Raumlabor — the pioneering Berlin-based participative architecture and urbanism collective — made their name with a series of spectacular site-specific interventions combining contemporary art with city planning, beginning in 1999.

Their projects have seen multiple transformations of the city’s historic Palast der Republik — first flooding it and offering dinghies for visitors to travel to the ‘islands’ within (each containing an exhibition on the theme of urbanism), then building a geometric mountain formation in, around and in front of it, drawing record crowds—as well as a collaboration with another notable name in temporary spaces, Plastique Fantastique, to make Das Küchenmonument. Leading on from that work’s inflatable room, Raumlabor took their Spacebuster truck, with an inflatable structure stored in the back, all around New York. But the project that has most affected the daily life of a city is their ongoing engagement with the former airport turned city park Tempelhofer Feld, incorporating both long-term planning and temporary interventions.Their most recent project, Fountain House, finds a pavilion in Montreal with a fountain in the middle, supplying water to the growing plants that form its walls. With public space more and more on the line in any discussion of urbanism, Raumlabor’s work directly addresses cities in transformation and the boundaries between public and private, while also operating intellectually in theory, education and open discussion. Also concerned with small-scale projects and the deeply local, the complexity contained within their ideas has brought them international acclaim.