KNOWLEDGE SPACE
Spatial Expansion of Education and Culture
This theme explores the connection between cultural and educational practice, space generation and the urban surroundings.
Concept
KNOWLEDGE SPACE investigates the cultural, economic and socio-political contexts of new spatial possibilities for educational institutions. It also examines new developments in research and professional environments, such as campus structures or new workspace environments promoted by industries, in order to create tools for both analysing and envisioning public places of the future in sync with their direct environment and taking local and global cultural discourses into account. Appearance, form and typologies for urban life become the underlying and ever changing guiding path for societies, where humanity forms ‘collective intelligences’ in which knowledge is valued and freely traded.
Furthermore, places of knowledge are examined in an urban context, as a motor of development for the city and as incentive for public urban space. In this context, ANCB explores cultural values and history, post-colonialism and identity in a globalised world, while analysing how conditions and obligations through cultural sponsorships and new public-private partnerships influence the knowledge spaces of tomorrow. Communication strategies, entertainment, education and implementation of digitalisation, programmatic concepts and their respective impact on citizens, visitors and actors, but also on technology and culture production are taken into account in this analysis. Questions about the architect‘s role and architecture itself as innovative design for such places are being raised on an international level.
What role can physical spaces play to support the presentation, discussion and conser- vation of knowledge in relation to scientific, academic, cultural and economic aspects? How does a space for knowledge of today and tomorrow look like? What functions do institutions have in the age of connectivity, merging the physical with the digital? How do we deal spatially with the new combination of functions and elements of knowledge? How can a broad accessibility of knowledge be ensured?
”Museums were equated with being public and accessible. Back then, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was actually truly free. The experience of ascending its steps remains fixed in my body‘s memory, along with crossing its thresholds. The scale and weight of the doors, the pressure of people moving inside the dimly lit Great Hall with its magnificent three domes, it all lingers vividly. Today, these steps continue to connect the museum to the city and remain as mentally captivating as ever.
Paula HorriganEmerita Professor of Landscape Architecture, Cornell University, Ithaca Symposium: Extrovert Interior: Publicness and the Contemporary Museum, 2019
So without a doubt [...] I felt that the museum belonged to me and I belonged in it.
