was of course what happens next and the political decision was that of course yes it's good to have open space but we also need space for the building industry and the real estate market and anyways Berlin needs more apartments that time it was a bit questionable now it's a bit different so there was a decision to at least define certain areas and these are the red areas as kind of new housing estates and leave the center part of the taxi way that's the round thing and of course the runways the two long light green strips free but as if you know about urban planning you also know that these processes between a decision that's been taken and the realization can take many many years I suppose around 15 to 20 years to realize something like that also taking into account that the whole area had to be cleared from possible bombs that are still underground and there need to be competitions there need to be designs there need to be political decisions the whole planning process is just very complicated and then starts the building and so on so 15 years at least so the question that the city had and that was interesting was what happens in between and that's where we came in and where we're allowed to work in a team that is making plans only for these kind of 15 years or maybe they thought 10 years but we knew it's more in between and our proposal was this that we instead of this kind of typical urban mechanism of master planning we impose a kind of a more strategic way how new ideas of urbanity can invade this site and how this can also become something that is kind of manifest in the future of the site so this is a very simple idea I think I don't have to explain it you have 5 years to experiment and then 5 years of consolidation of these ideas and then that led to this plan here as you can see we are already behind that and it didn't happen for several reasons but this is the way that we are thinking these processes because we also have that's part of our argumentation is that if we want a city and we want the city where the people in the city also get the chance to maybe participate or maybe actively intervene into these processes we have to give these spaces we have to invent these formats where it's possible and within these formats have to be somehow also they have to be public they have to be looked at they have to be also there needs to be decisions one of these things is something that could be good for the future what is only very within the time that we are in and to kind of mediate and argument this we make these kind of diagrams that also keep a lot of things very blurry but it shows that we are thinking in a strategic way over time now the interesting thing about this is that there is all this long term top down processes the competition about housing estate at Columbia Dumb that actually means the site where the floating university is the international building exhibition that was an idea that there should be another a third Berlin international building exhibition in 2017 and EGA is the international garden exhibition these were all ideas that were projected on the temple of airfield at that time and if you know a bit about this three billion nothing of that happened the international building exhibition was cut by the mayor the international garden exhibition went to the outskirts of the city because there was already a bit too much wind against it because it always means you have a closed park where people have to pay entrance and that was not a good idea and all the construction never happened and this went like that but here are the plans that we made one of the tools that we proposed was that there should be something that we called pioneer fields that should be implemented where basically people can come with an idea and do what they want and as we know that Berlin is a very creative city we know that these things can be very successful then there was another movement at the same time that was a movement that proposed to squat the airport and just take it for the city because it was still fenced off and this created like the biggest police action that Berlin has ever seen the thing was that there was nobody who squatted it was a fake but still the city spent so much money on protecting a temple of airfield against squatters that could have financed a couple of years of cultural program there anyways these are just some figures and then the opening actually happened so 2010 the reopening happened and it was a big success we started to also in this to come with one of our mobile activators this one is called the knot it's a truck that has a lot of things inside that you can unfold like the city mattress here and these funny Haribo colored roofs and it comes with program and so on it wasn't really necessary but was still good to have that also to say that this is a place where you can do these things where these things can happen now at the same time we were still a bit afraid that even though the international building building and garden exhibition didn't happen maybe the city of Berlin could get the idea of applying to make an expo that's the next thing that you can do we make a world fair and then we looked at the site and we saw that it actually is bigger than the Hanover expo in 2000 and it's also about the size of the Shanghai expo that was there before and with these stupid Berlin politicians you can be sure there's one liberal guy who says it's a super good idea to be behind them and then the dream of this expo is that it sweeps a lot of money into the city and things are getting possible that weren't possible before but we already knew that we would be afraid of that so what we did was we made our own expo we fundraised quite a lot of money and we declared that together with the theatre in Berlin we make an expo because the idea was that if we make an expo the city can't make an expo anymore it's a bit dangerous game but anyways so we made this expo in 2012 that we called the great world's fair with the subtitle the world is not fair and we invited a lot of artists to design pavilions pavilions is actually the nice part about the expo there's all these iconic pavilions in the past of world fairs that we as architects still find amazing and we would love to see them back some of them are still or again back and some never came back like Le Corbusier here and we thought that's a nice task so we want