"Just build it!" Martin Kaltwasser Week

The building process started from the guideline of the previous architecture project, the Hotel as an extension of the UdN. The sleeping and the living area would pop up from the existing building like the Wintergarden which would be an extension of the kitchen and the conference room.

This Drawing from Mattia Gammarota, a workshop participant, shows the first approach to the Hotel settlement. The streetside has been chosen, where there is more space to build and where the neighbourhood can directly see the Hotel.

It was already clear that it couldn't have been a regular building with one shape, but it would use the modularity and flexibility of the scaffolding to create different spaces at different heights, so as to leave to every workshop week the possibility to transform the structure.

The first scaffolding structures were built next to the UdN sleeping area and were filled with three starting units made of wood panels. This time, the units were not planned and assembled in an ordered sequence, rather they were shaped individually according to necessity (materials, tools) and the desires of the workshop participants.
Whereas the previous workshops focused on the overall structure the capsules had a quite simple configuration, in this one, the capsule architecture became more complex. Each student group experimented with different sleeping cells with more layers playing with the heights and the sunlight.

Martin Kaltwasser explicitly asked students not to plan their units in advance but to first go and build so that the planning process would grow together with the building process. Above one can see the sketches of the first living units presented in the middle of the week and underneath - their final output.

At the end of the week, we had one big block parallel to the UdN somehow following the existing building structure: two rows of units cut by a passage. On the street side three capsules of one level and one multilevel luxury capsule on the other side.

A roof was put on the top of the biggest block to protect the building from the weather conditions and to shape the main constructed part as a the central block. We now had the core structure from which we could start to extend and connect new spaces.