Design Lab

KOSMOS

KOSMOS is an experimental global hybrid space and infrastructure for the future culture spaces.

KOSMOS opens to all people and communities worldwide who have Internet access to participate in this co-creative hybrid gaming platform to interact with challenges and collectively envision new futures with the aim for its ever- expanding speculative worlds to provoke, inspire, and inform our thoughts.
KOSMOS @ Hybrid Space Lab, 2024

Digital
&
The City

Public urban space and the “space” of communication networks are usually considered to be competing, even mutually exclusive frameworks for social interaction.

In fact, the traditional functions of public urban space are being taken over by telecommunication networks, their input/output devices implanted in private space.
Publication Media & The City @ de Architekt, den Haag, the Netherlands, July 1997

co
SPECIES
lab

Ecological transition implies and demands a conceptual mutation, a paradigm shift.

This global transition has to integrate systems of knowledge and ways of conceiving the world, some of which are still organizing the daily lives of the inhabitants of cities in the Global South, and are often shunned and disregarded in the Global North.
Festival #1 Multi Species Habitat @ WɔɛLab, Lomé, Togo, 27 November 2023

Humboldt
Volcano

As an innovative flexible transparent structure, Humboldt Volcano contrasts with the historical appearance of the introverted power-radiating reconstruction of the Berlin palace, which houses Humboldt Forum.

Humboldt Volcano, standing for a pluralistic multiculturalism, enables the appropriation of the Humboldt Forum, opening it up to the city and international public.
Humboldt Volcano with its crystalline architecture refers to the glass architectures of the German architects Taut – and to other German traditions that opposed the palace and its power structures.

Humboldt Volcano @ Humboldt Forum, Berlin, 2017-2024

Kiez
Lab

The challenges of digital transformation are becoming more and more tangible in the daily lives of Berliners.
There is an increasing need to get involved and take the city’s digital future into one’s own hands.

Research & Concept, Workshops & Publications Kiez Lab © Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin, 2019~2022

Nature
Tecture

NatureTecture focuses on those fields of work that will become increasingly important internationally for the design of our living environments and formulates relevant questions for the future.

NatureTecture is dedicated to the tasks and instruments of qualifying landscape in the post-industrial age.
Concept NatureTecture @ Chamber of Architects, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, 1 September 2009

Deep
Space

Deep Space is a long-term investigative program initiated to deal with politics of memory, controversial space and monuments, heritage and digitalization.
How to transform and re-signify Valle de los Caídos (“Valley of the Fallen”), the Francoist monument close to Madrid?

Valle de los Caídos with its 152-meter-tall cross visible from more than 30 kilometers away and its “basilica”, a 263-meter long crypt with a 52-meter high vault cut out of the granite mountain rock, is one of the world’s most controversial monuments

Workshop Deep Space: re-signifying Valle de los Caídos @ Medialab Prado & Valle de los Caídos, Madrid, 25-27 October 2018

Poly
Garden
City

Poly Garden City is a participative project integrating green into Athens built environment, fusing building and gardens into new hybrid urban typologies, and reinterpreting modernist urban heritage and a strategy for participative climate adaptation for cities in semi-arid climates.
Research & Workshops, Urban Design @ City of Athens, 5 April 2015

Smart
&
the
City

From Smart City to Smart Citizen: mapping the Smart City, empowering the Smart Citizen.

Smart City is the fusion of the Urban and the Digital Age.

Ubiquitous digitalisation together with the increasing complexity of global challenges demand for interdisciplinary co-designing processes, involving society at large.
Urban Research Smart & the City @ Embassy Kingdom of the Netherlands Berlin, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Kingdom of the Netherlands, The Hague, 2 February 2014

SMART__THE_CITY_006_EN_FLOODING_1200x675_JPG_020816

Humboldt
Jungle

The Berlin Humboldt Forum, named after the Humboldt brothers, will become a world center for culture and is housed in the reconstruction of a historical palace.
We designed a hanging garden with lianas overgrowing the Prussian palace and a tropical forest for its roof.

Humboldt Jungle @ Humboldt Forum, Berlin, 2015-2016

INbetweenSTITUTE

INbetweenSTITUTE reinserts art production in 798. It is a new open infrastructure for co-creation, bridging the private space of artistic creation and the public spaces of the audience.
INbetweenSTITUTE provides a new hybrid infrastructure that fuses the private space of the artist/creative professional with the public spaces of the audience, creating a hybrid platform for co-creation.