to design expo pavilions but of course we want to do it our way and there's these buildings that are on the temple of airfield that have like strange different uses some of them are weather stations others are radars and antennas and maintenance things and there's also some buildings that belong to the US Army and we decided to take these buildings and transform them into expo pavilions and we also made this incredible drawing here that took us a lot of time because in this drawing we collected all the iconic buildings that were ever built in the whole history of world fairs and we put them all on the temple of airfield and you know what it looks like it's not a planning it's more a game I think but this drawing we decided to put on top of that building that I just saw together with the artist Erich Gönnrich to have a pavilion that actually talks about the history of ex world fairs and here it is so that's the same building that you've seen before just slightly transformed and kind of camouflaged a bit in the color code of the airport and you can go up there and from that terrace up there you can see this image of the great world fair how it could be on temple of airfield that's another building that's actually my favorite building is still there it looks like nothing looks like a garage but it is the building that housed the weather balloon of the german weather forecast so there was this big helium balloon that was left into the air once or twice a day to measure the coming weather in the stratosphere somewhere and I always liked the idea of this kind of globe that came out of that thing like a parking garage and then went up and came down again and as a globe is an important factor of a world fair we decided to use that and together with construct lab we've designed this auditorium that is also a very nice auditorium because you can take it apart and we invited the institute for spatial experiments with the pool of weight liaison and a lot of super cool students to use it for the time of our event as their experimental ground we also made a pavilion that was a stage for a performance by the japanese theater maker Toshiki Okada you have to think that Fukushima just happened the year before and we also happened the year before and we looked at the images and it was amazing how similar the images looked and then we built this pavilion from a reused stage set of the Hosta cultural event the house of the culture of the world where we inherited a lot of wood from a crazy show that they had for two weeks and we built these our pavilions with it and here it is and he made a performance in there and many others super good artists very good things that they did but I want to get closer to the floating university so still there were these plans designers were chosen to design garden things houses and so on and we were sitting there thinking what could happen and then they made this pavilion where they displayed the planning they called it participation whereas you know Burga Battalion is actually participation but the people in Berlin they don't believe in these type of top down participation ideas so it looked a bit like this after two days and I was clear nobody wanted it and then there was a group that was super smart and they were called 100% Temple of and they wrote a law and as in our democratic system you can actually a poll for a law that you want to impose and with the general elections there also came a small paper where you could cross yes and no if you want that law or not and that law said no construction whatsoever anytime in the future and the whole thing has to stay open for the public as it is because we love it as it is we don't want any real estate investors fantasies here and I didn't believe they would work but it worked more than 50% of the Berliners voted for this law and that meant that the senate of Berlin had to react on it and actually put this law into function which meant that nothings up to today not exactly nothing because there was a refugee camp that was built but that was under different circumstances so nobody said something against it and so the whole temple overfilled is protected by this law now this is an old map but I'm showing you something because here we can see an important part of the infrastructure that is this here and that is that is the rainwater base and where the floating university is and you can see that there is this gutter here that is lead into it and it collects all the water from all these concrete surfaces plus all the water from all these roofs plus also a bit of water from the street and it's all running in there we'll show you later and this is why it's there because it's on the other side of the road and it was forgotten to be included into the law now we thought that maybe that's a good idea but it's also a danger because it's not protected on the other hand it's the only reason that maybe still because something else that got blocked a bit we can't do things like the world's fair there anymore because it's the construction it's a bit difficult it's a situation that needs to be worked on but we knew that in the rainwater base we can still do things and we can use it as a threshold to protect us now these are just some impressions from the field and now I come to the floating university but I have to change into the other show how much time did I spend? what time is it? ok I just do it right so floating university up up up this is 2018 doesn't look like that anymore but so as I said this is the site this is where the gata goes and then it goes in a tunnel underneath that ends in the basin here and it's never that blue because it's a stormwater basin so it's only filled with water when it rains heavily but it's an important infrastructure in the city of Berlin because the city of Berlin has a mixed sewage system so that means that the water and the shit goes in the same canal that was an invention by the Berlin sewage water engineer and plus the main urban planner of the 19th century who went around the world and then found this in Chicago and he said that's good we do it that's the interesting thing I talked yesterday with a friend about for example the subway in New York City that was built also a long time ago and it's still working the same way it's almost impossible to change it same thing with water infrastructure at least in the middle of the city it was