The narrative outline

Thursday evening, 7 pm, TU Berlin. Despite the warm summer temperatures, the lecture hall of the Faculty of Architecture is filled almost to capacity with students, architects, faculty staff and interested parties. Swiss architects Mathias Heinz and Raphael Frei are standing at the front, at the lectern. They are the guests at today’s event, which is part of the “Positions” lecture series. The cover picture of the recently published book can be seen in the background. It shows two interior pictures. The title of the book crosses over them in large letters; “Poolology” – a neologism by the authors.

The Zurich-based architecture firm “Pool Architekten”, which was founded in the mid-1990s as a discussion platform for architecture, is known for its housing projects, among other things. During their work as professors at the design department of the TU Berlin, they created a collection of numerous floor plan concepts by students for various semester assignments. The topic of the assignments was predominantly communal living.

This compilation resulted in the book “Poolology of Living”. On over four hundred pages, it shows both housing projects from twenty years of office work and student projects. The book presents all projects in the same way, so that the realized designs merge with the students’ work. The floor plan, which is not explained in detail but rather encourages the reader to read into it with its sometimes reduced presentation, is always at the center. The “Poolology of Living” could therefore be described as a kind of universal collection of ideas of the most diverse floor plan typologies and innovative living concepts.

“Poolology of Living” is divided into several chapters with corresponding texts and series of images. These address topics such as working with typologies, materiality, the interior and the image of space. The book launch was structured in the same way; Raphael Frei and Mathias Heinz alternately read out the chapter texts and then showed the corresponding series of images.

In addition to the floor plan, as a universal mediator of idea and space, the focus is on the fascinatingly real model photos of built and unrealized interiors, which serve to visualize office designs as well as student work. In the book, partially photographed interior models are juxtaposed with real interior photos, so that built reality and design once again become blurred.