Mass-Public Space-Response
The built environment as a public habitat.
| Description | Workshop in Berlin |
| Date | Spring 2010, four days |
| Guests | Catherine Ludwig, Wolf Leeb |
| Participants | C. Adkinson, M. Cincala, J. Hindman, T. Ivey, T. Kelly, C. Mack, A.R. Mathison, A. McKinley, I. Parkinson, S. Popp, B. Potere, G. Oliver, P. Queisser, L. Rossebo, A. Ruff, T. Rafati, S. Siddiqi, F. La Vigna, D. Topping, C. Turski, Z. Závodszky |
| Affiliation | Virginia Tech, Center for European Studies and Architecture |
The students were asked study how the inhabitants and visitors of Berlin occupy and use the shared spaces of the city in order to develop both the perception and the techniques to understand the built environment as a public habitat. Our chief tactic was to shift the students’ relationship with their cameras – from an instrument to “shoot” architecture to a tool in their “tacklebox” to capture the intangible aspects of a place, especially things that move through space, like people and light. Following a brief technical session on photography, the students were challenged to not only re-see the built environment, but also to reconsider how to visually convey what they saw.
The five sites selected by the students form a pattern of urban acupuncture, both in their geographic distribution and in their roles, in that they map pinpoints of memory across the cultural landscape of the reunited city. The time constraints of the workshop compelled these pieces to be improvised directly on site as “practices” rather than as concepts planned and deployed from the studio. What resulted was a poignant portrait of Berlin in use as a contemporary habitat, and how that habitat configures its users.