The Institute of Placemaking

The Institute of Placemaking is a knowledge exchange center and public institution that gives spatial possibilities to people who desire a place for new ideas and new encounters within the city. The Institute is not permanent. It is nomadic and changing. It opens, closes, travels, hides and grows. It is always improvising and improving. The Institute is forever under construction. The Institute is not about autonomous art or autonomous architecture. Instead, we want to contribute to the idea that a place is more than the sum of its buildings, and that architecture is a tool for giving form and potential to these shared spaces.

The Institute acts as an infrastructure that ‘grows’ through a series of curated workshops dealing with public action and experimentation with do-it-yourself methods of production, which extends to building, making, cooking, using and re-using. Workshops are focused around the looped system of resources, and particular attention is paid to what is commonly neglected in the production cycle of materials or goods: waste. We will be hosting six public workshops together with local citizens and festival participants: Build Your Own Solar Cooker, Do-It-Yourself Marmelade Workshop, Soap Opera: Making Soap from Scratch, Solar Cooker Tester + Taste Test, and Remade Furniture Workshop.

With Jia Gu, Pieterjan Grandry, Rosario Talevi, commisioned by Eme3: International Architecture Festival in Barcelona, supported via Kickstarter. Thank you: Andrea Sollazzo, Louisa Vermoere