Instead of a mono-functional fixed identity (an artificial “New Brand”) we propose a process-oriented strategy for enhancing the creative artist networks, anchoring them into 798’s urban tissue.

Concept, Architectural & Urban Design @ 798 Art District, Beijing, 2012

Public
Media
Urban
Interfaces

Public urban space and the space of information networks are usually considered to be competing, even mutually exclusive frameworks of social interaction.

In fact, the traditional functions of public urban space are being taken over by telecommunication networks with their input/output devices embedded in private space: distribution and discussion of news, display and selling of goods, provision of space for play and celebration were formerly the tasks of public space; today they are increasingly being performed by the Internet.
Publication Public Media Urban Interfaces @ Lab für Kunst und Apparate, Jahrbuch, ISBN 3-88375-324-6, Academy for Media Arts, Cologne, Germany, 1 October 1998

KOSMOS

KOSMOS is a prototype for innovative venues dedicated to global cultural interaction and an experimentation space for the future of museums and cultural institutions.
Offering a hybrid (combined digital/physical) infrastructure that fosters transcultural exchange, KOSMOS is open to all people and communities worldwide who have Internet access to participate in this co-creative platform, to interact and collectively envision new cultural futures.

Kosmos @ Hybrid Space Lab, 2024

Humboldt Futures

Humboldt Futures offers a globally accessible co-creative gaming platform for exchange and participative collective production in order to negotiate dystopian and to envision positive cultural futures.
Humboldt Futures is an experimentation space for ideating the future of museums.
Humboldt Futures is a collaboration between gamelab.berlin and Hybrid Space Lab.

Dinner Humboldt Futures @ Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin 11 January 2024
Workshop Ideation, Presentation & Discussion Humboldt Futures @ Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, 12 January 2024

coSPECIESlab

Ecological transition implies and demands a conceptual mutation, a paradigm shift.
This global transistion has to integrate also other systems of knowledge and ways of conceiving the world, some of which are still organizing the daily lives of the inhabitants of cities in the Global South, and are often shunned and disregarded in the Global North.

Labs & Fests @ Glocal, 2023~2026

festCITY

festCITY consists of a radical, situated approach to embed festival and cultural events into the city. It entails a process-oriented think-tank to sustainably integrate festivals and festival designing and making into the environment, with a crossover, hybrid approach that combines Berlin’s (bio)diversity leveraging unexpected encounters and combinations from the cultural and tech fields.

Lecture FESTcity, Town Hall Meeting #1 @ betahaus, Berlin, 22 March 2023

Next Stop Culture

Animal Club connects creatives, ecologists, biologists, artists, philosophers and other experts with professionals from the club scene to generate new concepts and develop new business models for a sustainable future of clubbing and culture.

Presentation, Workshop, Panel, Party @ Amsterdam Dance Event @ SEXYLAND World, Amsterdam, 16.00-24.00, 2022

Animal Club

Animal Club connects creatives, ecologists, biologists, artists, philosophers and other experts with professionals from the club scene to generate new concepts and develop new business models for a sustainable future of clubbing and culture.

Presentation, Workshop, Panel & Party Animal Club, Co-Hosted by VibeLab @ Amsterdam Dance Event, SEXYLAND World, 1 Noordwal, 1021 PX Amsterdam, 20 October 2022

Convers@ions

Convers(at)ions engages creatively with exchanges over border phenomenology and performativity, it transforms negative spaces such as military demarcations and borders by adopting a ‘more-than-human’ perspective and taps into the potential of nature and environmental conservation activities.

Research @ Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) &  European Green Belt (EGB), Berlin & Seoul, October 2019~2023

reWild Autobahn

ReWild Autobahn proposes a hybrid (natural and artificial) landscape on a dismantled urban highway in Berlin as a green corridor for humans and non-humans.

Exhibition ReWild Autobahn @ BDA Gallery, Association of German Architects Berlin, Berlin, 6 October – 26 November 2021
Publication Berlin Atlas @ BauNetz, Berlin, 19 November 2021

Co-Creating Hybrid Culture

For the German Federal Cultural Foundation Hybrid Space Lab developed Co-Creating Hybrid Culture that addresses the augmenting of physical cultural sites and practices through digital spaces via transdisciplinary co-creating events.

Keynote Future Cultural Space @ Kulturstiftung des Bundes, HoloLab – dive in Program for Digital Interaction, Halle an der Saale, Germany, 16.00 – 17.00, 22 September 2021
Research & Concept @ German Federal Cultural Foundation, Halle an der Saale, Germany, 2021

Grow Your Green City

Grow Your Green City is an international campaign creating awareness of the fundamental role played by urban green. Grow Your Green City is committed to the idea that a Smart City should be a climate-conscious city, exploring how digital and media technologies can contribute to address urban climate adaptation and water-conscious urban development, strengthening and promoting sustainability cultures.

