Global Design New York University: Spotlight: Raumlabor Berlin

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Spotlight: Raumlabor Berlin - "Die Grosse Weltausstellung 2012"

Raumlabor Berlin have created a counter proposal to the format of the “Expo.” Titled The World is Not Fair – The Great World’s Fair 2012, a tour with 15 pavilions set up June 1 - 24 for exploration on the grounds of the former airport in Tempelhof, Berlin.

These pavilions are not to be understood as state agents for national branding, but instead as places of highly subjective artistic and political reflection. Beyond the boundaries of cultural disciplines, architects, theater artists, performers, and visual artists seek to examine ideas, systems, and phenomena by which even the most outlying cultures are now globally connected with each other. The exhibit is not the world as it is or should be, but how we perceive, understand, and interpret it. Can it still be represented and negotiated as a totality at all?

The architecture of the 15 pavilions can be understood as a contribution to a discussion about managing resources sensibly. A third of the exhibition spaces involve reformations of structures that belonged to the existing facilities of the former airport field. Other structures were erected from modules that were used in the summer of 2011 at the festival "Survival" at the House of World Cultures. Only three pavilions are new structures, and only to a limited degree.

Die Grosse Weltausstellung 2012 Project Page | Raumlabor Berlin

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MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."