Location: Berlin, Germany
Founded: 1999
Each project by raumlaborberlin is based upon the idea of collaboration. This involves changing formations within their office for each project, as well as bringing in external experts and involving future users, neighbours or inhabitants of their architecture as early in the design process as possible. Within this broad, participatory method – that aims to include laymen and professional planners alike – hand drawings have become one of the key communicative tools. They help to make ideas visible and plausible to a wide audience and build the foundations upon which the discussions and visions of the collective can actually be developed.
In their 18 years of practice, raumlaborberlin have developed a remarkable style of architectural drawing, executed collectively and by hand.
Previous page: Stick On City at the Venice Biennale 2011. This page: World Fair poster, 2012. (Images courtesy raumlaborberlin)
Raumlaborberlin was founded in Berlin in 1999 by a group of friends who happened to also be (mostly) architecture students. It continues to be a collective with changing collaborators, although current members of the collective are Andrea Hofmann, Axel Timm, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, Christof Mayer, Florian Stirnemann, Francesco Apuzzo, Frauke Gerstenberg, Jan Liesegang and Markus Bader.
raumlabor.net
In a style somewhere between Yona Friedman, Archigram and Keith Haring, they mix quick sketches, pop-art collages, storyboards, comics and utopian drawings of extraordinary structures. It is important to them that these drawings do not focus on the built structures alone, but also on what’s happening within and between them; i.e. their architecture acts as a backdrop to human actions.
The imperfection of their drawings, even when showing completed projects, makes it clear that raumlaborberlin don’t pretend to offer fixed solutions to spatial problems. Rather, they point out problems and potential opportunities to activate the users of urban space towards collective action. I (fh)
raumlaborwelt, 2008.
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