built in the 19th century it's still the same, still works well except for moments of heavy rain when there's heavy rain it's too much water for the sewage system so there's these spill overs that go into the river and that's an ecological nightmare as you can imagine so every time there's a spill over there's a lot of dying fish it's just too much nutrients in the wartime it's a time that we don't want to go back to anyway so that's why it's important that this water gets collected somewhere and then slowly given into the river and that there's also especially in areas like that where you have a lot of paved surface there's the water goes the water is being collected and then that's what the basin is before no this way we don't what is this I've already talked about it in the last lecture so I go through this very fast and so here we go this is the basin when we first saw it and the reason why the images are there is we've when we made the world fair that was the moment when we found out that this basin exists because you cannot see it from the street it's up there but and this is the canal where the water comes in but it's surrounded you can see it here by a ring of allotment gardens and they are so green and they have trees and little houses on them that from the street you don't see it and also the basin of course is 8 meter going down so it's it wasn't invisible and the allotment gardens have a fence around it so there's only 100 allotment gardeners who had for 50 years had the key to go into that basin and there's lots and lots of people that live in the surrounding neighborhoods that are still today four years after we've opened the Golden Lion and so on they still come in and say I didn't know that this is here because it was and and that's another funny thing about it because that's the proof that we've found it at that time because on that drawing that I've shown before with all the iconic buildings we have put the new Raum Labo headquarters into the basin already in 2012 now we never dreamt of it we just saw it and thought it's an interesting place this I've talked about and then in 2018 somehow the weather had changed because when we made that drawing it was before the public poll for that law and after it was clear that there would be no construction on Temple of Airfield the prices for real estate around the Temple of Airfield rose enormously we now have a corner of Neukölln that used to be the last corner where you want to live right beside the airport nobody wanted to live there so it really had very very low rents it's now one of the most expensive parts of Berlin where you can find an apartment and because of that we already saw the truffle pigs of the real estate industry sneaking around all corners of the area and we thought because we like this basin to be just this kind of secret place but we thought it's not going to stay secret for long so now we have to put a foot in the door and to put a foot in the door as we architects we made this program like idea we are going to build this offshore place for cities and transformation whatever it is and it took us three years of difficult diplomacy to actually make it happen but then surprise surprise it happened and here it is so I don't know maybe it's too much to talk about all the difficulties we have gone through but the interesting thing was that as the basin is part of the infrastructure of the airport there is a company that is in charge of the maintenance of the airport and renting out spaces and keeping it running the airport building is called the temple of project and they are also in charge of this basin and they are owned by the city and so the way was actually to persuade somebody in the planning office to put a word in with the director of this company to give us a contract to make this little thing for one year that was one thing and it happened and the other thing was if you want to do something like that you need money where do you get the money I know that in the United States that's quite difficult either you find a billionaire and you build something like little island and then it is also like little island but if you want to have if you don't want to go that way and this is actually more difficult in Germany you apply for cultural funding because we have that and there was the lucky coincidence that when we thought about this in 2017 we knew that in 2019 there will be the 100 year Bauhaus anniversary anniversary is always moments when public funding is filling up a big pot with money and putting it into the middle of the cultural institutions and artists and so on and they say whoever wants to have a share can write an application now it's the same with the boys birthday Joseph boys or I don't know it could be Mozart or Bach if there's an anniversary there's money and we thought that Bauhaus maybe is a good idea because we were already very very interested in kind of these learning learning sites and that's also but I have to admit it was also a reason to design and also to name it the floating university to get that money and and that also worked out fine so we were able to realize it and here's sorry press the wrong button you said it before so we made this design and we realized it this building on the right is designed by Atelier Bauhaus from Tokyo it was it was built for an exhibition in again the house where we already inherited the other structure from and we had this in the process we had this super good idea to take it apart together with Bauhaus and bring it to a place where it makes sense and the place where we thought it makes sense was the refugee camp in the temple of Hangas that was there in 2015-16 and it took a while but then we managed to build it up there as kindergarten that was before we wanted to do with the floating university but there wasn't before but it was a way to already get a foot in the door into the temple of airport to be able to talk with the director it didn't work out that well but anyways because the company that was running the refugee camp was fighting with the director all the time so they didn't invite him for the inauguration of the children house but it was still there that was good and when we then finally started the floating university the they called us and said we have to take it down again because the refugee camp is now moving out into containers outside of the building and so we had to