The temporary pop-up hotel offered 22 rooms that were spread over a series of unexpected locations all over the city, such as a rooftop, a market square, the riverbank, former army barracks, a car parked near the National Theatre, and a cabin suspended from a tree in Mannheim's Luisenpark. Some 120 people from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, Poland, England, Austria and Germany participated. The hotel was built using found or recyclable materials, such as scaffolding structures, shipping pallets and polycarbonate panels, under a strict budget of 250 Euros per room.
The Collini Bay Resort for instance consisted of a series of recycled wooden beach huts with beds overlooking the city’s harbor, while the Fairy Tank offered guests a bed, cupboard and mini pool raised on scaffolding around one of the city's fountains. Portuguese architects Nuno Pimenta and Frederico Martins designed The Hedonist, a miniature translucent ad-hoc homage to Mies van der Rohe, overlooking the River Neckar, and built with timber pallets, wood beams, corrugated fibreglass and steel scaffolding. At night, eight torches suspended from the ceiling transformed the room into a glowing red box. Also raised on scaffolding, Monumotel allowed guests to rest beside a statue of German writer and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, inviting them to hang their belongings on his outstretched hands. the entire length of the festival, from May 22nd to June 8th ,the hotel cabins could be rented for one night by anybody, for €25 a night.
Raumlabor is the most famous and successful of a whole series next-generation-studio’s in Berlin that have specialised in lightweight and volatile experiments in the urban tissue – rather than still focusing on the design of objects of desire or landmark buildings that have eternity in mind. The collective has an outspoken preference for small scale, playful and temporary interventions, on difficult locations, places that are abandoned, left-over, in transition, or wasteland. Makeshift, its actions declare themselves averse from the linear thinking that comes with Grand Utopias, and are developed in a perpetual exchange, dialogue and dialectics with the complexity and specificity of the site.
Since September, the collective has been working for the Bruges Triennial 2018,Liquid City - Vloeibare Stad, where they are working on a House of Time in the historic center of the city, a site that is reprogrammed and activated to form a meeting and production site by and for young people. .The lecture of Jan Liesegang, who co-founded Raumlabor and co-managed the Eichbaumoper, is an initiative of A + Architecture in Belgium, BOZAR, and the Brugges Triennial. Jan Liesegang will speak about their vision on architecture; architecture as a means of searching for a future city full of possibilities.
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More information:
www.raumlabor.net
a-plus.be/actuel/lezing-door-jan-liesegang-raumlabor/
www.triennalebrugge.be
