International Workshop 4: Building

The following chapter is about the moment where the Hotel Project, after months of organisation and architecture planning, is realised during the International Building Workshops. These four weeks with international guests and students almost completely changed the Architecutre of the Hotel. The Building process introduced unexpected issues, it made us think about how architecture can be an improvised collective practice and how at the same time in this spontaneous approach one can find some main architectural and urban planning ideas.

In the end of February the project as a university course was ending and we were now supposed to finally build our Hotel. At the same time we had to fulfill our academic duties, we had to prepare a documentation of the whole project. For this reason most of us couldn't participate in the Building Workshops and from that point the work in UdN was split into two directions: while inside the building the “Project group” was analysing the work which was done in the whole semester, ouside new students and new tutors were developing in 1:1 scale the Hotel by directly building it.
The Workshop phase was divided in 4 weeks and each was coordinated by a different guest.

• The first week with Véronique Faucheur landscape architect of Atelier Lebalto in Berlin
• The second week with Martin Kaltwasser, architect and artist from the Koebberling/Kaltwasser studio in Berlin
• The third week with Benjamin Foerster Baldenius, architect in the Raumlabor Berlin Studio in Berlin
• The fourth week with Peter Fattinger, architect in the Fattinger Orso Architektur Studio in Vienna
  HCU, Erasmus and international students as well as Baupraktikanten were taking part in the construction site. Some of them previously already had an idea of what was happening at the UdN but most were coming to the UdN for the first time.

The previously developed plan couldn’t be taken in account because of the lack of materials and also because we couldn’t have called four architects and new students just to execute a previous plan. The building process would be somehow like a surrealistic “Cadavre Exquis”, each actor would develop a previous work and then pass it to the next player for further contribution.

Like in every true story the processes overlap and mix with each other. Seeing the building now, it is complicated to separate the different interventions. Each guest gave a new direction to the work according to his views, but also every participant created new ramifications in other directions. Some of the students brought their previous experience with the project, some came only for the building time, and some came only for some weeks or some days. No one has a complete overview of the whole process, we all share pieces of information. Some stay, some get lost and reappear in other contexts, some get completely lost. Anyway, like in every written story we will try to find in this flow of events some main guidelines; the innovations, the changes of directions but also the constants and the repetitions.