Workshop Grow Your Green City @ Floriade Expo 2022, Almere, The Netherlands, 25 February 2021

Club Futures

Club Futures is an international laboratory with the aim of developing new perspectives for the club and cultural scene.

Exchange, Ideation, Research, Panels, Parties, Prototyping, Workshops @ Club Futures, Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin & Amsterdam, 2022~2023

Green Artificial Intelligent Architecture

In the Anthropocene, the juxtaposition between nature versus artifact and designed environment is becoming obsolete. In the dissolution of this polarity lays a great chance: architecture (which in the allegorical depiction of the Vitruvian Primitive Hut by Marc-Antoine Laugier and Charles Eisen of 1753 had emerged from nature) merges with nature once again.

Architecture G AI A @ de Waag Technology & Society, Amsterdam, 2019-2020

Reboot Culture

Reboot Culture experiments with collective cultural experiences deeply rooted in urban space, combining public physical space and public digital space. Through hybrid formats and the support of a mobile, modular media infrastructure, the program engages with practices that can make culture ‘go-round’ in its hybridity, embedding cultural co-creation in the city fabric. With floating stage and studio facilities at the riversides Reboot Culture merges (urban) landscapes with Hybrid Staging, developing a strong symbolic momentum for the rebooting of culture.

Concerts, Jam-sessions, Performances, Screenings & Narrow- and Broadcasts @ Instrument Inventors, Royal Academy of Art & Royal Conservatoire the Hague, Sonic Acts, V2 Lab for Unstable Media, Waag technology & society, The Netherlands, 2020-2021

DMZpace

As a consequence of the more than 65 years long near absence of human activity, the Korean DMZ  land strip has become a verdant 984 square kilometers nature reserve where endangered flora and fauna species had the chance to regain space.
The Korean DMZ has become a testimony to unintentional beauty. Thriving vegetation and undisturbed wildlife now cover the painful, conflict-born void along the military demarcation.
Over the last few years, it has gathered international attention due to its symbolic value as well as to individual and bilateral bids by North and South Korea securing UNESCO Biosphere status for areas of the DMZ.

Workshop DMZpace @ DMZ, CCL, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea, 30 May-3 June 2010Exhibition @ Yeonnamjang Gallery Seoul, 2 May-17 May 2020
Exhibition @ Korean Cultural Center Paris, 10 September-6 November 2020

Deep Space

Deep Space is a long-term investigative program initiated to deal with politics of memory, controversial space and monuments, digitalization and heritage.
Deep Space: re-signifying Valle de los Caídos aims at developing creative processes, concepts, and ideas that can break through and transform the symbolic power of the place.

Workshop Deep Space: re-signifying Valle de los Caídos @ Medialab Prado & Valle de los Caídos, Madrid, 25-27 October 2018
Opening, Exhibition, Lecture & Discussion Lost Memory – Recovered Memory @ Goethe Institut & Fundación Pablo Iglesias, Madrid, 5 June 2019
Workshop & Lecture @ ISEA 2022 Symposium “Possibilities” Heritage and Futures, Centre de Cultura Contemporània, Barcelona, 12 June & 14 2022

Quantum B.A.N.G

Quantum B.A.N.G explains the acceleration of communication technology.

Quantum B.A.N.G. © Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin, 21 July 2017

GRÜNMANIA

GRÜNMANIA decorates the front of the pavilion, transcoding the GERMANIA letter characters. These small “shifts” bring about a transformation and inversion of meaning and open up a wide range of ideas: the pavilion is no longer just Germany’s shop window, but a container in which the global challenges can be tackled together.

Concept German Pavilion @ Venice Architecture Biennial 2018, Italy, 1 May 2017

Fabric

The documentary Fabric presents the history of the building complex that houses today the Athens School of Fine Arts, one the main venues of documenta 14 in Athens. It also narrates a family history that spans more than over 100 years and starting in Cappadocia in Central Anatolia, continues via Beirut and Istanbul (Constantinople) arriving in Athens in the 1920ies.

