Education

According to Hans-Jürgen Commerell, one of the masterminds behind Aedes, they put architects, urban planners and artists from all over the world in contact with each other. They hold lectures and workshops in which designers, engineers, traffic planners, doctors, environmental activists and entrepreneurs take part. They have created a platform for the “quest for urban intelligence”. Along with his partner, Kristin Feireiss, and program manager, Aine Ryan, he has established a network that in the meantime has enabled creative people from 18 universities ranging from South Africa to Australia to put their heads together.

What do Jakarta and Amsterdam have in common? How does London regulate its inner-city traffic? Has anybody got any ideas on what should be done with deserted villages caused by people migrating to the cities? What plans do cities like Sao Paulo, Johannesburg and Singapore have for the future? These are all questions that urban planners cannot answer alone. They need to cooperate with others – for example, with water technology experts who know something about rising sea and water levels; with traffic experts who know just how much regulation can be imposed on a city and with demographic experts.

“The Spaniards,” says Commerell, “have developed a concept for settling immigrants in deserted villages, enabling them, within the limits of their capacities, to work the land.” Could this be an example for the German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania? It is questions like this one and many others that are to be discussed “in a cultural context on our new platform”. And not behind closed doors, either. One of the aims of Aedes is also to involve as large an audience as possible in the discourse.

How did the campus come about?

More than 30 years ago Kristin Feireiss opened an architecture gallery in Berlin called “Aedes” . It was the first time, according to Commerell, that architecture had been shown in an exhibition, that a gallery had put urban concepts, town planning and landscape architecture together and presented it as part of mainstream culture. Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid – most of them unknown at the time– were already showing their work at “Aedes” 25 years ago. “Aedes” has organised over 400 exhibitions – for many years they were in the Charlottenburg district of West Berlin, for the last four and a half years they have been in the Pfefferberg complex in the district of Prenzlauer Berg. The Pfefferberg used to house a brewery and to day it has become a popular meeting place for culture and culinary delights.

The move to the Pfefferberg brought new ideas, i.e. extending the gallery’s successful, global network and setting up the “Network Campus Berlin” – a forum for the world-wide exchange of urban planning ideas and an experimental laboratory beyond the usual, timeworn, academic structures. The Aedes Network Campus Berlin (ANCB) is housed in a U-shaped brick building. The place is generously appointed: a spacious seminar room, a café and in summer the surrounding green areas - all right next-door to the Aedes Architecture Forum with its exhibition area of about 300 square metres. One of its neighbours is the Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson, with his Kunstfabrik (art factory). Nearby there is also a design office and two galleries that have their origins in Copenhagen and Tokyo. “The new location would have remained a dream, if it had not been for a private benefactress,” says Commerell. She bought the building and leased it to the Aedes Network Campus Berlin at a reasonable price. To the left of the entrance there is a plaque with a list of sponsors from illustrious design companies famous for lighting, kitchens, furniture and fittings.

Art and Industry

Aine Ryan points to an electric socket in the wall of the seminar room. “You might think that is actually something quite everyday,” she says, “but these days there is a revolution going on in there – it is all about the distribution of electricity, about intelligent power meters, about decentralised power plants, about efficiency!” What has that got to do with the architects and artists? “Quite a lot indeed – when alternative power stations are installed in residential areas, power meters control the electricity supply in line with the amount required and the source. The consumption is then regulated by automated systems that will have to be designed in a user-friendly way for the people.” Aine Ryan has just managed to persuade Busch-Jaeger/ABB – an energy and automation technology company - to hold a joint workshop on this subject.

The program manager has compiled a strategy paper that evaluates the first 18 months of the ANCB. It lists seven subject areas for the Campus Network: the challenge of migration flows, the effects of climate change on our living space, mobility and infrastructure, urban trends and behavioural patterns, what students of architecture are learning today and what they have to come to terms with, new technologies for cities and the role of the urban planner today. The paper serves as an aid to orientation for the next “units” that are to be realised in Berlin in cooperation with academic partners from New York and Santiago de Chile over the next one and a half years. The emphasis here is on the role of Berlin as an object for field research, as today it is the city in Germany in which people are striving to find new ideas for urban life.

A large part of the predominantly English-speaking lecture program at ANCB is open to the general public and thus also represents a platform for the subject of urban culture for all the embassies and cultural institutions located in the city. The partner universities share in the cost of realising the ANCB program by paying fees. The brunt of the costs however is born by partners from industry and by the sponsorship programs of other institutions, exchange programs and foundations. Sponsors however still have to be found for some partners like South Africa. For various individual elements of the program that are not coordinated by universities the participants might have to pay a fee for the course or the workshop. “Our aim is to keep expansion at a minimum,” says Commerell, “the leaner the administration, the more flexibility and mental dynamism.”