Individual Artists, History, Architecture 

Garbage dump or gold mine? The German artistic collaborators Martin Kaltwasser and Folke Köbberling see rubbish as a major resource. Their projects colonize public space in the name of recycling and design: Overnight, they can make pavilions, villages of huts and even whole houses appear. In installations, exhibitions and, most frequently, guerrilla architectural interventions, they question the conditions of urban life as determined by privatization. For example, in a 2004 project called "Hausbau," they built a house in front of West Berlin's infamous Gropius-designed, failed-utopia high-rise development, Gropiustadt, and moved their family into it for a one week stay; for 2005's "Kleinod," they built a bridge and a stairway between a local family's home and a nearby community garden. In City as a Resource: One Man's Trash Is Another Man's Treasure, Köbberling and Kaltwasser propose simple ways of livening up and re-appropriating the urban habitat with sly alternatives to conventional urban planning. - from Amzon