The four projects presented in the Time Space Existence exhibition by HS Architekten unite a focus on the preservation of the urban building stock, the provision of inner-city space without resealing the soil and the use of wood as building material. They thus follow the principle of resource-conserving and circular building in the sense of the ‘Goals for a climate-positive architecture’.

In this workshop, the projects will be compared with the studio’s experiences in a project currently underway in Berlin, the Atelier Gardens Campus, where circular processes and urban mining are being tested in a real laboratory on several levels.

The contributions depict two sides of building: on the one hand, the project as a whole with the image of the building as a consumer good and all the associated expectations of a functional living and working space, and on the other hand, the invisible chains of building materials behind it, which usually elude perception and are still disposed of as waste, usually in a linear fashion, after the period of use, thus destroying not only resources but also capital.

The questions that concern them are: How we can successfully link the actors in the different areas of construction and how can we as planners ensure that the linear chains are closed into a circle? What are the economic and political constraints and how can architecture outsmart the notoriously slow legislative and political processes? What can a city like Berlin learn from the urban conditions of Venice and vice versa?

The presentation will be an open panel followed by a Q&A.