I recently completed my final project for a workshop in Cottbus. I collaborated with three other students: Anne Groß, Sebastian Seyfarth, and Erko Luhaaru. In the beginning of the project, I wrote an abstract on what we hoped to practice—Community Architecture.
We strive to democratize the design process. This begins by connecting constituencies: the community, the local governance, and the owner. Each constituency will be approached and compassionately listened to, not judged, until theirs and others' perspectives have been voiced and evaluated. We will engage constituencies on a one-to-one basis, going door to door in the community, contacting the local governance, and contacting the owner—while simultaneously we will begin a public outreach campaign with fliers, signage, and installations. We will host meetings with all the constituencies to create dialogue and explore possibilities for the abandoned Stasi site at Nordrand 45. Each meeting step will be documented as a stream of design process data, which will be interpreted with the community and the students to come to terms with the various positions, through synthesis or recognition of differences. Democratization of the design process cannot predetermine outputs, but we must be open to the communities decisions and outputs, while we hope to create documentation, installations, tangible streams of intervention, or architecture.
Beginning with this abstract and resulting in the final video, my group engaged in a dialogue that placed the architect out of the traditional role of delivering vision, and into the public sector, engaging in public service architecture.
English subtitles soon to come (maybe..).
