Design Build

2021 Type: Glossary

Design Build means designing and building in one. The term designing is future-oriented: What can be tomorrow? How can it look and how do we get there? Which questions do we want to negotiate in it? Build – the building – is very present. It’s physical, materials are dragged, worked on, joined, combined. In building, you see the space emerge that was previously thought. It becomes tangible, it is immediately there to be tried out and questioned, to be touched, to be entered into.

Design Build combines both: the future and the present in a direct designing, space-producing action. Design Build is space production as a collaborative process. Space becomes part of a conversation between multiple people, ideas from different directions converge, and different experiences and skills contribute to the success of the whole. In Urban Praxis, many spaces are designed collaboratively in this way.

Markus Bader is a cofounder of the group raumlaborberlin. Since 2016 he is heading the Department of Building Planning and Design at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning at UdK Berlin. He is a member of the Berlin Council for the Arts and is involved in the initiatives Haus der Statistik and Urbane Praxis.