Documentary Video Fabric @ documenta 14, Athens School of Fine Arts, Peiraios Street 256, Athens, 8 April-17 July 2017

Humboldt Volcano

A vertical jungle in a greenhouse pavilion clings to the Berlin Humboldt Forum. A trail leads from the underground to the roof of the Humboldt Forum, opening up stacked gardens and pop-up restaurants dedicated respectively to world flora and world cuisines.

Poly Garden City

Poly Garden City is a participative project integrating green into Athens built environment, fusing building and gardens into new hybrid urban typologies, and reinterpreting modernist urban heritage and a strategy for participative climate adaptation for cities in semi-arid climates.

Research & Urban Design @ City of Athens, 5 April 2015

Humboldt Jungle

A jungle for the façade of the Berlin Humboldt Forum!

INbetweenSTITUTE @ 798

INbetweenSTITUTE is a strategy for strengthening the Beijing art district 798 as a resilient creative cluster and as China’s Creative Lab.

BioBubble

BioBibble is a sustainable urbanism project for the city of Beijing.

Smart & the City

From Smart City to Smart Citizen: mapping the Smart City, empowering the Smart Citizen.
Smart City is the fusion of the Urban and the Digital Age.
Ubiquitous digitalisation together with the increasing complexity of global challenges demand for interdisciplinary co-designing processes, involving society at large.

Urban Research Smart & the City @ Embassy Kingdom of the Netherlands Berlin, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Kingdom of the Netherlands, The Hague, 2 February 2014

NatureTecture

The international travelling exhibition NatureTecture presents the fields of landscape architecture in all their breadth and relevance.
The exhibition is based on landscape architectural expertise from North Rhine-Westphalia and refers to examples of landscape architecture from NRW.
NatureTecture focuses on those fields of work that will become increasingly important internationally for the design of our living environments and formulates relevant questions for the future.
The NatureTecture exhibition is dedicated to the tasks and instruments of qualifying landscape in the post-industrial age.
The international travelling exhibition on the fields of work of landscape architecture is organized by the Chamber of Architects of North Rhine-Westphalia with the support of the Ministry of Building and Transport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Concept NatureTecture @ Chamber of Architects, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, 1 September 2009
Exhibition NatureTecture @ Chamber of Architects, Düsseldorf, Germany 11 Februar -17 March 2010
Exhibition NatureTecture @ Representation of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia to the European Union, Berlin, Germany, 9 June-12 July 2010
Exhibition NatureTecture @ Chamber of Architects of Jeollabuk-Do Province (KIRA Jeonbuk), Republic of Korea, 1 September- 4 September 2010
Exhibition NatureTecture @ Building Culture Fair Daejeon 2010, Republic of Korea, 14-19 October 2010
Exhibition NatureTecture @ Architecture and Urbanism Fair Gwangju, Republic of Korea, 3-7 November 2010
Exhibition NatureTecture @ Turkish Chamber of Architects of the Metropolis of Istanbul, Turkey, 26 November-10 December 2010
Exhibition NatureTecture @ 20th Anniversary of German Reunification, Busan, Republic of Korea, 8-14 December 2010

Neighbours Network City

Neighbours Network City: a project proposal by Hybrid Space Lab for the city of Essen and the Ruhr region in Germany as the Cultural Capital of Europe.

Concept Wir essen für das Ruhrgebiet @ European Cultural Capital Ruhr, Germany, 1 March 2003

reBoot

For a week, from 8 till 15 October 1999, a boat descended the Rhine, the archetypal symbol of the connection between Germany and the Netherlands, as reBoot a floating media-laboratory, from Cologne on its way to Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

Concerts, Screenings, Broadcasts, Performances, Projects & Research, Art & Media Lab reBoot @ KUNST NRW.NL, Motor Boat Carolina, The Rhine, Cologne~Amsterdam, 8-15 October 1999

Venda

A colossal De Klerk, complex dream-pictures in wood or a monkey with a transistor radio and a bright pink rear end. Rotterdam’s Museum of Ethnology is showing some 30 sculptures by South African Venda artists in a remarkable display. ‘If there is one general characteristic to be given to contemporary African art, it is an unstoppable narrative drive.’

Publication The storytelling art of the Venda, Paul Faber @ Museum magazine Vitrine, Rotterdam 1 August 1994

Hybrid Space

Hybrid Space is the fusion of media and physical space.
Hybrid Spaces are the products of the alliances between physical objects and digital information-communication networks, of architectural-urban and media space.
Hybrid Space is the ambivalent space that is at the same time analog and digital, virtual and material, biological and technical, local and global, tactile and abstract.

Concept Hybrid Space © Hybrid Space Lab, Berlin, 1988~2024