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Inside - Out. Event #4

Architectural probings in Ursynów public spaces. Event #4: Urban Design Workshop 2010 meets the KNOT. Discussion with the KNOT team and presentations by leaders and participants of Urban Design Workshop 2010 - Nikolai Roskamm, Ursula Flecken, Katarzyna Pluta, Sławomir Gzell

The urban design workshop with Polish and German students is a binational seminar which forms part of academic cooperation between the Faculty of Architecture, Warsaw University of Technology and the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning of the Berlin Institute of Technology and is financially supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Within the last years the urban design workshop has been established as the core area of this cooperation. Annually alternating topics from Berlin and Warsaw respectively are to be elaborated by students.

The title of this year workshop is: "Fly Over Bierpinsel: Post-Oil-Megastructure-Designing". The `Bierpinsel´ in Berlin-Steglitz is representative of the 1970s pop-architecture style. The 46 meter tower is part of the expressway-construction that crosses the famous Schlossstraße (a strong-selling shopping street). This expressway-construction (the so called `flyover´) is an element of a partially realised expressway-network, originally planned in the 1950s. The task of the workshop is to design a vision concerning the existing megastructure `flyover´/ `Bierpinsel´. The context of this vision should be the current debate about the `post-oil-city´. `Post-oil-city´ means rethinking urban structures regarding the changeability in terms of urban living without (or with less) availability of oil from natural resources. The aim of the workshop is to question the `flyover´ usage as an expressway and to come up with ideas of conversion (partly or completely, temporary or permanent).