Action Village

The Research Village design studio evolved in a remarkably different way than most traditional design studios. Encouraged by the teachers, the group (consisting of 20 students) quickly decided to work on the project together and as a collective instead of the usual competing small groups. Beyond the actual task, the group set themselves some basic questions to work after. These questions revolved around and reflected over how to create the necessary change towards a more sustainable architecture and construction industry and more transparent and agile design process. Furthermore, an essential part of the process was to try different methods and possibilities to teach architecture and hence drive a change in the education of architects. Most importantly how to transfer theses processes beyond the university and in to architectural practice. 

 

Over the course of the semester, it was particularly challenging to manage the multiplicity of opinions, ideas and expectation of 20 people. By actively trying out different ways to organise group, having reoccurring discussion, as well as a multiple of decision-making strategies, we distributed and broke down the tasks into smaller working groups. We renegotiated often and tried to keep the process as open and horizontal as absolutely  possible trying to utilize the expertise input we could gather from our teachers, guest critics, ourselves and other students. The following time diagram illustrates the development of the entire group and shows the agile movement of the members in the different working groups, among each other as well as important milestones.

 

As a medium we mainly use interventions and workshops in public space to communicate our content to a broader audience in a direct exchange. Therefor we chose the name Action Village, to separate ourselves slightly from the studio name. As a collective we put on smaller actions at our faculty to emphasise our societies consumption structures and what we need to do to change them.For our largest action, we thematised post-fossil mobility as well as land justice in the city with regards to motorised traffic. For this purpose, large parts of the parking areas on Berlin's Straße des 17 Juni were closed, and on the suddenly empty large space we organised a cargo bike riding school. We saw the event as way to show student and staff on campus what possibilities there are in choices of mobility in the inner city but mostly to emphasise the immense spaces that exist on the campus and that it could be used as a communal space for the people studying, working and living there.

 

The cargo bike school had around 200 guests, 15 initiatives and groups present at the market and managed to reach even the dean of the university.