The Design Studio PALACE of UN/LEARNING is questioning the unquestioned in the field of architecture. In times of multiple crises and uncertainty, we need to unlearn the status quo in order to rethink our discipline, our teaching and our practice: How and what do we learn in architecture? Which architecture knowledge is part of the canon we rely on and what remains invisible? How can we design, plan and built without exploiting the environment and architecture labor? So, what's good? Who is we? And how to do less harm with architecture?
PALACE of UN/LEARNING creates an open space of exploring, inventing, negotiating and sharing counter-hegemonic design strategies aiming for accessible, transformable, affordable, empowering and resource-efficient un/built structures for a most possible diverse urban society.
WHY UN/LEARNING?
For creating a sustainable future for our planet we need to question our design practices and the commodification of our habitats by neoliberal politics.
We want to raise awareness of exploitive conditions of physical and human resources in architectural production and move towards a collective, collaborative and transformative practice of shared counter-knowledge and multiplicities of histories and possible futures.
WHAT TO UN/LEARN?
Un/learning means for us to overcome hegemonies, hierarchies, rituals, values and conditions of current heteronormative, capitalist and human-centered spatial production to be able to relearn creating other future spaces of living.
HOW TO UN/LEARN?
Un/Learning is about an unruly and provocative spirit that empowers you to become Agents of change. It’s the search for ambiguities and niches to enhance and occupy them and for counter-strategies to rethink and draw visual and written narratives.
SO WHY A PALACE?
The palace is an accessible, approachable and cute collective space to enjoy and elaborate transformation collectively. It’s a safe place to experiment, provoque, negotiate and claim a missing words and spaces for a most diverse, queer, feminist and post-colonial future. It’s a playful overcoming of codes of design, society and aesthetics. The exhaustion of the concept of „architecture“.
WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT?
For a semester we will experiment on new formats of sharing knowledge and production of space. We will create our own Palace at TU and gather in weekly salons where we will read, write, discuss, design, build, eat and nap. We will start with a spatial intervention in Vienna, and end with a camp in Prague and Vienna – and inbetween? A wild ride.
WHO ARE OUR ACCOMPLICES?
We welcome students that are eager to question the current condition of architectural production, labor and education and are willing to explore new ways of learning and designing. We gonna meet Eva Franch i Gilabert, Alžběta Brůhová and their students of UMPRUM Prague, while accompanying Palaces will pop-up in collaboration with Fondacio Mies van der Rohe in Barcelona, the Irish Architecture Foundation in Dublin and the Design Academy in Eindhoven. All this will nurture our Viennese Palace.
“The crossing is a place of uncertainty, of the unobvious, of strangeness. It is not a weakness, but a power.” (Paul B. Preciado)
