What it is
The site began as a rainwater retention basin serving the former Tempelhof airport and nearby roads. After the airport closed, animals, plants and algae occupied the human-made basin and turned it into an accidental wetland.
Raumlabor opened the site to the public in 2018 as Floating University. Since then, the project has treated the basin not as empty land waiting for a better use, but as existing infrastructure and habitat that can host learning, culture and collective care.
How it works
- Rainwater: runoff from the former airport buildings, airfield and nearby streets continues to enter the basin as part of Berlin’s drainage infrastructure.
- Wetland: reeds, grasses, willows, frogs, birds, algae and other organisms have colonised the site.
- Learning: architecture, ecology, art, movement, water testing and public workshops use the basin itself as curriculum.
- Experimentation: the site has hosted greywater, rainwater, soil and biodiversity research alongside temporary spatial structures.
- Public rhythm: seasonal opening hours, free programmes and guided tours create repeated reasons to return rather than a one-time exhibition.
Community / operating model
Floating University is held together by Floating e.V. and a changing network of members, artists, designers, scientists, activists, neighbours and visitors.
The project’s language of care is practical: opening the gate, maintaining structures, testing water, cooking, hosting public days and negotiating how humans occupy a wetland that is also municipal infrastructure.
The 2026 programme describes the site as an ongoing eco-social experiment in multispecies living, not a completed design.
What can be copied
- Before redesigning an overlooked site, inventory the life and practices that already arrived without permission.
- Treat infrastructure as a possible public learning environment rather than automatically separating technical and cultural space.
- Let programmes adapt to seasonal and ecological conditions instead of forcing the site into a fixed institutional schedule.
- Use temporary architecture to support attention to a place rather than to dominate it.
Yogawiser read
Floating University works because it resisted the urge to improve the basin into something cleaner and more legible. The mess is the syllabus.
Evidence / trade-offs
What makes this difficult to copy?
The basin's ambiguity is part of the project and also its constraint. It remains functioning rainwater infrastructure, contains polluted water and sits on public land that has repeatedly been imagined as something else—including real-estate development.
The model depends on institutional tolerance for an unfinished, seasonal and ecologically messy place. A city that demands clean ownership boundaries, permanent buildings and a fixed programme may remove the very conditions that make this kind of learning landscape possible.