On 5 September Dr. Elke Beyer from the Technical University of Berlin joined the TRANSEDU-Team for an Erkner Encounter. Erkner and the IRS are not a novel place for Elke, who has previously worked at the institute from 2013-2014. Elke is currently a senior researcher in the DFG-funded project Transnational Production Spaces at the Habitat Unit since December 2016. Previously, she studied History and East European studies at the University of Cologne and University College London and received her doctoral degree at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich.
We discussed about the exciting findings of Elke’s project on the Transnational Production Spaces at the Habitat Unit of the TU Berlin and about how to make sense of our mappings the architectures and built environment of offshore campuses, their (in)visibility and (dis)connectedness to the urban surroundings. What does the form tell us about the function? Who determines their form – foreign investors’ based on their business models or the urban planning rules and regulations of the host context? And who is the intended audience for these spaces? Surely a conversation to be continued…