DESCRIPTION

Landscapes of Commoning focuses on rural areas as sites that create desirable ways of living, working and producing. Inhabitants of rural regions bring together site-specific knowledge and skills to create prototypes of communities that manifest a deep awareness of the interconnection between the built environment and social networks.

In this seminar we investigate the potential of rural areas through a workshop format, emphasizing the practical role of making. Together with students, local experts will actively engage with the surrounding environment and its aesthetic, material, and ecological qualities.

The student group lives in each rural location for several days and works together on a common objective. Local experts contribute site-specific knowledge and skills. In parallel, international guests bring in thematic links to a wider ecology of discourse. Both groups are involved in a pedagogy that aims to be non-hierarchical.

In addition to learning craft techniques, the workshops investigate the relationship between the cultural landscape and the built environment, and thus the conditions of contemporary rural society. Local cooperation partners help to ground the project in these specific spatial and social contexts.

Within this program we develop narratives for new patterns of caring through collective experience of the rural condition and its potential for a new ecology of architectural practice.
 

COURSE STRUCTURE 

Our seminar will take place in the small village of Gerswalde, 100 km north of Berlin. In the past years, new spaces for rural commoning and small-scale cultural production have emerged there. These include a communal housing project to a permaculture farm, and even a risograph printing workshop. Together, they are creating a replicable model for quotidian degrowth living. We will live and work in the ensemble of Der Große Garten, a former garden nursery which now offers a guest-house, seminar rooms, and common kitchen.

FRAMEWORK BY

Prof. Niklas Fanelsa, Jana Wunderlich, Victoria Schweyer
Local experts of Gerswalde