Floating University
by Floating e.V.
Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany
Project details
Year
2025
Project year
2021
Building area
2860 m²
Project website
Location
Team credits
design and construction
- Floating e.V. -
Felix Wierschbitzki,
Lorenz Kuschnig Lefort,
Florian Stirnemann,
Maxie Schneider,
Ariel Curtelin,
Benjamin Frick,
Esther Bonneau,
Maddalena Pornaro,
Geselle Jonas,
Jan Schlake,
Jeanne Astrup-Chauvaux,
Johan Kirsimäe,
Jonas Johnke,
Moritz Welmeskirch,
Samuel Boche,
Volunteers.
contributing partners
Gerüstbau Tisch GmbH,
Berliner Schrauben GmbH & Co. KG,
Mehler Texnologies GmbH,
Happold Ingenieurbüro GmbH,
Studio K + Dipl. Ing. Kristian Kreutz.
Floating University, located in Berlin, is an experimental campus and research project that serves as a platform for transdisciplinary learning, urban practice and ecological research. It explores new forms of collective learning and living by creating a shared space for exchange, reflection and collaboration among students, scientists, artists and local actors from around the world. Set within a rainwater retention basin near Berlin’s former Tempelhof Airport, the project challenges conventional architectural thinking while drawing inspiration from its unique landscape. Once a polluted and inaccessible site, it has been transformed into a testing ground for new relationships between the built environment, water and the city.
Defined by the team as a ‘natureculture’ learning site, Floating University blurs boundaries between nature, culture and infrastructure. It offers an open educational environment without barriers, enabling broad and inclusive participation. Learning unfolds not through formal instruction but through shared experience, experimentation and hands-on practice. The space functions as both a laboratory and a community, where teaching, research and collective making are inseparable from daily life.
Lightness, modularity and adaptability guide the project’s architecture. The structures are built primarily from timber frames, scaffolding, membranes and recycled materials. This lightweight system gives the buildings a sense of openness, allowing constant interaction with the surrounding nature. Every element is designed to evolve, creating a living dialogue between interior and exterior spaces. The architecture is intentionally unfinished, changing from year to year as new ideas, users and needs emerge. Its combination of construction methods, repetitive materials and simple joints produces a cohesive yet flexible design language. Spaces accommodate diverse activities – learning, workshops, communal cooking, water filtration and public gatherings – where everything is visible, accessible and interconnected.
Floating University is also a model of ecological responsibility. It conserves resources and minimizes its environmental footprint by integrating itself into the local water network. The rainwater basin becomes an educational site through ecological maintenance and restoration, strengthening environmental literacy and awareness in an urban context. The project’s structures are designed for disassembly and reuse, ensuring minimal waste. By embedding architecture within the hydrological cycles of the city, the team demonstrates how buildings can become agents of regeneration rather than consumption.
Its social dimension is equally important. Floating e.V., the association behind the project, is a self-organized collective of architects, artists, urban designers, students and activists who collaborate to reimagine urban environments through experimentation and care. Organized through non-hierarchical structures, the design team makes decisions collectively, develops ideas in open discussions and builds together during communal construction weeks. The process is transparent and participatory, rooted in transdisciplinary exchange and a shared commitment to sustainable practice, social inclusion and critical urban research.
At its core, the project explores design as both a social and ecological tool. The team has created platforms for dialogue, learning spaces for shared knowledge and hybrid infrastructures that engage the rainwater basin as a productive site for encounter and reflection. Through its open and evolving structure, the design process becomes part of the educational experience itself – an active example of collective, future-oriented urban design that responds to ecological challenges, fosters new ways of learning and reimagines the city as a space of collaboration and care.
Floating University embodies a form of architecture that is never finished but continuously adapting. It redefines the architect’s role as a facilitator rather than a sole author, and the built environment as a living system shaped by its users. Its participatory structure embraces principles of self-organization, mutual responsibility and collective authorship. The project’s flexible architecture mirrors its social openness, showing that new ideas about urban life and ecology can emerge when communities are invited to build and think together.
The project’s impact extends beyond its site. It has become a reference point for how architecture can function as an educational process rather than a fixed object, showing how physical space can foster social transformation. By combining art, research and ecological experimentation, it invites a wide range of voices to co-create the environment, reflecting the needs of all stakeholders while remaining responsive to environmental, social and cultural shifts. Floating University demonstrates how architecture can foster transformation by connecting environmental repair with cultural renewal and community empowerment.
The prize money will fund the transformation of the Floating University into a resilient hybrid infrastructure and living laboratory that deepens its ecological and educational mission. The plan focuses on restoring the rainwater basin through multi-stage filtration systems, habitat creation and circular resource cycles for water and energy. These interventions will expand the project’s capacity for collaborative research, workshops and community engagement, fostering shared knowledge on regenerative urban design. By co-developing adaptive, low-tech systems across disciplines, the team aims to make the site a model for inclusive, sustainable and experimental urban practice – an evolving space where design, ecology and collective learning continuously inform one another.
- Information for the project text was provided by Floating e.V. -
Image gallery
Advisory Committee Statement
‘Floating University’ receives the award for Social Engagement for its deeply democratic and inclusive approach to learning, architecture and ecology. Situated in a polluted rainwater basin, the project transforms a neglected site into a vibrant public space where everyone, from residents to international students, can participate freely. The project reuses and repairs rather than replaces, offering a powerful model of ecological and social restoration. Its open structure enables shared authorship and co-learning between teachers, students and the public. By creating an architectural language rooted in care, the project shows how design can restore ecosystems while fostering radical forms of collective knowledge and community.