Under the title "Spaces of Learning" this project aims to critically consider what a learning space is. Led by Jakob Köchert, Maximilian Wolf and myself as a starting point we invited the body back into the space of learning. By approaching the site in question in its corporality, we are approaching architecture and, more broadly, space as bodies, and therefore we are addressing the body of the learning space, of the architecture for learning or even of the architecture of learning itself. This project came about as a way to reaccess the relationship between the spectrum of bodies and how we learn.
Our experience of architecture is an embodied one, with all our senses acting in concert as we move through its temporal characteristics as well as spatial. By recognising the dynamic relationship between atmosphere and our affected bodies, we begin to appreciate the multiple ways in which we touch and are touched by our built environment. The field of study (in this case the Stechlin Institute) serves here as a gateway to the subject of study (i.e. Spaces of Learning). In seeking to decondition our study of the site we let it teach us rather than trying to learn about it, we move beyond the dichotomy between what is passive and what is active into a state of interaction that is spontaneous, sensual, emotional and balanced. The site reveals itself to us and we recognise ourselves in it. Observer and observed start to merge, they trigger each other. We are now part of the site as much as it is part of us. This grasp raises the question of whether it is possible to encounter and get to know the site of intervention objectively, and whether it is even right to talk of objectivity. Objectivity and subjectivity rub up against each other. However by denying this tension, are we not running the risk of dismissing our own bodies and removing the study of our physicality? By separating the intervener from the site of intervention, do we not end up with an isolated and dead intervention? These tensions lie at the heart of our critique of learning environments, and more broadly of our society that favours conceptual realm. What are the power relations between the psyche and the soma in interaction with the environment? How does someone who learns on a site also learn about themselves? How does the trace of this living learning also reveal the traces that live within us? These and other related questions are posed here not with the primary aim of answering them, but rather of providing the right framework for them to be addressed.
What is conceived is a research environment where architecture is based on embedded practices oriented towards process and experimentation, and where it is approached on the one hand from a dialogical ethnographic perspective and on the other through self-referential and self-critical methodologies. The normative habits of design are challenged by the exercise of alternative transdisciplinary approaches to un/re/learning, in order to rethink the idea of criticism as a gesture of shared responsibility and attention. The complexity of the site is revealed through the diversity of engagement, expression and documentation, intertwined with a myriad of entities situated between the so-called human and the so-called more-than-human and also between what seems abandoned and what seems cultivated. Drawings, somatic movements, poems, photographs, films, field recordings and spoken words all coexist and speak, in their own way, of a site rich in interdependence. These are all creative, lively and speculative interventions into the site itself. The project addresses the role that artistic practice and art-based research play in expanding the tools for working in the field.
Through careful, sensitive and patient execution, design enriches the space in a sympoetic relationship, rather than intervening aggressively, erasing previous traces. This project shows how architects can develop a project without the intervention of a constructed form: the extension of the Stechlin Institute takes the form of a space for reflection on the architecture for/of learning. Fragments of our experiences are tangibly collected. They take on a variety of forms, eventually reconstituting an immersive, sensory landscape conceived as a travel diary that highlights the concerns, complexities and new conditions of this spatial action and discoveries along the way. Ultimately, it is a mapping of a territory - the architecture of embodiment and incorporation - that is not given but emerges from the acts of mapping. This territory also pinpoints the way in which our experiments, sometimes individual, sometimes collective, relate to each other. This interplay becomes a specific landscape of coexistence of various explorations within this research environment. As far as the public is concerned, the intention is to convey to them, in all it's essence, the richness of the site and the stimulation felt in discovering it. Through the creation of a significant moment for reflection, exchange and sharing, the aim is to deepen discussions on critical spatial practices with a view to broadening the palette of architecture and its teaching within a growing ecology of new radical methods of learning.
This project was supervised by Anna Kokalanova within her design course: "Spaces of Learning. The non-institutional school in rural areas." at the Berlin University of the Arts in the summer semester of 2021.