Same but Different: The Floating University Berlin (FUB) and the Making of Another University

Abstract

While architecture has surfaced in recent years as a key resource in shaping the entrepreneurial university both programmatically and aesthetically, the Floating University Berlin has taken architectural design as the starting point for developing a temporary space for creating and reflecting upon the future of urban societies and the role universities might play therein. In its unfolding the FUB resonates with some of the processes of neoliberal city and campus development, and at the same time turns these into potentialities for overcoming the imagination of the entrepreneurial university. The article shows how the exploration of potentialities within existing spaces and discourses might be understood as one way of resisting and transforming them. It points to potential roles that architecture could play in enacting this form of affirmative critique and presents five tactics of making space for another university.