Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

Fellows and staff members of the ZI as well as visiting scientists report on ongoing work. The open format of the workshop facilitates intensive discussion. | Dina Falbe is the recipient of the 2025 Jutta Held Award.

Around 1960 concepts for type school buildings were developed as applied research projects, defining the norm of a school building as part of the larger system of a cybernetically organized state, with its economy largely defined by the availability of materials and labor or the lack thereof. The type school emerged from the political turn towards the concept of polytechnical education in 1959 and embedded school building into the industrialization of the construction economy with its changes in materiality and production processes. In the following school construction program 25 percent of the costs were to be covered with voluntary, unpaid, self-organized construction work and material donations – mainly to overcome a financial deficit, but with an educational benefit. Practical implementations of collective school construction are well documented and expose conflicts and contradictions between standardization and appropriation, between centralized and local responsibilities during this expansion of educational infrastructure. The practice of including handcrafted building materials and physical labor of students into the building process suggests the students' work being considered part of a collective effort in the sense of polytechnical education.
In the late 1960s a movement in art pedagogy discovered the potential of the environment as a learning space: local groups formed various practices and built a network exchanging ideas and experiences. The group KEKS - a short term intended to encompass concepts such as art, education, cybernetics, and systems theory - organized art educative happenings in Nürnberg and Munich as well as designing and operating adventure playgrounds for kids to build and operate a “Model for a Qualitative Society” as Palle Nielsen put it for his projects in Stockholm. With the play-town Mini-München a large-scale project derived from this formation persists until today. KEKS maintained contacts with groups sharing similar concepts like the “Spielclub” in West-Berlin and “Spielwagenkollektiv” in East-Berlin. Both of which organized more or less spontaneous building adventures in construction sites of large-scale housing estates, encouraging children to build their own organization aiming to overcome the distinction between theory and practice, between the adult world and the children’s realm. The processes and results of these two approaches differ, but they both are aimed at building a new understanding of society, facilitating a process of communing, negotiating and establishing common norms and practices, redistributing common resources and creating common knowledge.
My goal is to retrace the ideas and practices of learning by building during the 1960s until the 1980s in projects in which children constructed their own learning environments. The main sources will be project documentations to be found in archives of official institutions or private groups, local records of building projects, magazine and newspaper articles, and examinations of materials used in (school) buildings. To gain a more complete understanding of the educational aspects of these practices, compared to the theories, walking interviews with contemporary witnesses are planned.

[Caption: Construction of the Planetarium in Hoyerswerda which was entirely self-organized by the community of the school and the neighborhood to accommodate astronomy lessons. Source: Archive Planetarium Hoyerswerda, Astronomischer Verein Hoyerswerda e.V.]