The Berlin architects’ association Raumlabor has been awarded the Golden Lion for its contribution to the Biennale Architettura 2021. Raumlabor’s presentation in the halls of the Arsenale looks raw. The Berlin architects have assembled a ceiling-high room divider from a scaffolding system. Image and text panels are attached to it with powerful screws […]
The Berlin architects’ association Raumlabor has been awarded the Golden Lion for its contribution to the Biennale Architettura 2021.
Raumlabor ‘s presentation in the halls of the Arsenale has a raw look. The Berlin architects have assembled a ceiling-high room divider from a scaffolding system. Image and text panels are attached to it with powerful screws. Armchairs and sofas, whose seats and backrests are made from old plastic stairs, form a small lounge area behind it.
Repurposing and recycling are themes that have long preoccupied Raumlabor – and not just when it comes to furniture. This becomes clear in the works they are presenting. Raumlabor is presenting two projects at the Biennale under the heading “Instances of Urban Practice”. The “Floating University” and their conversion of the Haus der Statistik on Alexanderplatz. They convinced the jury chaired by Kazuyo Sejima. It awarded the Berlin office collective the Golden Lion for the best contribution in 2021.
The Floating University was created in 2018 in a biotope at Berlin’s former Tempelhof Airport. With the help of a series of informal buildings located in an old rainwater retention basin from the 1930s, Raumlabor created a multidisciplinary place of learning. The facility, which is now run by an association, aims to make the biotope permanently accessible to the public. At the same time, it has developed educational programs designed to enable self-empowerment in the present.
The Haus der Statistik model project is pursuing the participatory conversion of the GDR administration complex on Alexanderplatz. A whole range of cultural and social uses are to be established here. The schematic drawing showing Raumlabor on its scaffolding construction in the Arsenale contains terms such as “experimental house”, “appropriation” and “neighborhood niche”. Even those who don’t know what’s behind them understand the thrust of the project. In addition, a new town hall for the Mitte district, a day care center, studios and facilities for affordable and integrated living are to be built on the site of the Haus der Statistik.
If you compare the Raumlabor projects with the contribution for which Eduardo Souto de Moura received the Golden Lion in 2018, the difference could hardly be greater. The Portuguese artist placed the important Cistercian abbey of Santa Maria do Bouro at the center of his installation. He had renovated the building 20 years earlier and converted it into a hotel. His contribution, like his renovation, was an architectural-historical and aesthetic reflection on how to deal with the past. The same also applies to the contribution of the 2018 Silver Lion winners, the Belgian firm De Vylder Vinck Taillieu. They used Filip Dujardin’s wonderful architectural photographs to show their conversion of a ruinous historicist clinic building.
Raumlabor, on the other hand, use a formal and visual language that demonstrates extreme pragmatism and compelling necessity – an aesthetic of self-empowerment and resistance to the capitalist value model. Anyone wandering through the 2021 Architecture Biennale will quickly notice that this aesthetic position appears far more frequently in the halls and pavilions than Souto de Mouras. In it, the feeling of a present that is now perceived as crisis-ridden in many respects finds its formal expression. The awarding of the Golden Lion to Raumlabor’s contribution is entirely logical in this context. Does the jury really see it as an exemplary answer to the title question of this Biennale “How will we live together”?
