Urban Imprints – Rural Spaces
Two architectural collectives—asphalt and circa.—are transforming the HDA into an open laboratory. Blurring the lines between documentation, archive, and spatial staging, they create a shared space for thought and discourse that highlights their interest in engaging with the existing built environment and in establishing a new culture of preservation. Based on precise field research into routines, material flows, traces, and infrastructures, they open up two complementary perspectives on new narratives of (re)building in urban and rural areas. The approaches and working methods of both collectives are brought together at the HDA and made immediately accessible. A multifaceted accompanying program of talks, a symposium, and workshops with students—beginning as part of the 2026 Architecture Days—deepens these perspectives, develops them further, and brings them into the public sphere through shared discourse.
The lab combines two perspectives on everyday infrastructure: While asphalt focuses on the countryside, circa. explores the often-overlooked spaces of the city. Together, they create a multifaceted picture of a lived culture of reconstruction.
Rural Spaces: The Poetry and Potential of Infrastructure
The collective asphalt explores municipal building yards and waste collection sites in rural areas. As often-overlooked everyday infrastructures, they represent spaces that straddle the line between emergency situations, logistics, and poetry. Through multimedia portraits, the collective highlights the potential of these low-threshold, publicly accessible infrastructures for practices of reuse. As part of the lab, asphalt develops cartographic mappings of the building yards that make their spatial structures comparable and allow them to be recognized as a specific typology. In addition, student works created as part of a co-taught course at the Institute for Architectural Technology are on display, showcasing experimental and research-based approaches to the topic of building material reuse. Building on the Umbauhof project, for which a book will be published by Birkhäuser Verlag in May, the spatial qualities and atmospheric characteristics of these infrastructures are highlighted: the improvised, the raw, construction-site-like, and at the same time highly organized.
Urban Imprints: Translations and Practices of Building On Existing Structures
The circa. collective focuses on those often-overlooked spaces in the city that form the shared infrastructure of our daily lives—transitional areas, residual spaces, and places we take for granted. These “infraordinary” environments quietly and enduringly shape our social and spatial experiences. circa. views the careful observation, analysis, and representation of these structures as an act of recognition and creates a foundation for care, further reflection, and preservation. An atlas of memories, fleeting narratives, lost places, and transformed structures is being compiled and continuously developed by circa. over the course of the lab. The resulting urban imprints are on view at the Haus der Architektur. Between imprint, archive, and exhibition, a space emerges in which the city is remembered, interpreted, and reimagined.
The Laboratory at the HDA: Between Documentation, Archive, and Spatial Presentation
At the Haus der Architektur, the approaches and working methods of both collectives are brought together in an open laboratory and made immediately accessible. What is on display is not a finished exhibition, but a discourse in the making, one that is constantly evolving and deepening. Through various media, it becomes clear what traces the existing built environment leaves in the city and how construction processes are organized in rural areas. Over the course of several weeks, a multifaceted picture of a lived culture of renovation and repair emerges in the HDA’s exhibition space. “Urban Imprints – Rural Processes” views renovation and resource conservation not as exceptions, but as an intrinsic part of architecture. A successful architectural transition lies not only in the use of new technologies, but in how we engage with what already exists—in existing infrastructures, routines, and material cycles. In the lab, city and countryside are reinterpreted: as archives, as resources, and as starting points for an architecture that builds on what comes before.
An accompanying program of workshops, discussions, and a symposium is an integral part of the lab and features voices from architecture, research, and practice. Over the course of several weeks, a format unfolds that combines research, education, and public debate.