take it apart again and then we started planning with it and build it up on the site and it's actually super nice where we talked with Yoshihitsuka Moto and everything that he said from this kind of structure and then he said but if you put it there it looks a bit like a Chinese tea pavilion and you have to make these sliding doors that's why we designed the sliding door it also needed a roof and so on but it's still there, it's super good our only building that we can close so there was an auditorium there was a kitchen up there there was a water experimental tower and a bar and here you see the auditorium and the auditorium also had this pool in the middle so people could sit in the water on hot days or just put there it was not always working as you can see and there was a lot of experiments of all kinds of practices on one side we invited artists to make workshops and on the other side we thought now I'm coming to your question in the beginning that was before we officially started we invited groups of students or teaching groups from all kinds of different European universities where we knew the teachers and lots of people and friends in our network that are teaching somewhere and we wrote to them all and said we have this site now and if you want to come for a week or two or three and exercise your research here and you can do it and there were about 20 groups of all kinds of students that came in the first year that all tried out lots and this is just one example with the students from The Hague that were using the site to this guy is making coffee without electricity and he's making fire himself and so on it really brought the students also to a different idea this is an installation that was built by a group of students from and Munich together a kind of a bicycle trail that's referring a bit to the history of the site because it used to be before it was a rainwater base and it was a bicycle racetrack there and so they cleaned up apart and made this kind of bicycle dance space then that's a more artistic approach there on the right that is the result of the workshop that Spanish architects what are they called thank you that's it it's an interspecies meeting place the first one that we had the first group that actually pointed out that we need this and now we know it but there were also all kinds of activists making workshops and so on and then we started something that became more and more important and that is the kids university so we invited artists to work with kids on the site and make all kinds of things the kids inhabited the site immediately of course when they came there they started walking around with rubber boots they started looking at animal traces and the mud made photos of them and research on certain things they told stories about the things that they are road stories about the stuff that they found and told these stories to the grownups they looked at the water of course there was also workshops together with water analysts and chemists and so on and we also water became also a very important aspect there because there is this water and it is being collected and then led into the river and we all know through the swamp city planning ideas that actually rain water should the best for rain water is if it dissolves at the place where it is raining down and it is not being led into the river and the problem with the water in the basin is that through being led over a kind of different kinds of surfaces the roof surface of the building also the concrete surface and the road is highly contaminated with all kinds of things pesticides from pesticides to oil to nicotine and so on and it is all in the water so the question is how can it be so we built a set of different experiments this is a moving bad reactor that is actually a very well-working bacteria cleaning system and we also made a rain water collection in the toilet where the water is being collected in the basin in the middle and instead of flushing the toilet with a box that is filling up with water from somewhere you have to take the water with one of these flowering buckets and take it to the toilet and then flush yourself which makes you a lot more aware of the water effect and of course sometimes the water also is invading the space and then we have Aqualta and we have to deal with it but actually we are always embracing these moments because it only happens two or three times a year and then finally it happens and we have put on all our long rubber boots up to here and start jumping around in it like that and after that we have to clean up and another thing that we are doing is of course the spatial experiments which are also very important this was 2018, this is what it looks like at the moment this was the in-between time when we didn't have so much money so we had to reduce and also give back the scaffolding to the scaffolding guy and we built this iceberg which we thought was very iconic for the situation and also very beautiful as you can see in different ways, you can make these photos there, it's very so it's the perfect Instagram site and also I mean that's a big plus of course and just a few images what it looks like now so we have at the moment we have a kitchen in this kind of building there on the right and then there is this roof that can move along the rails and then in the back in this kind of a bit Haiti I don't know Hawaiian looking building that's the bar this is the moving roof and there is also a bigger one, I don't know if it's on the thing the thing the state of of the floating university is for the past three years that we have founded an association and this association is running it so it started as an initiative and me and my colleagues and then we thought that we want to rest it on more shoulders and we also want to give it a bit away to the city and the association now is more than 50 members and these 50 members are kind of organized in different kinds of groups that are taking care of all the different aspects, the academic program the cultural program, the kids program the maintenance the architectural experiments raising funding and very very important lobby work for the city because as you will see it's still not so clear one of the most important things that we found out is that we have the perfect site to invent new forms of urban practice and one of them is walking with rubber boots in algae 5 