raumlaborberlin is a network, a collective of 8 trained architects who have come together in a collaborative work-structure. Working at the intersection of architecture, city planning, art and urban intervention, they address city and urban renewal as a process.
Attracted to difficult urban locations, i.e. places torn between different systems, time periods or planning ideologies, that can not adapt; places that are abandoned, left over or in transition that contains some relevance for the processes of urban transformations; raumlaborberlin treat these places as their experimentation sites, trying to activate the untapped potential these places have to offer. This opens new perspectives for alternative usage patterns, collective ideals, urban diversity and difference.
There was once a society that believed the future would bring better living conditions to everyone. There were people, utopian thinkers, who thought about the big questions of the city. Today only a feeling remains, half desire, half melancholy, reminiscing of those architects who wanted to live in a better society and who had dreamed of better places. Such an era is now over. Here begins my work.