Architecting a Change
Federica Zambeletti in conversation with Arno Brandlhuber and Olaf Grawert
Amidst an escalating housing crisis in Europe compounded by the speculative methods of the real estate market, buildings are torn down and rapidly redeveloped with limited consideration of community and environmental impacts. Architects must in turn consciously situate their practices in relation to these and other changing disciplinary boundaries. Groundwork, a three-part film and exhibition series presented at the CCA from May 2024 to September 2025, looks to new critical modes of engagement and shifting methodological approaches to understand architecture as an open process shaped by a multiplicity of stories and collaborators.
During the filming of To Build Law, the second chapter in the Groundwork series, Arno Brandlhuber and Olaf Grawert (bplus.xyz) spoke with Federica Zambeletti (founder and managing director, KoozArch) about how their practice seeks to reimagine the architectural project. Their conversation took place outside the Mäusebunker, a former animal testing facility in Berlin which gained heritage status in 2023 after years of public debate. For bplus.xyz (b+), the Mäusebunker serves as a catalytic project to imagine a future of reuse for the existing building stock—a future they are hoping to shape through the promotion of a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) called HouseEurope! that proposes new EU laws to make renovation and transformation more easy, affordable, and social.
- FZ
- When did your studio start looking into adaptive reuse and the renovation of our existing building stock?
- AB
- When I came to Berlin in 2006, nobody asked me to do a project. That can’t happen, architects that are not asked to contribute! So we started basically to find our own projects, and the first was Brunnenstraße. It was an abandoned site with an artist run gallery behind it. Berlin was still very open in terms of unused spaces—cheap rent, cheap prices, abandoned buildings. And this is just fifteen years ago, at a moment of financial crisis when the system collapsed for a moment. But this enabled other forms of participation. Basically we asked the bank to provide us with the money to buy the building then to build our project, and it was always the same logic for us: rent out studio space at just the price that you would have to give to the bank, without any profit. Meaning that you can have friends around, or people that are interesting. In the end, it’s about solidarity.
- FZ
- How does the Mäusebunker enter this story? And to what extent did it become the moment that you started really looking into the idea of policy and reuse?
- OG
- In a way, the Mäusebunker is not so easy to compare to other projects that the office has done, because the other projects were privately owned. With Antivilla or San Gimignano, we were not in competition with the public sector and the value of the land was not that high. With Mäusebunker, they wanted to demolish to free the land—and we are in the midst of Berlin next to the river in a beautiful area, so of course the value of the empty land is high. But they never priced in the consequences of demolition. They only saw the land value. So this is why they said, let’s demolish it and free the land, and we can either build ourselves or sell it for a high price.
Outside the Mäusebunker, Berlin. Still from footage shot during the making of the documentary film To Build Law, 2024 from the series Groundwork © CCA
- AB
- The building itself tells the whole story about our relationship towards environment. In a way, its reuse would have a double agenda. It’s about the grey energy, but also about our relationship with nature. And that’s from an architectural perspective, but also from an activist perspective. So we made a public offer to buy the building, with newspapers and writing to the mayor, saying we would like to take it over. That was a moment when there were also a lot of other activists, historians, and architects doing exhibitions about it, collecting material.
- OG
- This was a moment when we as b+ said, okay, we want to do this reuse project and we are not waiting for a call from the city. Instead, we publicly want to present our proposal. The Berlinische Galerie invited us to participate in a show for which we produced a design and a reuse proposal and presented it publicly. And at the opening of the show, the city announced that they won’t demolish the Mäusebunker but instead they will list it, because we created this whole moment where they could no longer say “There is no future for this building.”
- FZ
- That’s interesting because you really managed to catalyze public consensus. With such an activity, you built up the citizenship and an initiative to say, first of all, we start questioning, and then we build momentum and we stand against this kind of thinking, which ultimately brought to the stopping of demolition.
- AB
- There was a very aware crowd. We felt this solidarity to a topic that’s coming out of an architectural perspective, and we started to enter this discourse and felt, wow, there is something which is also architecting, because you built on something. In the end you can be successful without building a building, but maybe architecting a change or a shift or an infrastructure, a design process.
- OG
- And then there are so many overlaps to learn from for HouseEurope!. Of course we have a goal, which is a very architectural goal, but you have these layers in this goal, whether you speak about it from a social, ecological, economic, or cultural perspective. There are all these entry points for the spectrum of politics, from wherever you come. But then it’s about direct democracy in a moment when I think a majority is questioning our current system or wondering about its future. It has this double layer where it’s not only about what we aim for, but also the format that we choose to become activists and fill this tool with meaning.
