The Institut für Raumexperimente was an art school within an art university with an emphasis on Sculpture. Nearly half of our ‘classes’ took place in public spaces, out of which  we developed our city as classroom interdisciplinary approach. Each semester, content for ‘classes’ was co-constructed from the bottom-up, inflecting around the students’  professional ambitions, skills, and needs. Affiliated with the Berlin University of the Arts, the institute served as an experimental education and research project echoing the 100- year anniversary of the Bauhaus’ spatial experiments. Led by its founding director Olafur Eliasson together with co-directors Eric Ellingsen and Christina Werner, we did not offer  ‘classes’ in the traditional sense, except once (EXPERIENCE EXPERIMENTS*) for comparative purposes. Our institute was supported with funding from the Senate Department of  Education, Youth and Science of the State of Berlin as part of its program of excellence Wissenschafft Zukunft (Knowledge Creates the Future) and grants from the Einstein  Foundation Berlin. Students received undergraduate art degrees with the option of a master’s degree (Meisterschüler).  

Each year we learned how to learn how to co-sustain a safe and healthy experiential learning environment. Each year we partnered with an global, interdisciplinary array of students and professor researchers and universities, in order to learn how other schools of art, design, and architecture conduct their research practices. Examples are the University of Addis Ababa (Alle School of Fine Art); Science Po Paris, class of Bruno Latour; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH - Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich) class of landscape architect Guther Vögt; and, Harvard Graduate School of Design, students of Sanford Kwinter. We published reports and hired external peer reviewers throughout the 5-years to consult, advise, and evaluate our emergent methodologies, techniques, and learning-structures. These constant, self-reflective reviews allowed us a global view on best art-research learning practices. This cultivated a healthy & safe learning art lab environment and gave the students agency in co-generating the learning-structures they learned in, and some of the guests that they wanted to learn from, which we collectively referred to as Ambassadors of the Why. For 5-years, our individualclasses | semesters emerged into a proof-of-concept and prototype for alternative art & design pedagogies in the 21^st century.