RAUMLABOR: CHANGE IT NOW

FRANCESCA GOTTI: Considering that you have been working for almost 20 years in this field, if you look back at your first projects, how would you describe the beginning of your practice? Your energy, your initial approach, your methodology; how were they compared to what they are now?

RAUMLABOR: First, we have to define the moment of the beginning. Was it our first spatial practice when I was about 10 years old and I decided to take a ride around the neighbourhood on the rubbish bin outside our house and packed everything I needed for this ride (bottle of water, some cookies, a book to read)? Or did it start with climbing trees? Or taking part in theatre groups? Or inventing new strategies to bring performative art into the countryside? Or did it start when we were squatting in houses in East Berlin? Or when we finished our university diploma and began our professional life?

FG: There is certainly something that starts in us at a certain point and triggers us to explore the space, to find new relationships between the space and our bodies, new approaches. And it is hard to choose what is the actual beginning. Maybe we can set it at the moment when you declared yourself as practitioners, when design really came in as a tool.

RL: So, considering that we know it is not the pure beginning, we can define it as the foundation of the collective, when different people, with different experiences and backgrounds, came together. Raumlabor started as a group of friends and not with the idea of specific spatial practices. All we knew was what the others had been doing for the past seven years and that we had spent time together, travelled together. We had a space that we shared, an old butcher’s shop in the middle of Berlin, where we were doing little events, parties, working, where people were just passing by and walking in. Sitting at street level allowed for this, to face the public directly, and that was interesting but it was hard to do constructive work. We were all architects and interested in design questions; we had jobs on the side working for traditional design companies to earn money, but as a group we only shared the space and its programming. One day, we were invited to hold a lecture for a group of architects in Halle an der Saale (near Leipzig) to tell them what we were doing. The reason we got the invitation was that we took part in a competition for which we produced some visionary images, which drew some attention: it was a proposal for Moritzplatz in Berlin (1999), when we created images of a mountain in the middle of the city, a concept related to living in the forest. That was the occasion for us to define what we were doing: until that moment, we were just sharing critical thinking and organising events. We decided that we had to produce something for the meeting, to engage with people. We invited them to split into two groups and to form two cities with colourful Play-doh and decide who was going to be the Mayor. The Urban Planning Office’s Director of Halle an der Saale was taking part in the game too; she decided to have a meeting afterwards and ask us whether we were open to take on a project for the city. Halle an der Saale is a medium sized city, 200,000 inhabitants approximately. It has the history of a double city, with the old part on one side of the river and the new part built during the GDR on the other for mechanical workers. At the time, the city was suffering because of people moving away and social segregation. People didn’t want to live in the socialist housing blocks anymore, there were a lot of empty buildings and it was not working on an economic base anymore. So the municipality took the idea of commissioning us with the task of creating a new idea for the city seriously. This was the initial project which glued us together as a group and which gave us confirmation that what we were doing in 90’s post-wall Berlin was worth it.

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FG: You have always worked with abandoned buildings, leftover lots, in-between spaces... what are now, in your opinion, the most challenging places that can offer these possibilities?

RL: Roads. Just imagine that in 20 years, driving a car will be as bad as smoking. In the space of 10 years, smoking in closed public spaces changed from being a completely normal thing to an absolute no-go. Now society is more and more conscious of the effects of car emissions and if we gradually stop using private transportation, what do we do with all the space that is taken up by traffic? Roads, parking lots, buildings stuffed with unused cars: pavements could be way wider and there would still be plenty of space to densify our cities with all kinds of activities and services. This has super potential.

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Extract from the interview "A talk with Raumlabor: Change it now" Full text available in the book "The Design of Tactics: Critical Practices for Public Space Re-Activation," forthcoming.