Un-Real Estates

FB06.521
Un-Real Estates
documenta urbana vacant: not a Reallabor

ASL Vertical Studio ARCHITECTURE CITIES ECONOMIES
Prof. Dr. Gabu Heindl
WM Helena Rafalsky
WM Alexander Rakow

8 SWS, 12 ECTS
MA: PRO-2.1-30, PRO-2.1-03, PRO-2.0- 02; BA: Pro-1.1-01, Pro-1.1-01, Pro-1.1-04, Pro-2.1-02
When: first session 15.10.2026
Thursdays 14:00-18:00h
Language: English, German

Project development usually means finding an empty site, assigning it a function and developing it.
What if we question this order and dissect its elements? Vacancy is spatially, politically and
economically produced. An empty plot, an abandoned building or an inaccessible parcel is not
simply an absence of activity or value. It can reveal how land ownership, speculation, planning
regulation and exclusion work. Kassel has about 260.000 m² of vacant space, yet not one square
metre of it is easily available for longterm non-profit use.
In 1973, Gordon Matta-Clark bought fifteen tiny leftover parcels in New York that he could own but
hardly enter: Reality Properties: Fake Estates. Vacancy in Kassel works similarly. It exists on paper
and in reality, and still cannot be used.
Building on existing vacancy mapping, we will trace Kassel's Un-Real Estates (vacant, inaccessible
or underused sites), develop strategies to activate them, and map the obstacles we meet in order
to translate them into physical space. The task is not necessarily a building. It is a set of critical
spatial interventions that make existing conditions legible and open a public debate on activation
and long-term, common-good use. It is, and is not, a Reallabor.
Through in-situ sessions, self-organization and peer-led discussions, you will test forms of
expression and collaboration by drawing, building, calculating, reading the existing and intervening.
Intervention doesn’t need to mean improvement or permanent construction. It can be
documentation, exposure, disruption, appropriation, negotiation or speculation, in the form of
installations in public space, 1:1 prototypes or other experiments across media and scales.
Substantial funding for building & realisation is provided by the Sto-Stiftung*