City, Country, Rehearsal

Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, Anna Foerster-Baldenius, Andrea Hofmann –congratulations on winning the Tabori Prize 2026! Off the top of your heads, can you think of anything that connects you, as a collective with a background in architecture, to the namesake of the most important award in the independent performing arts, the theater maker George Tabori?

Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius: The lightness of his approach to the medium! Not taking the theater as a place too seriously, but rather understanding it as a tool with which one can do all sorts of things – I think that’s where we really have a connection with Tabori. For us, the theater is above all an infrastructure – including a human one, because, aside from the basic material equipment, it brings together experts and expertise from all sorts of fields that, as an architect, cannot be combined into a single person. That’s why it was a perfect match from the very beginning: the theater and us.

You’re a nine-member collective that has been opening up the public space to the theater as a kind of stage since 1999. It remains unforgettable how, in 2003, in collaboration with the Thalia Theater Halle, you transformed an 18-story building in the high-rise residential district of Neustadt into the “Hotel Neustadt” together with over 100 young people, or a year later, as part of the “Volkspalast” project by HAU and Sophiensaele Berlin, when you flooded the former GDR parliament building, the Palace of the Republic, and turned it into a temporary lagoon city that one could navigate by boat!

Andrea Hofmann: Today we say we work at the intersection of urban planning, architecture, art and intervention. But when we started back then, our primary motivation was to apply what we had learned in architecture school in a different way. That naturally led us to other clients as well. Although, to be honest, those active in traditional building construction not only interested us less, but at that time – and this must be said – would not have been accessible to us at all.

Expressed in classical theatrical terms, the city is your stage. What exactly interests you about this scenario?

B. Foerster-Baldenius: First and foremost, the city is interesting because it’s where we live –and as the habitat for an incredible number of different individuals, it must be organized in such a way that’s as good as possible for everyone. This primarily involves what we call urban practice: What exactly are the codes we use to navigate the city? How do we improvise our paths through the public space, how do we maneuver around one another, with whom do we come into contact and in what ways, whose eyes do we look into? Building on this, we try – in the best democratic sense – to create places where encounters are possible in a different way. And for that, it’s simply not enough to just build a space; you also have to get the programming right, so to speak; social practice comes into play. That’s the point where it becomes performative: you have to practice together – especially if you want to change something. In that sense, we create practice spaces that have a lot in common with rehearsal spaces….
Hofmann: … and in which passersby automatically become co-actors. I believe our spaces often function as amplifiers: They are so charged with certain phenomena, or sometimes even exaggerated, that they challenge people to participate, to engage in dialogue. This creates places that help us arrive at a different consciousness and ultimately figure out how we actually want to live together in these cities in the future in a meaningful way.
B. Foerster-Baldenius: Architects usually imagine that they just need to draw on their own knowledge and experience to design buildings, which will then somehow function on their own. That’s also what you learn in college –and it’s something we simply don’t believe in. We’re convinced that in order to create a space, you have to try it out with the people who will ultimately use it, and therefore develop it collaboratively from the very beginning. The first step in this process largely involves unlearning.

What exactly needs to be unlearned in this process?

B. Foerster-Baldenius: From a global perspective, we know that we can’t continue to do things the way we’ve been doing them up to now. And to actually achieve a more ecological, open and tolerant way of interacting with each other, we first have to unlearn much of what we’ve practiced for decades or even centuries! It’s similar to trying to quit smoking.
Anna Foerster-Baldenius: You might have to practice that several times! Maybe you need to quit smoking three, four, or five times because you kept starting again, and then each time trying a different method of quitting.

What “practice spaces” are you designing right now?

B. Foerster-Baldenius: We’re currently working for Kampnagel in Hamburg. Over the next few years, there’ll be a major construction site there, and Kampnagel will continue to present its theater program on the site. We are calling this a “performative construction site” and are developing spaces for it that lie somewhere between a theater and a construction site, and which we’ve defined as a “clarification plant”: places where things can be clarified. Among many other things, this includes a pool of warm water in the theater’s garden, which is intended to become a hub connecting the theater staff, its neighbors, the audience and the construction crew, and run by the Migrantpolitan team. Because when you enter this wet environment – naked or in swimwear –you think and speak in a more relaxed way about the stress that surrounds everyone. Moreover, everyone is equal, just like with the project “Floating.”

That’s the temporary campus in a rainwater retention basin near Berlin’s former Tempelhof Airport, which experiments with open-air learning, research and communal living, and for which you were awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021.

B. Foerster-Baldenius: Exactly. When we invite academic groups there, they’re initially confronted with conditions completely different from their usual environment: There are no walls, mosquitoes fly by while they’re giving their lectures, and frogs croak nearby. The place is incredibly charming, so everyone who comes there feels at ease right away. But when it comes to their research, they’re a bit at a loss because their normal routines don’t work. This inevitably changes the way they talk about these issues and ultimately leads to people from different research fields – the ethnologists, the architects, the theater people – suddenly being able to talk to one another.

The city, as a sociological category, has undergone a major transformation since you formed at the turn of the millennium, and that’s also true of Berlin. Today, it’s less about opening up spaces and more about defending them. How has your work changed against this backdrop?

Hofmann: I actually believe that we’ve increasingly shifted our focus from participatory issues toward development issues. Projects like Floating or the Haus der Statistik are fundamentally tied to the question of who can still afford space in the inner city at all.

At the Haus der Statistik on Alexanderplatz – right in the heart of Berlin’s now truly unaffordable city center – the goal is to gradually transform a former administrative building into a public-interest-oriented space for living, working and art.

A. Foerster-Baldenius: It’s important to point out that both the Haus der Statistik and Floating are not only long-term projects but also explicitly collective ones; raumlabor is not operating alone there. At the Haus der Statistik, we are merely one of several groups and individuals who helped initiate the process. And while we initiated Floating in 2018, in 2019 it was taken over by an independent association of which raumlabor remains a member, but which speaks entirely for itself and designs the program on its own. So, it’s about helping to drive urban development processes and also passing on our knowledge.

What do you currently see as the biggest challenge in your work?

B. Foerster-Baldenius: Trying to create a space that continues to stay interesting and where the debates we just discussed actually take place time and again. Because spaces become institutionalized very quickly: You run the risk of building administrative structures that no longer produce anything at all, but merely sustain themselves – and thus reproduce exactly what you originally wanted to get rid of through the development of the space. We see this problem with theaters: The venues are renovated at enormous expense, the administrative structures are protected by unions, but the content – the programming and, above all, the work with the independent performing arts – becomes impossible at some point because there’s no budget, since the money in this country is needed for other things.

You’re alluding to the cuts to the culture budget that Berlin – like many other cities and municipalities– is currently facing.

B. Foerster-Baldenius: These are developments where we also feel increasingly that we have a responsibility to speak up and propose ways to bring about change ourselves. We must find ways for artistic work to continue!

Speaking of which: The Tabori Prize not only comes with symbolic recognition but also with 100,000 euros. Do you already know how you’ll invest the money?

B. Foerster-Baldenius: We’ve already planned a day when we’ll all head out to the countryside together to discuss this very question. There are a huge number of things on the table, because right now we’re actually involved almost exclusively in underfunded projects.

Hofmann: In that sense, we’ll really think very carefully about where the prize can have the greatest impact.

B. Foerster-Baldenius: In any case, we’re absolutely thrilled about it. And not just because it means fame and glory, but specifically because it comes with money. It’s great to think about how to use such a sum together! We’ll be spending it very responsibly.