Elena Schütz graduated from the University of the Arts in Berlin including an academic term at ETH Zurich. After graduating, she established Something Fantastic with Leonard Streich and Julian Schubert, based on the conviction that architecture is affected by everything, and, vice versa, affects everything, and the resulting social, ecological and political responsibility calls for an alternative practice. The ‘undisciplinary’ office was founded together with the publication of a Manifesto entitled ‘Something Fantastic’ outlining their position towards Worlds, People, Cities, and Houses in 2010. The office gained larger recognition via four holes cut into the walls of the German Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia  2016, radically altering the spatial structure of the pavilion, and a fashion show conducted at Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie during ongoing museum hours. In more recent years the office, which has deliberately not grown as an organisation, but by a widening range of collaborators and fields of action, has applied this approach of precise, minimal, strong interventions to a number of projects; among them Alvaro Siza’s Bonjour Tristesse, a 1990’s office building off Berlin Friedrichstrasse, Willy van der Meeren’s Vierwinden and, on a larger scale, the ICC in Berlin.