Credit: Victoria Tomaschko
Credit: Lena Giovannazzi
Credit: Lena Giovannazzi
Credit: Lena Giovannazzi
Credit: Lena Giovannazzi
Credit: Daniel Seiffert
Credit: Constanze Flamme
Credit: Daniel Seiffert
Ephemeral structures planted into the concrete floor of a disused rainwater basin hidden in the centre of Berlin house Floating University’s interdisciplinary programme of activities
The first things to know about the Floating University are that it is neither floating nor a university. The next thing to know is that this peculiar spatial experiment in a quiet corner of Kreuzberg, Berlin, has been a centre for architectural knowledge production of the highest level since 2018. Its freewheeling design, a constantly evolving constellation of open timber structures, is drawing some of the finest thinkers operating in architectural circles: in one weekend alone, during the inaugural summer of programming, I saw lectures by Keller Easterling, Eyal Weizman and Benjamin Bratton. Even more highbrow, the pseudo-institution was the centrepiece of Raumlabor’s Golden Lion-winning installation at last year’s Venice Architecture Biennale; the jury observed ‘an inspiring collaborative design approach that calls for participation, regeneration and collective responsibility’. And yet all my interviewees want to talk about is frogs.
Click here to download drawings
Yet, far from a nature reserve, the Floating site is a concrete basin, a piece of urban water infrastructure designed to collect the rainwater run-off from the neighbouring Tempelhofer Feld when it was first constructed as an airfield in the early 1930s. For around ninety years, the basin sat unacknowledged, known only to the city’s maintenance workers and a community of allotment owners whose gardens surround the upper edges of the glorified ditch. In 2014, the basin was spared from redevelopment along with the adjoining airport, which was converted into a park, one of Europe’s greatest public spaces, following a referendum by the citizens of Berlin. It was through their involvement with the campaign to prevent the airfield’s development that the basin entered the orbit of the combined architecture office and artists’ studio that is Raumlabor, whose radical, playful and transient approach to work in the built environment reflects their home city’s atmosphere of DIY culture.
Spearheaded by architects Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius and Florian Stirnemann, Floating hosted its first public programmes four years ago, on a set of structures that would come to define the evolving architecture of the institution. Primarily comprising interconnected platforms and pathways made of timber and scaffolding beneath distinctive inflatable roofs, the seasonal pattern of activities on the site (inhospitable winters restrict programmes to the summer) mean the architecture has always been temporary, responding to budgetary and thematic parameters.
‘Many people and university groups coming here are looking for a certain freeness from perceived constraints in their usual spatial environment’
‘In 2018 it was much bigger, even bigger than now,’ explains Jeanne Astrup-Chauvaux, a board member of the Floating association. A long pathway led visitors from the site entrance to a cluster of raised areas for gathering, cooking, drinking and learning. One space resembled a lecture hall with the soggy basin itself acting as a visual backdrop where a projector screen might be. Another gathered visitors in the round; at its centre was a floating platform that benefited from the basin’s water level, which was much higher than today. The majority of the rest of the structure was, and continues to be, anchored to the basin’s concrete floor. A large Ferris wheel collected water from the basin and lifted it to the top of a central tower, from which it would filter through a series of bathtubs filled with different plants to eventually be used in the kitchen. ‘That year was a lot about our interaction with water,’ continues Astrup-Chauvaux. ‘Filtration processes were embedded within structures.’
Late 2018 saw the founding of an official association to run the project, which today comprises 65 members split into working groups who organise operations and write funding applications, and otherwise keep the project afloat. One group is the ‘space’ group, who have designed and constructed Floating’s perpetually evolving architectural iterations over the years. In 2019, the central structure was topped with a tight tarp, resembling an iceberg or a gnome’s hat. More recently, mindful of Covid-19, the team have opted for a more dispersed layout with constructions that are open to the breeze and keep audiences spread out. This summer, a ‘rain tower’ is clad with reeds to reflect an interest in the plant life growing on site. A kino structure, used for film screenings and performances, has a sliding inflatable roof that can be moved along rails: one of many Floating moments with echoes of a low-tech Archigram. When I visit on a cool July evening, the Berlin summer sky casts a warm glow on the trickle of water passing through. A dragonfly rests on the basin surface and I hear a group of Humboldt University anthropology PhD students politely clapping in one corner, while the Floating team holds their weekly production meeting and the bar is set up for ‘Thirsty Thursdays’.
It might sound like an idyllic afternoon in Glastonbury’s Green Fields, but Floating is also home to a multifaceted range of educational programmes that range from architecture lectures (a series on collective, feminist and queer housing ran earlier this year) to the Office for Neighbourhood Networks, aimed at those who live in the direct vicinity of the site, and the Kids Uni, a ‘practical, ambitious and crazy laboratory’ for ‘young explorers’. This mixing of diverse publics and actors is at once charming and a critical argument for a different kind of educational space. Rather than simply cater to a closed group of students or professors, Floating aims to be a place for children, neighbours, architects, researchers and frogs.
Click here to download drawings
For Markus Bader, one of Raumlabor’s co-founders, the beginning of Floating as a ‘university’ in 2018 was a moment to build on experiments in spatial education that he had been developing elsewhere, both within formal institutions such as the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK), where he is a professor, and with more ambulatory learning platforms such as the Urban School Ruhr. Typically, these experiments involved working with different groups on live projects, often temporary structures which would activate a public space and create moments of informal but sincere gathering and knowledge exchange. At Floating, the site and structure itself have provided those moments, with participatory design and construction processes run by the space working group that take the needs of neighbours, children, association members and others into account for the pavilions and ‘auditoria’ that pop up each summer. What’s more, the spaces have hosted dozens of seminars, workshops, field trips and symposia for visiting university groups: TU Berlin, ABK Stuttgart, RISEBA University Riga and Pratt Institute are a handful of institutional visitors this summer.
The 2022 iteration of Floating Berlin
There is some freedom in this institutional no man’s land. The bureaucratic headaches, facilities struggles, student satisfaction surveys and other pressures of the neoliberal university drift away when one steps onto the decks at Floating, which has no obligation to see cohorts of students through curricula and degree programmes. Yet the flipside to this intellectual and curatorial freedom is a financial precarity and future uncertainty. Currently, Floating’s activities are facilitated by state and private grants, occasional sponsorship, and hundreds of volunteer hours. There are also proposals by landlord Tempelhof Projekt GmbH to ‘rewild’ the drainage basin, which would mean displacing Floating and, paradoxically, the frogs.
The Climate Care festival, one of the programmes organised by the Floating association members rather than external guests, took this threat as the impetus for its second edition, critically examining ‘wildness’ through a week of performances, workshops, readings and more in September 2021. The annual festival, curated by Karjevsky with Rosario Talevi, looks closely at the Floating site to explore contemporary ideas at ‘the intersection of ethics of care and climate challenges’. The festival is described on Floating’s website as ‘Theory and Practice on a Natureculture Learning Site’, borrowing Donna Haraway’s term to describe the entangled histories of human and non-human species and to critique the imagined separation of the ‘natural’ from the manmade. It is a fitting way to describe an exceptional place, where the interdependence of a 1930s concrete drainage system, a flourishing frog population and the desire for unrestricted education is made abundantly clear.
The banality of the basin’s original function is perhaps the great lesson to take from Floating. We are surrounded by infrastructural spaces wherever we live: reservoirs or energy facilities that are separated from places for ‘nature’ – those portioned into parks and reserves – and places for ‘learning’ – those held behind steep fees, as well as other social and physical barriers. Floating proposes an interconnected understanding of the urban present which, floating or not, will be required for the anthropocenic future to come.
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