centimeter algae water which is definitely a very I don't know you get into these strange moods and you always saw these groups of two or three people walking together with rubber boots like really in deep philosophical thoughts and where do you have that? it's really difficult to create that moment and there's lots of other things that could be done on this because it's all concrete surface with water and algae and grass and so on and the water is only this deep sometimes sometimes it's completely gone like you can see here on dry summers like this there's nothing one of the things that happened now is that our landlord who thought that we would only stay for a year were a bit surprised that we organized ourselves in a way and made a lot of lobby work to stay and then they found out that they are responsible for this place and with this kind of response of this responsibility they started seeing that they are also responsible for the maintenance of the public infrastructure now one idea of the public infrastructure is that the water is coming in and running out now the outflow is constantly blocked by these reeds that you see there because as they are growing on concrete whenever there's high water they move towards the outflow so what they are doing is making with big machines the reeds away from the outflow so that the water can go out the other thing that they found out as we knew it already is that it's highly contaminated mud which is something that in the best Donna Haraway way staying with the trouble is exactly what we need to have in front of us to take the right decisions for the future and with what they are doing now every now and then the reeds is coming with a big machine and scraping the mud off our holy mud and other things is that they don't one more thing is that of course there's also a big variety of all kinds of animals our landlord had this idea that actually we like that it becomes an irrigation zone so that they finally block the outflow take away the concrete and then the water can irrigate into the water or could be activated in other ways that still needs to be decided for that they had to make a biological survey and this biological survey created over a year created a list of animals and of course there's amphibia frogs and others and that was given to the district's nature authorities and they said oh there's frogs then we know you're walking around there with rubber boots in the water and sometimes the kids are even walking in the reed we said no no no not in the breeding period because we all know there's lots of birds and other animals breeding there and then they said no but you're not allowed to walk there anymore so all these nice moments of walking around with rubber boots in this marvelous basin and doing experiments with floodings in the base and they don't happen anymore they have a constant drought now because the water is flowing out very fast and it's not being cleaned by the reed anymore before it goes out into the river so all these marvelous situations are belong to the past at the moment and um um that's the way that we organize as an association because we have to keep away from the concrete because we have to ask for permission every year again and now they said you only get the permission if you put up these signs that nobody's allowed to walk anywhere besides on your wooden structures and you have to get rid of these rubber boots so all these rubber boots we could have new rubber boots maybe but they really said we don't want to see these rubber boots anymore because as long as you have these rubber boots people are going to put them on and walk around wherever and so we had to clean that off rubber boots are gone and we have to basically all the wooden structures to walk on which is it bugs me really the space is getting smaller the space of experimentation is getting smaller bureaucracized and even us as an association we start to have this do we really obey these stupid rules that are put upon us just because we want to have the next permission for next year and or shouldn't we do it so there's all these discussions that somehow you could say they're interesting but they're also um they prevent us from thinking about hey what could be the next interesting topic that we could tackle here so what I'm what I'm trying to do at the moment that's my latest strategy is for this festival that I'm making this October that is called re-educate me a post-fossile theme park that is kind of trying to transfer strategies of sustainability from the Japanese Edo period that was the time when Japan was closed off from the rest of the world and they had to live with the resources they had on the islands and everything that we know and love about Japan was created basically at that time including sushi if you can only cook rice once a week and you have to eat cold rice with raw fish the rest of the week the only thing you can do is put some algae around it and because and many other things like the kimono but also a lot of very very important and interesting art forms you know where the reduction of the everyday life also kind of boiled down distilled in poetry and in performance and in music all the minimalism that we know from Japan comes from 250 years of no import and export basically and taking care of the country that you know the land and so on so we looked at that we made us imposing them about that 20 artists to listen to the scientists and historians that we invited in Tokyo and Berlin at the same time so we streamed like tonight and they are trying to make this kind of translation act into contemporary art and one idea that came up there is from an artist couple called Maya Franz and what they want to do is they want to build these guitars out of dead Berlin street street trees because we are losing about 1000 street trees trees that stand in the street every year and they are proposing that we could build these guitars with it then I thought that's good these are no rubber boots for sure and they are also our own wooden constructions it's a kind of minimal architecture that is permission free because if you go with a pair of sandals to the building authorities and you ask for permission they are going to laugh at you they will say it's permission free so we have these permission free wooden structures to walk on and that's my next step is that we get the people back into the