Every building is the result of a competitive system. This semester we are embracing Mutual Aid!

WHAT IS ALL OF THIS?!? one could wonder, think or scream. Every day we are confronted with novelties and absurdities. Things that go against the logic of what we thought just the day before. Climate is changing. Borders and territories are contested. Power is centralized. Strategic horizons are becoming shorter and shorter. The state of the systems we once set up have reached their limits. What if changing the system is no longer enough? What if the logic of the system cannot be fixed? Together we want to set out on a journey. To document what was. To question what is. To reconsider what could be. To architect a path towards it! To hold. To give. And to receive.

First, we will look back: In September 1872, around 200 people gathered in the Swiss Jura in the village of Saint-Imier to found the Anti-Authoritarian International, countering Marx‘s idea of a centralised workers movement. Coming from across Europe, they unanimously called for the abolition of rule and hierarchy, envisioning a society based on voluntary cooperation without state, property or factory owners. It was not by chance that the meeting took place in this village of watchmakers and the region became a centre of the anarchist movement in the 1870s. At that time, it took around 300 individual parts and more than 50 different steps to make a watch. These were distributed among various people, including watchmakers, engravers, spring makers. We will look at the houses they collectively lived and cooperatively worked in before industrialisation took hold and large factories were opened.

And then into the future: We will together work on housing models that are based on this very idea of Mutual Aid. To be implemented, all of them require certain adaptations in both the legal and societal frameworks that surround them as well as their built structures.