Project Village 2015-2017 - Hello Wood

When you ask hundreds of young architects from around the globe to experiment with the relationship between communities and their built environment through building their own settlement, they will end up with creating a rural campus for their nomadic faculty. This was at least the outcome of the experiment Hello Wood, an architectural education platform initiated 3 years ago as part of their Summer University programme, Project Village.

^{© Darab Zsuzsa}

The educational programme is co-curated and developed by Johanna Muszbek (Liverpool School of Architecture) in collaboration with Hello Wood (founded in Budapest 2010). It involved 150 participants from over 20 different countries building and developing their project in response to this year’s theme: “Courtyards: Shaping Communities”.

^{© Balázs Turós}

The previous years themes of Project Village: “Portable Settlement” and “Settling: Rituals of Arrival” allowed the programme to tackle architectural and theoretical ideas within the context of the changing rural landscape. The framework was loose, blurring the boundaries between summer university and festival, urban and rural, art and architecture, practical solutions and utopian ideals. In the final year seven international teams were led by researchers, academics and organisations such as Architecture for Refugees, and an important proponent of landscape urbanism, Groundlab from the Architecture Association. The symposium and debate was joined by Javier Villar of Kengo Kuma & Associates and Prof. Rob Kronenburg, Liverpool School of Architecture. The teams had to physically define the spaces in between structures, nature and the terrain, based on the actual and imagined routines of the residents. The method of interaction was to practice the craft and politics of building, negotiate against the constraints of the site, material and time.

^{© Balázs Turós}

During the day participants designed, built and “thought with their hands”; adapting their designs to the needs of the community and the site, the responding to practical solutions at hand.

^{© Darab Zsuzsa}

At night, social interaction took another dimension: a series of evening lectures allowed for critical reflection. The symposium tackled question sustainable responses to growth, methods of appropriating existing structures, collaborative and adaptive learning processes, and the opportunities or the shortcomings of crafts. The event was followed by performances and parties every night.This meant connecting on a different level and discussing the global consistencies of ideas.‌

^{© Balázs Turós}

Although Project Village was initially planned as a 3-year-long programme, the experiment continues, opening up to more interdisciplinary and complex ways of tackling urgent issues of our time.

^{© Balázs Turós}

The Project Village Team

Johanna Muszbek
Curator (University of Liverpool, School of Architecture),

Péter Pozsár
Curator, Hello Wood co-founder (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design),

Orsi Janota
Project leader

FruzsiKarig
Project manager

András Huszár, Dávid Ráday
Hello Wood co-founders,

Niki Lakatos, Anita Farkas
Project management,

Lukács Gergely Szőke
Graphic design,

Csaba Bányai, Gyula Végh, Nóra Fekete, Dániel Kiss, Laci Mangliárt
Designers

Réka Holánszki
Carpenter

^{All images courtsey Hello Wood Project.}