Floating University, Berlin – Climate Lab Precedent Analysis: Design/Sustainability/Architectural Approach

Located a little over 3 miles from the heart of the Berlin city centre, lies a patch of wetland surrounding by a plethora of sporting stadiums and venues, a mosque and acres of parkland galore.

From April through to September 2018, the basin was occupied by a peculiar, offshore structure—a constellation of scaffolded volumes and floating platforms with inflatable rooftops and a large wheel. It was part-pirate ship and part-Princeton; part-Archigram and part-Burning Man. This was the Floating University, and the location of a flurry of events that connnected in line with the floating structure, architecturally and educationally related.

Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation as part of its ongoing Bauhaus centenary celebrations, the university was initiated by Raumlabor as a continuation and expansion on its previous education experiments such as the Urban School Ruhr, Hotel Shabbyshabby and Making Futures at the Design Biennial, hosted in Istanbul during that year.

In these cases, Raumlabor has taken its playful and process-focused approach to architecture and urban planning to broaden the often-rigid or exclusionary nature of education.

Surrounded by lots and bungalows and noticeable only to those in the know, this 19th century basin holds rainwater drained from the airport’s defunct runways before it is fed into Berlin’s canal network.

A rainwater retention basin right next to the former Tempelhof airfield is the gathering place for visiting students and scientists from more than twenty international universities as well as artist from all over the world, local experts, architects, musicians, and dancers.

‘Kitchen’ theory

This approach gave the Floating University its architectural form and a truly unique series of spaces. 

Following on from the initial empiric studies mentioned in the above diagram(s) conducted by University of Berlin students, they continued onto building architectonic speculations about the future of our society, based on the design of the kitchen.

Within 4 weeks, the students worked on the conception of a vision as a reaction to the question: How will we live in the future? The starting point was a scenario where in future we would spend more time for collectivity as well as for our individual development.