Werkarchiv Conrad Roland - Suspended Houses, Spacenets and the Categorisation of Architectural Knowledge

How can not only the physical heritage, but also the underlying mindset of an architectural visionary be made accessible, communicated and carried into the future?

Archives are based on classification systems that structure materials and facilitate access. In the best case, these are flexible enough to enable different contextualisations and to make estates for a variety of research questions interdisciplinary compatible. But how do you deal with a stock that comes with a specially developed, highly specific classification system?

As a schoolboy, Conrad Roland dreamed of traveling to the USA. But it was not until years later, after an apprenticeship as a carpenter and a degree in architecture at the Technical University of Munich, that he was given the opportunity to continue his studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Walter Peterhans thanks to a Fulbright scholarship.

Fascinated by Otto's delicate supporting structures, Conrad Roland developed concepts for large-scale suspended cities in order to ‘free society from the straitjacket of architecture’.

Everyone knows them - the red climbing structures that are omnipresent in playgrounds and fascinate children and adults alike!