PAO 3

The PAO.3 sessions were an extreme endeavour. Intended as an Arts & Crafts „summerschool“, it soon turned into a kind of architectural bootcamp. For their „Design-to-Build“ projects, the participants were to tackle an unusual site: a gigantic timberyard with approx. 117.000m³ of wood stored in one place, half a million of trees. This incredible mass of wood was a result of typhoon „Kyrill“ which had cleared whole mountain-ranges in Germany off its forests in April 2007. What is more, the „summerschool“ had not much of a summer; severe wheathers made the workshop a tough going. Equipped with exceptional enthusiasm, however, the PAO.3 people came up with astonishing projects. Reaching far beyond the academic scope, these works turned into an intense meditation on the nature of architectural practice and thinking today.