- FZ
- I wanted to ask a little bit about this idea of the European Citizens’ Initiative and direct democracy. How did you define that as the tool through which you wanted to shape HouseEurope! as an initiative?
- OG
- Well, we realized there is no real legal ground on which to challenge the demolition or new construction of a building. That was the moment when we started questioning, how do we bring these values into the economic system? How do we deal with it on a European level to avoid local or national conflicts of politics? That ultimately brought us to the ECI as a format.
- AB
- It was also the time when more and more people were beginning to use the legal framework; understanding that rivers could have their own rights didn’t exist twenty years ago. I would say rivers have always had their own rights, but that they became a legal entity.
- OG
- We also started looking into the topic of cohabitation, of how to really plan in non-human agents as architectural users or as core citizens of our cities. And the Mäusebunker appeared as a logic to showcase these ideas, because it’s the story of the building itself and it is part of its story not to deny its past. So to use this story and to imagine how it could continue. And I think this is the dilemma that the city now has, because there is no protocol for how to easily preserve buildings, how to reuse them, and what could happen. In our scenario, we say, all the parts that cannot be easily used in a human logic can be given back to animals or non-humans. But this is a logic a normal developer would never think of, because they say we have x potential square metres to generate rent, and non-human value is not priced in. We also don’t price in the consequences of a building when it was built, but we all live in this world that has to deal with this impact. All the CO2 that was emitted is now our reality. So then the question is, how can you now make use of what has happened already? It’s a crisis moment again, where something new can evolve.
- AB
- We as architects normally try to find loopholes within the legal framework of the building code. And we see that the legal framework is something that we are opposing, or the legal framework is opposing us or excluding us with our imaginary thinking. There was a moment when we thought, the making of the legal framework is a design process. Because somebody designs it, somebody writes it. So it’s also architecting. We said, okay, if it’s not fast enough to come up with a societal awareness leading to a shift, then use the legal framework. That’s what we are doing with HouseEurope!, just to shortcut the process and help our dear politicians to be faster.
Alina Kolar and Olaf Grawert presenting HouseEurope! during the filming of To Build Law, October 2024. Photograph by Francesco Garutti
Photo of San Gimignano, office of b+, taken during the filming of *To Build Law, October 2024. Photograph by Francesco Garutti
Photograph taken during the filming of To Build Law, October 2024. Photograph by Francesco Garutti
- FZ
- I’m interested in going back to this idea of storytelling, because I think it’s interesting as an architect to activate storytelling as a tool by which one can gain consensus. How does that factor into your practice and your research?
- OG
- I think that a lot of things that we do seem as if we have invented them, but there are also different offices and different partners along the way. We had a conversation with Christopher Roth, who as a director working with time-based media just naturally saw the storytelling potential in a lot of the projects. We were working together to make the films Legislating Architecture (2016) and The Property Drama (2017). But then I think it was one interview we did with Keller Easterling, and we used it in the film Architecting after Politics (2018), where she said, as architects we should not only design the object, but we should design the story and the advent of the idea into culture. How can we as architects really tell the story in a way that people out there understand that yes, this is what we need and what we want? And not only focus on the building, but actually on the whole time span of architecture. It’s not only about facts. Of course, our decisions need to be based on facts, but it is also about how to tell a story so people understand it, because none of us can fully understand the complexity of other disciplines. It’s always a question of storytelling and arguments and incentives.
- FZ
- I think that’s pivotal. Buildings are part of a larger cultural, social, economic, political dimension. And that really requires the architect to think beyond the building, to understand the context. What’s beautiful is this transition in and understanding of architecture as a more collective discipline, where it’s not so much about the authority of the architect. I’m wondering how the shift of the office into a collective practice also represents a more generous way to approach the discipline in its widest discourse?
- OG
- I think there was a moment in the office when there was a change. One project was about to end, so there was also a change of partners. And it was the question, how will the practice continue? And then you [Arno] were inviting and open for something else to develop. I think it’s a form of generosity that you have, to open it and develop another model, and also to think how it will develop in the future. This is really the question now with HouseEurope! and opening it kind of as a policy lab. This is a first step, but there need to be different forms for what the office does.
- AB
- In our practice, if we shift where we are working, we also have to co-design the economic model. And that’s something we were not trained in. If we are looking for an alternative model, we have to collaborate even more.
