Floating University Berlin is a living laboratory for urban practice in the rainwater retention basin of the former Tempelhof Airport. It brings together diverse disciplines to explore sustainable futures, hybrid spaces, and natureculture entanglements. Through experimental architecture and collaborative programs, it fosters ecological responsibility, social cohesion, and climate-resilient urban development in coexistence with a wetland ecosystem.

Floating University Berlin transforms a hidden urban infrastructure in the middle of Berlin into a place of public imagination, collective care, and ecological rethinking. Located in a rainwater retention basin at the edge of the former Tempelhof Airport, the project operates within a polluted site that is both a crucial element of Berlin’s water management system and a vibrant wetland ecosystem. Rather than imposing itself, Floating works with the site—its runoff water, its non-human inhabitants, its existing infrastructure.

Through delicate strategies like using low-impact, biodegradable, and reused materials, and by cultivating relationships with neighbors, municipal actors, and even the trees and nesting birds, Floating demonstrates how subtle design interventions can shift perceptions, policies, and practices around urban water, public space, and environmental stewardship.

The architectural structures on site—lightweight, mobile, and often seasonal—are continually built, dismantled, and rebuilt in collaborative effort. Workshops gather spatial desires; rainwater is filtered through experimental systems; and the basin becomes a space for learning, repair, and re-imagining. The association’s long-term vision to transform the basin into an infiltration site proposes a nature-based solution with lasting infrastructural impact—reducing pollution in the Spree River while feeding nearby parks and green spaces during droughts.
Floating University is not monumental—it is iterative, collective, and embedded. Its strength lies in its poise: the quiet but powerful way it reclaims a toxic site and turns it into a catalyst for ecological, cultural, and civic renewal.