basin on these guitars I think that's it thank you you asked yourself a question which is what do all of that policy price building project what does that have to do with ambiguity actually ambiguous tolerance because I love both of the words and we've used those words many times in our just kind of explanation of how we approach architecture but I always understood ambiguity and tolerance as almost the opposite operation tolerance you have to have two things and then they kind of move they do the stance with each other and you have to leave that space that's the third space in between versus ambiguity it's like one thing that maybe can be interpreted in multiple ways so there's this kind of defuse bifurcation that happens by ambiguous tolerance well ambiguity times that was what your word was yeah it's I think one thing that is good to realize is that we live in places that are created through all kinds of different mindsets and some of them we like and some of them we really don't like but they are still part of our environment our built environment and our social environment and I think it's and some of them some of these mindsets still exist and some are kind of slowly transforming and also there's new ideas and new mindsets like Fridays for Future for example asking for different ways and of course there's always different opinions how these things how our surroundings especially the urban surroundings have to be transformed and I think with ambiguity the ambiguity about that is that they all exist in several worlds at the same time and that maybe we don't have to embrace them and find it all super good but we have to accept first of all that this is the way and there's a lot of historical background that led to this and that also if you look into the future there are all kinds of different streams that want different ways and we have to tolerance doesn't mean that you have to necessarily find a compromise but it means that you tolerate that this exists and then you can start with the struggle the democratic struggle as well and finding finding other people that companions that think the same I think this is what I mean and you need both operations to live with the ambiguity of democracy you started by saying something that I thought was super beautiful and later I thought was also very funny when you said the story of Ramabor is part of the story of Berlin and then you showed us the slide about and you talked about the book project which is also very exciting and then you talked about and I forgot what it was what it was called that sort of gap between that exists in in Berlin bureaucracy what is the phrase of what is it called again? the gap between the idea and the master plan and the realization there was like this particular this German word they used and it seems to me though I mean that this kind of the beauty tolerance this idea that has to be you know trained and learned to me after hearing it expressed in this way somehow like unlocked a lot of the projects that I had been familiar with but hadn't fully strung them together in this connected way through learning, through education through making these opportunities for people to come together in conversation to develop maybe not a tolerance but first an understanding that's what's been so incredible about a lot of your work especially the earlier work like the education boat you know floating the future of floating for example but also other your project sort of like the realm of a project within the educational institution I wonder how if you can maybe talk with that a bit more for those of us trying to maybe grapple with you know how to make those spaces either an institution or within the confines of practice in a particular way so we can't that was a journey sorry by the way if I start from the destination the way you ended I think I thought a lot about the floating university that also housed another learning experiment that we did that's called the making future school that was for one year happening in the floating university and the second year happened in the Hauster Statistic which is another big project that we are running in Berlin and that's a project that my colleague Markus was leading and he is teaching at the Art Academy in Berlin and he is making this project also with you know not with money from the school but with money from some kind of I think even from the building ministry or something that was just a pot of money that was put somewhere and he grabbed it and said okay we are going to do this now and that was that was super good but super difficult at the same time so the thing that was super good was that there was this money but to administrate the money through the university was a nightmare and I think that's the same everywhere you fundraise and then through the kind of treadmills of the institution it becomes kind of difficult to use and what was the trick that he found was that the money that was a collaboration between the Udeka the Academy of Arts in Berlin the floating university and Raum Labor so that the money could actually go through Raum Labor and then into these kind of learning experiments so you always have to think of these kind of administrative tricks as well and what I found out by making the floating university and inviting all my friends that are teaching somewhere in universities they were also super happy that they could go to a place where it's almost like the bad is made they don't have to argue anything with the university everything that they have to do is bring the students there and start the work but creating a space like that out of a system like a university at least talking Europe at the moment, I don't know how it is here but it's super difficult so it's very good if there is you know if there is a new initiative that is also a bit independent from the university that is building up this kind of Black Mountain College whatever and then opening it up as a new kind of playground institute towards the universities and because it makes it kind of independent from that administrative body I think that because I see it wherever I go, wherever I talk and wherever I am invited there is all these super cool people teaching and their professional life are making crazy projects and when they start trying to when they try to do this with their students they kind of get gray hair but but I think there is