The studio will ask students to explore heritage and identity as well as engage social and architectural interventions to reinvent the village of Referinghausen in Germany, where the community will act as the client of the studio. Referinghausen is located in the Sauerland, a rural low mountain range in the green heart of Germany. Approximately 250 people live and work in the community and in 2019, the village celebrated its 750th anniversary. In recent decades, the village has been affected by the migration of around a quarter of the population to urban centers, yet the local community is vibrant and open and its inhabitants are looking for innovative projects to support and strengthen the community. The village’s cultural heritage is tied deeply to agricultural production and its regional agricultural network of food, labor, and landscape will be foundational to understanding the identity of the place. At the same time, the studio will critically examine and propose rural and urban connectivity strategies between the village community and its relationship as a potential cultural satellite to the city of Kassel, an internationally renowned destination for art and culture. Rather than designing a building or an iconic object, students will consider the social and material fabric of the village to propose projects as social strategies that build a dialogue with the existing context and connect to it at both a local and regional scale. Attention to local materials and building technologies will be encouraged during the design process. The program and scale of individual design interventions, whether culture, agriculture or infrastructure, will be defined by the students, with considered social and economic measurements, to reinvent the village of Referinghausen based on their research and understanding of the context.
As part of the studio pedagogy, students will examine and consider the reality of Referinghausen and its people, meeting with community members through public presentations and reviews. The local mayor Reinhard Figgen is very open and supportive to the studio idea to involve the local community and to potentially select a few studio projects to build in the village. Students will develop techniques to prepare design materials and oral presentations for a variety of audiences within both an academic review context as well as public facing presentations for local stakeholders.
A number of other resources and inputs will be available and key to the studio’s development. During Travel Week, the studio will visit Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany and meet with the artist collective ruangrupa from Indonesia who are the curators of the exhibition. The concept of “lumbung” is the theme for Documenta 15 and it translates to, “a communal rice-barn, where the surplus harvest is stored for the benefit of the community.” This concept is based on principles of collectivity, resource building, and equal sharing, and one that will inform the studio’s approach. During Travel Week the studio will also go to Berlin, and students will work out of ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory, which is an interdisciplinary platform for urban discourse exploring the intersection of the built environment, social life, education and research for the future. ANCB will provide a workshop program and space during the stay in Berlin.
Methodology
At the beginning of the semester, students will work in groups to research and look into a regional community-based framework, analyzing and proposing a strategy (with an individual design initiative) targeting specific issues. These issues will be initiated by students and might, for example, develop an approach to agriculture, water systems, abandoned infrastructure or adaptive reuse within the community or region. The fourth week will be Travel Week and include a trip to Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany and then to the town of Referinghausen to meet with local communities and do onsite research of the local cultural and environmental context. During this visit, students will also investigate and define the potential site(s) for their individual design proposals following their reinventing strategies. The Travel Week will conclude in Berlin where the studio will undertake workshops, studio visits and visit key sites germane to the studio’s interests. Following Travel Week, the remainder of the semester will be dedicated to individual work on design interventions. Students will decide on the program and scale of their individual work to demonstrate their social strategy with ecological and economic measurements.