After the Rainfall: A Visit at Floating Berlin

To understand how Floating Berlin got its name, you need to be there after a rainfall. During dry weeks the complex spreads over one side of a dusty concrete basin; on the far side of the basin is a thin spit of water and a clump of reeds that grow thickest where the water is deepest. When it rains, the dribble of water swells and quickly begins to fill the basin. After a decent downpour, the entire space – one-and-a-half hectares in total – is covered in water, and then the platforms do in fact seem to be floating.

Floating Berlin was started in 2018 by raumlabor, a Berlin-based collective of architects who discovered the filtration pool tucked away in a Schrebergarten colony adjacent to Temphelhofer Feld. To prevent the massive swath of land from turning into a mud pit every time it rains, Tempelhof airport was constructed with a filtration system that channels rainfall into this basin. After some wheeling and dealing with the city government, raumlabor was able to get the rights to install a series of semi-permanent structures inside of it – these now constitute the material form of the project.

The physical structure of Floating Berlin, which since 2019 is run by the association Floating e.V., is mostly wood and exposed metal scaffolding, on top of which there are a variety of improvised structures. Currently these include a sauna, a kitchen, a vertical garden, a domed thatch contraption that stores water, and a number of assembly spaces. Each of these nodes is connected by wooden platforms, so if you look at it from above it resembles a flowchart or sentence diagram.

Maybe the reason that Floating Berlin so easily invites linguistic metaphors is that it was envisioned as a site of experimental learning and intellectual exchange. It hosts a variety of ongoing programming, which ranges from headier stuff like conceptualising the relationship between the body and the environment, to more earthy regimens like a “kids uni” and neighbourhood walk-throughs. The site itself is very visibly the product of a bunch of architects, artists, and ecology folks letting their creativity run wild, a site where theories and principles promulgated in the classroom have a chance to take actual form.

One of the many needles that the project threads is that the basin it exists on is an active part of the city infrastructure. Water from Tempelhof and the surrounding area runs into the basin and then feeds into the canal system and ultimately into the Spree. Although the water levels fluctuate significantly, there’s enough water moving through the basin to sustain a dynamic ecosystem of birds, insects, amphibians, and all kinds of flora. If you pay attention, you’ll find that air itself is rich with life in a way that doesn’t exist in the surrounding area – dragonflies and honeybees whirr along, frogs make frog sounds, birds seem to appear out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly.

When you step inside the Floating Berlin complex, you have the feeling that you’re in a place that almost shouldn’t exist. It’s in the middle of the city, so close to Tempelhof that you can see the big white golf ball of the radio station looming over the trees, but at the same time you’re sitting in a forested cradle, things buzz and hum around you, you can feel the motion of nature changing. The sense of floating on water when the basin fills up is only the most literal of the instantiations of this magical quality.

Likewise, the feeling that this sort of place shouldn’t be able to exist is not a poetic abstraction. The past several years in Berlin have provided plenty of reasons to be pessimistic that autonomous creative spaces will be able to hold their ground against infrastructure priorities and real estate developments (the planned A100 autobahn, which will destroy ://about blank and Wilde Renate being just one of the more egregious recent examples). Floating Berlin is sitting on prime real-estate, a swath of green in Kreuzberg’s prized Bergmannkiez, the sort of land that developers drool over, and faces obvious existential questions because of this.

As a functional part of Tempelhofer Feld, the fate of the basin has largely been tied to the fate of the park itself. The most recent attempt to develop part of Tempelhof was shot down by a public referendum in 2014, but there will almost certainly be further efforts to reengineer the territory, to make it more productive. Floating Berlin’s existence, then, especially in the event of further referendums, will depend largely on the extent to which it can convince people in power that the things it produces are in fact valuable – more valuable than however many millions of euros could be made by dropping condos there.

Fortunately, this is exactly the kind of challenge that Floating e.V. is ready to take on. One of the most exciting proposals that has come up – originally proposed by Tempelhof Projekte GmbH, which Floating Berlin affectionately refers to as their landlord – is to transform the site into an “infiltration basin,” which basically means that it would be reconstructed to naturally process the contaminated rainwater. Instead of the rainwater being dumped into the canals, it could be used to irrigate the surrounding gardens and cemeteries, to provide a cleaner source of water for the reed wetland, and even to feed a public swimming area.

The fact that Floating Berlin is literally integrated into an existing piece of city infrastructure makes it an interesting case study in the narratives around development in Berlin. If it proves to be the case that its symbiosis with government property affords it protection from developers, the space may become a model for future projects that would seek to do the same. As squats have been demolished and abandoned buildings being torn down, the next generations of anarchists in Berlin might find more welcome homes in these infrastructural interstices – alongside canals, within aqueducts, underneath bridges, who knows, maybe strung along between towers. We don’t know what the future is going to look like, but places like Floating Berlin are a reminder that we can dream big, and that sometimes those dreams come true.