modes to do this and I think this is also why why a lot of people love this idea of the floating university it's opening up this door and maybe we can do it more I think I have some follow up questions about the ambiguity but I can't wait maybe I'll just say one thing that I think that to me it seems that the success of being able to find these funding sources and then also the framework of Temple Hof to understand how to navigate bureaucracy in a particular way also has a lot to do with your skills and abilities as researchers which is not as you said it's not a separate practice but it's often treated as such in learning in the framework of education so I wonder I'm asking you a lot to just expand on things I'm sorry for that but I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit maybe for your own personal experience if that's something that you've thought about explicitly in terms of how you then communicate or share that kind of process with others or I think that coming back to your initial point that Raumler was connected to the past 22 years of history in Berlin I think we were the city just offered a lot of possibilities to start certain projects and temporary things and you probably all know all the art and music scene in Berlin and how they just invaded spaces and experiments and tried out things and that was super attractive it was super good that we were in the city at that time because it's getting more and more difficult everywhere but we kind of saved certain ways of doing things I think this research part was not very strong in the beginning we basically had ideas and these ideas of course came out of a certain kind of blurry feeling about sites and locations and cultural formats but the longer we stayed there the more we found out that actually all this experience that we gained by just doing things is also part of that research and gives us a lot of knowledge that we can activate also when we come to other places so when we're now invited to a place like Pristina and Kosovo we've been this summer that we have these activation tools that still need to be adapted to the site and we still need that we can just take something and impose it to any other place but we know that we have to go there and talk and understand and find out how a site like the site that we were given in Pristina which was an old brick factory that was used basically as DIY for recycling industry you could also say it was a garbage dump that it's necessary before we start with any kind of intervention there and any kind of planning process that we have to understand the rules and the ways that it's working plus we have to understand the local politics we have to understand we have to look at the history of the site and so on before we start doing things and then still what we're doing should be more creating a common ground to start the discussion but even to create the common ground to start a discussion you have to make a planning and so on yeah and the other thing when you go into academic learning environment that's what I always find the most difficult it's not so difficult to go together with students into the city and make research the difficulty is to make the translation into a planning and there is a lot of people who have not the experience in doing things also don't really know they have these two languages language of research language of planning but somehow it doesn't work together and then the language of planning always asks for buildings and architectural faculties and the research maybe says no why are you thinking about buildings people have to sing songs and eat good food and they have to find ways how to harvest all these fruits that are growing on the streets that on the side of the road and so on these are the findings of a research that you do on site and then how to make a building out of that the good thing is, the good news is we don't need so many new buildings so we can with a good conscience as architects concentrate on more the soft factors of space maybe this is all there if it's about sites in the city where we live and practice for many years it's not so difficult because we know where still I can be surprised about it but it's more the question when you come to I don't know a city in Taiwan or a city in Italy that we are not so well acquainted with to actually find these sites and then it is just enormously important that we have local partners that are working a bit in our direction that know the city and so on so we need these agents for sure to help us find the right areas and still I think it's also a way part of our research is really sneaking into all the corners and not being afraid to go somewhere and so on but and we also have I think we've developed a kind of a good nose for the sites that we're looking at and these are very often sites that it's really about the potential of a site seeing a potential that in a sense it's not so different from somebody like one of these truffle pigs of the real real estate who knows okay this is this is an area that is emerging and it will become more expensive so maybe we go and have a look around there and then our location scout for movies it's about it's a bit like that there's always a question if a site is super cool but it's outside the city how do I get the people there that's difficult it's closer to people it's a lot easier close to public transport and it's also a question what is there that can be activated I think that we are a lot more open also to activating non-human species and and so on like there's not really a recipe it's a it's a learning I appreciate that question as well so I have never seen you speak before so I have this startling feeling like there's so much in common with some of the questions that we're always facing here and you of course aren't surprised by that but with I was thinking in the 80s there was a gallery in New York I wasn't here I was in California but it grew to be quite prominent it was run by a gallery maybe you know it under Patty asked her she showed graffiti art and when before graffiti art existed but people started sending her slides she said I'd like to be represented by your gallery can I meet you and her reply was start your own gallery start your own war I don't want to show you how to do this and it was trying to maintain the idiosyncratic quality rather than allow it to become so that I mean