MAX UTECH

PALACE of UN/LEARNING creates an open space of exploring, inventing, negotiating and sharing counter-hegemonic design strategies, that aims for more accessible, transformable, affordable, empowering and resource-efficient un/built structures for a most possible diverse urban society.

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PALACE of UN/LEARNING is a space, an archive, a laboratory and breeding ground for counter-hegemonic practices to re/learn how we can live together - across scales from the city to our beds. By reading and using existing (built) structures differently, society will be enabled to create ambiguities, cracks and niches, where the "other" emerges. The “other” can be a transformative mix of strategies, typologies and new vocabulary: queering, hacking, spongeing, commoning, provoking, negotiating, rave, salon, camp, … With the open aim of envisioning a (post-capitalist) future city infused by far more accessible, transformable, affordable, empowering and resource-efficient un/built structures for a most possible diverse urban society. 

 

PALACE of UN/LEARNING performs three following steps to crack up norms, standards and habits.

UN/LEARN is the search for another vocabulary and  typologies of missing words and spaces for a most diverse, queer, feminist and post-colonial future. It aims to unlearn rituals, routines and norms which are determined through walls, floors and social ideals. It moves away from an architecture practice which is grounded on the idea of solving our planet’s and society’s challenges with even more buildings while serving capitalist mechanisms of housing shortage and risk minimization through limiting diversity.

 

OPEN describes a collective, collaborative and transformative practice. It is an open PALACE, whose histories are written and built by many. It is not about one exclusive definition of space, architecture, history and future. It aims towards a growing knowledge of how our built and lived futures could be, including other forms of cohabitiation with a nonhuman existence. OPEN is a call for action, for changeable, shapeable, uncoded architectures that stimulate one to actively engage. They are places of experimentation, negotiation and transgressing boundaries. Ultimately, it is about the playful overcoming of codes of design, society and aesthetics: pleasurable exaggeration, flamboyant provocation, shameless claiming and pretending, the exhaustion of the concept of "architecture".

 

TRANSGRESS & NEGOTIATE

PALACE of UN/LEARNING is also a place of resistance. It is not just about understanding but as well about claiming urgent changes by exhibiting and negotiating them. It can be a Wild Image-Atlas of possible futures, a Living Manifest like a love letter and an exhibition more like a Radical Salon: collecting knowledge of the many, challenging the ruling and promoting political activist strategies for a different understanding of a sustainable architecture.

 

Bernadette Krejs / Max Utech