An Architektur

: Production and Use of the Built Environment
"The journal An Architektur was founded at the beginning of 2002 continuing the work of the architecture collective freies fach – a group that had sought, since the mid 1990s, to assess critically the restrictive reconstruction of Berlin and the relevant political and economical conditions through actions, exhibitions, and small publications.An Architektur is the exercise of discursive architectural practice. For us, both the critical analysis of spatial relations and the visualization of their inherent socio-political conceptions offer a possibility of political agency. In monothematic issues, socio-political criteria are applied to concrete examples and questions of space and architecture. An Architektur exposes the wider social and political implications of topics which tend to be discussed too introspectively only within the domain of architecture as well as their effect on and relevance to everyday life."

from their contributions to the An Atlas of Radical Cartography
"Geography of the Furth Departure Center" - in the project map.
"Since we conceive space not as something given or fixed but as something contructed that develops through concrete use, experience , forming , or reflection, a map is a constitutive element of this manifold prodiction. Maps, as descriptions of and inquiries into space, are neither neutral repdroductions nor mere copies of space. They rather shape space though the act of naming and confining. In opposition to planning, which has as its aim the implementation of an anticipatedproject in space, mapping describes and un-folds existing structures and corces. Maps are tools to capture the incomprehensible, unconscious, or structurally "invisible" qualities of space. What they describe is the basis for new realiits. As maps both disclose and re-shape what is already in existence, they give it meaning and introduce new layers of perception. "

Ausreisezentren, or, "departure centers," are camps for refugees and migrants that, due to missing pa-pers, cannot be deported"...