DESCRIPTION

The seminar AND WORKSHOP with the theme Landscapes of Commoning focuses on rural areas as sites that create desirable ways of living, working and producing. Inhabitants of rural regions bring together site-specific knowledge and skills to create prototypes of communities that manifest a deep awareness of the interconnection between the built environment and social networks.

In this seminar we investigate the potential of rural areas through a workshop format, emphasizing the practical role of making. Together with students, local experts will actively engage with the surrounding environment and its aesthetic, material, and ecological qualities.

The student group lives in each rural location for several days and works together on a common objective. Local experts contribute site-specific knowledge and skills. In parallel, international guests bring in thematic links to a wider ecology of discourse. Both groups are involved in a pedagogy that aims to be non-hierarchical.

In addition to learning craft techniques, the workshops investigate the relationship between the cultural landscape and the built environment, and thus the conditions of contemporary rural society. Local cooperation partners help to ground the project in these specific spatial and social contexts.

Within this program we develop narratives for new patterns of caring through collective experience of the rural condition and its potential for a new ecology of architectural practice.
 

COURSE STRUCTURE 

Our seminar will take place in the small village of Pohle, near Hanover, in a region where agriculture is still present. A small river and a street follow a valley embedded among gently rolling hills. Playfully scattered houses and barns line the road. On the outskirts of the town, a large distribution center stands close to the highway—a typical rural setting. In the past years, new spaces for rural commoning and small-scale cultural production have emerged there. Lisa Kreißler and Patrick Eicke, are working on the project “pohletotal“ and strive for an artistic dialogue between urban and rural space. We will live and work on their farm, with studios, bakery, garden and a small cultural center.

FRAMEWORK BY

Prof. Niklas Fanelsa, Jana Wunderlich
Patrick Eicke with local experts of Pohle