Making Futures Bauhaus+ is an action research project that addresses questions of architecture as a collective form and architecture as a resource. Departing from these two perspectives, it operates as an experimental research unit that advances future paths for architectural practice and education. It was initiated in 2018 as a cooperation between raumlabor and the Berlin University of the Arts on the occasion of the Bauhaus’ centenary.

Architecture as a collective form brings together the cultural, the social, the economic and the political. It traverses diverse entities and scales: objects, bodies, buildings, cities; the human and the planetary. It invites us to reflect our built environment beyond obsolete dichotomies such as public and private, living and working, urban and rural.

Primarily driven by fast-paced growth and innovation imperatives, the construction industry is the largest waste producer. There is an unbalance between the energy it consumes and its capacity to repurpose it. Exploring architecture as a resource involves looking at longer-lasting dynamics, such as recuperation and maintenance in the production and reproduction of space.

Making Futures Bauhaus+ has devised a two-year long public program that continuously explored future modes of architectural and urban practice. This included a Plug-In at Floating University Berlin (April-September 2018),  four mobile workshops in Istanbul (September 2018), Palermo (October 2018, research documentation here ), Thüringen (March 2019), Chicago (November 2019), a setting for conversation in Tel-Aviv (September 2019) and a Summer School at Haus der Statistik (September 2019). 

The Making Futures book is now available from Spector Books in German and English.

Making Futures works towards building up alliances and making transversal connections with people across, disciplines, institutions and territories that transcend the boundaries of the academic world and go beyond the borders of Europe. This is unpinned by the belief that social change cannot be limited to a dispersed few but must instead manifest as part of a wider, synergized system. Making Futures is definitely a pluralistic endeavour, there is not one future, but many.

+ info: www.making-futures.com