that when I was like 20 years old and I thought whoa that's an interesting person I'd like to know her but the reason I bring it up is that I think you're when you describe Proud Aigo that image and the way Charles Jenks mobilized it I was an undergrad when that image and that statement was made what you I think did very articulately there was started to show that there's another story about why that could have happened and one big thing was the Brooke amendment is Senator Brooke Massachusetts managed to get a bill through congress that said public housing ran at 25% of household income which dramatically accelerated a shift in the population in public housing if you had a good income you left because your rent actually went up and after the Brooke amendment public housing became far more monolithically poor and more monolithically racial but that kind of story like then allows a building to come apart socially but also allows it in a way to be misappropriated as an image like this is why it came down and to me that was like sheer persecution of the building and the people but then on the other side of it is something that falls out of regulation the free university water basin when the people attempted to liberate the space they didn't realize anyway I don't mean over interpreting but this kind of quality of like trying to find spaces that supersede regulatory procedure and thereby are an opportunity which is I think that is like such an incredibly I mean it's so potent I don't think real estate is often nearly as good at finding it as people like Patty Astor were with the fund gallery I think it's all throughout your lecture I was thinking of terrain bug and Solace Morales that agreed to which spaces that fall out of the commodity process we shouldn't rush to put them in it because they are indeed that so but and one final comment the airport the Howard Hughes airport at Playa Vista for Hughes Industries was a real contentious site that people wanted to get their hands on as real estate and there was a huge push to like stop it from becoming overly commodified Dana Cuff at UCLA back in the early 90s described that there was still an ethos in land in the perception of land use in the U.S. despite all the perversions of American media that you should work to control property and the public by and large does not believe most people who own or control property have exerted an ethical amount of work to control such property to object about the use of property you get called a quack that's her term when in fact you're exposing a kind of broadly held belief that property is overly controlled by people who have not earned the right to control that property that's where I think the Berlin your project for the floating university is this kind of ingenious well it's not ingenious because you're not trying to be tricky but it's a it's very poignant that way like how to maintain authorship and control over a place without submitting yourself to the normal procedure of gaining economic authority to own it then there's something that's remarkable that way anyway those are comments not questions it's a wonderful lecture thank you and your jukebox method of suggesting topics kind of works the immense of these are serious to go against something wider um thank you maybe yeah this is a super fast question first thank you for this amazing conversation and the presentation of course and also one of the things that I found like amazing and very meaningful in the world of round labor is how you explain I mean beyond the project like all of the process after the project or as you say in some point like the design futures so but also you mentioned donahatta way and staying with trouble so I would like to ask you you know like more like as a comment how do you envision like the new future of you know like of these kind of practices as I mean I personally see like a very close relationship between donahatta way and round maybe but I want to know like how do you envision like these like questions that need to be respond like in these like emergency let's say in this urgency of new ideas yeah that I mean then the good thing about everything that I show today is that um it has already happened and and I can look at it kind of retrospectively of course there's a that there's always the to create kind of utopian ideas or even if it's only short term utopian next 10 years something there's always big attraction in that but the what we found out is that it's always very helpful to route this all in our presence look at what what is there and what we have at the moment to actually also make any kind of future vision um understandable and kind of graspable and we we very barely think about futures that are further away than 10 years and um but of course we try to that within these 10 years we can imagine very very drastic changes like the changes that we've all went through in the past years you know who would have thought that we would be all sitting at home for a year or um all I don't know if it's the same here but the energy crisis and the war in Ukraine uh is really something that changes our world completely it's kind of turning it upside down and um and that's of course a um it's a disaster both it's a disaster but on the other side it also shows us um something that also we can see we look at history you know especially in Germany the Third Reich was maybe 12 years 13 years and then it's not so so much time that you need to destroy a lot of things in the whole world if you want so but if you see it the other way around that's also there is the possibility of change so we can change our behavior towards nature we can change our behavior towards resources we can also look at architecture in a completely different way that's no problem and we can create a practice that's maybe also a lot faster than the architecture that we know because that's you know with architecture we are mostly stuck in these very slow processes except if you are if you're in one of these countries where things go super fast because there's a lot of investment into concrete and the political systems are you know and the planning authorities are not so then of course they can go very fast but normally it's a slow ship and we can it's too slow for all the changes that need to be made and that wasn't really an answer to your question but it was somehow thank you so much thank you