About the workshop
Demolition. Creation. Violence. Conflict.
Creating always means destroying. Destroying always means creating.
But just the persistence in a state where an urban environment is neither completely destroyed nor entirely completed forms a pulsating city that offers space for development and allows coincidence. So a city always stands in the field of tension between finished and unfinished. And an authentic city allows the existence of this contrast and knows how to handle it.
But how to design something that is neither finished nor unfinished? How to leave things open and not to retain the complete control?
But does less control means more violence and conflicts? As Violence lies in the nature of humans it lies in the nature of cities. Conflicts and the examination of them are forming the basis of cohabitation in our society. Urbanity is a constant conflict. And urbanity means to solve these in a civilised way.
The city that excludes violence and conflicts looses authenticity and identity.
Not aborting violence but using it and the energy emerging out of the tension between creating and destroying, between finished and unfinished shall be the origin of the workshop - finding out how to deal with violence in the city and using violence as a design background.
With this we like to reach a critical approach of an often practiced optimism that creates an advertising – paradies – disneyland. So the question is how to handle violence in an urban environment and how to visualize and use conflicts in an aesthetic way to achieve authenticity and reality.
About Topotek1
The task central to our office is the design of urban open spaces. Based on a critical understanding of immanent realities, the search for conceptual approaches leads us to decided statements concerning the urban context.
Throughout design, planning, and construction we offer solutions for independent new parks, squares, sports-grounds, court-yards and gardens, whose designs answer to contemporary requirements for variability, communication and sensuality. The manifold experiences through a broad spectrum of German and international projects meanwhile capacitate an efficient realization, finely tuned to respective necessities.
www.topotek1.de