- FZ
- I really appreciate this plasticity of the mind, of really stretching what it means to be an architect today, of inventing different models, adapting, but especially collaborating.
- OG
- Yeah, but working together is really fun and also communication is really fun. I don’t fully understand why with others it always has to be a competitive mode, because we’re not all in competition.
Photograph taken during the filming of To Build Law, October 2024. Photograph by Francesco Garutti
Photograph of a banner to promote HouseEurope!, taken during the filming of To Build Law, October 2024. Photograph by Francesco Garutti
Photograph of HouseEurope! tote bags, taken during the filming of To Build Law, October 2024. Photograph by Francesco Garutti
Photograph taken during the filming of To Build Law, October 2024. Photograph by Francesco Garutti
- FZ
- With this shift in your practice in mind, how do you understand the power of architecture in terms of designing a process and designing a legal system or a law?
- AB
- If you can attach something to already existing law, then it’s much easier because it’s just a shift or adaptation. It’s like a building: you already have a building, which is the existing law in Europe, and you have to come up with adaptive reuse of the law. And that’s the moment when it becomes really interesting.
- OG
- It has to be open that enough people can follow it. This is also what we learned with the ECI. You better not propose something that needs a hundred percent agreement by all countries. So you should go for proposals that are open enough that different countries with different stories, histories, and political parties ruling find their own entry point to it.
- AB
- We are coming from the sector of architecture, and building codes are only national laws. So how to frame it so that for everybody it makes sense? Why should we throw away all the energy we have already put into buildings if we know that the building sector will cause an increase of one degree Celsius by the end of the century? It’s not only that we as architects see the potential, we are also part of the problem. And that’s a moment now where we have to rethink our own practice.
- FZ
- I think the interesting question being posed by HouseEurope! is, how can one rethink the system, both in terms of an environmental condition through adaptive reuse, but also as a social condition, as a housing condition?
- OG
- I think this is also a big danger that Berlin has. How do you tell a story and get people to want to preserve something that is considered ugly? The question is also, how do you design laws that create an incentive for people to change their minds? I think the first agreement was that we don’t want to ban things. We work together with an environmental agency who prepared a law for a mandatory permission for demolition, and they commissioned lawyers to check it for Germany. And they said, well, it’s against the right of private ownership because I cannot tell anyone “You are not allowed to demolish the building” because it’s their building, unless it’s listed. So how do you write laws that are not forbidding things? And if the new reality is not affordable, even the most activist, climate friendly citizen and voter becomes a consumer and says, I want the cheaper option. And this is a hard learning, I have to say.
- AB
- But on the other hand, we also started with the pure facts that for renovation, there are mostly no incentives. But to build anew, there are a lot of incentives. So if you compare the economic situation to make a decision to build anew or to reuse, you will find more advantages to demolish and build anew. And in the end, we need 1 million initiators for HouseEurope!, 1 million people at least that sign and say we as individuals initiate that change.
- OG
- Creating this awareness is actually the goal, because even if we would not succeed, and say in the end we have 700,000 signatures, we still were able to raise awareness amongst 700,000 people who will speak about the topic. And this creates potential change and political pressure, because then politicians realize it’s something that people want.
- FZ
- If you do reach the 1 million signatures, what happens next?
- OG
- Well then the legal proposal is brought into the institutions that will try to implement it. The European Union has dedicated themselves to implement it. If we make renovation cheaper, we are shifting from a material market to a labour market. We don’t lose jobs; we create jobs, we shift jobs, we channel the industry in a different direction. We have already thought so much about the impact of what we demand.
Groundwork is an exhibition and film series structured as three chapters. The first follows Xu Tiantian (DnA_Design and Architecture) to Meizhou Island, off the coast of China, where she is creating a set of subtle interventions to mediate between pressures of heritage, tourism, and marine ecology. The second chapter focuses on bplus.xyz (b+) in Berlin, Germany as they launch a European Citizens’ Initiative intended to shift culture and legislation toward preservation and rehabilitation of existing buildings, offering a way to actively fight forms of inequitable urban speculation. Finally, the series concludes by following Carla Juaçaba to the heart of Minas Gerais, Brazil where she is developing pavilions in a coffee field—minimal support structures in a territory where collectives are resisting extractive industrial agriculture.
Documented through the narrative folds of cinema as research format—presented alongside artefacts, documents, specimens, and site fragments as evidences of an ongoing thinking process—the stories of Groundwork are excerpts of investigative and explorative journeys whose conclusive act—the final result—is yet to come, to be conceptualized, still open and under construction.
