The school building in Burgdorf is scheduled for demolition. A pity for such a simple, yet generous building and a strange precedent for students at the beginning of their studies. To demolish in order to build again is precisely the reflex architecture must now unlearn.

Let’s try to turn it into a pedagogical opportunity. Schools tend to be difficult structures to appropriate. They are large, heavy, regulated. Students can spend years inside them, remaining strangely estranged from the architecture that directly surrounds them. This specific context allows us to challenge this. The building becomes site and material for the students, it turns from a container to a tool. The school is theirs.

The first act is to collect material. Each group has to fill a car with found, discarded material. They place it in a chosen spot in the school: a corner, a landing, the middle of an auditorium. Through organising the material at this specific place, a logic within the material itself appears: weight, dimension, solidity.

From there, each group builds their own living space, combined with one useful function for their fellow students. Each school needs a good place to drink a coffee, brush your teeth, smoke your morning cigarette or take a sauna.

Working with existing material brings architecture back to an elementary question: how do things hold together? Knots, joints, stacks, wedges. Architecture is built first, and drawn second.

At the end of the semester, we spend a night all together at the school, with reviews slowly sliding into a rave.