Johannes Hoffmann, Maximilian Bentler and Daryan Knoblauch, three former architecture students at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences, addressed the housing issue in their exhibition Coherent Existence. Growing cities lack space close to the center for quality housing, and meanwhile the shoe is on the other foot everywhere. With their urban and progressive experiments, they question conventional approaches to housing.
In the sense of a society oriented towards the common good, the trio transfers ideas of the sharing economy to urban space: less private spaces, multiple uses or the dissolution of property boundaries are packaged in different scenarios. Within Cologne, various locations were selected to serve as the starting point for their experimental attempts at living. In addition to a parking lot and an allotment garden settlement, one of the vacant railroad arches on Hüttenstraße in Cologne-Ehrenfeld was used as a projection surface for a new typology of living. The exhibition and publication were developed as part of her bachelor's thesis, which was awarded the BDA Masters by the Association of German Architects of North Rhine-Westphalia in 2018. For the CityLeaks Academy, the exhibition was presented again in one of the railroad arches. In doing so, they entered into a dialogue with the artist group Horses in Space, who dealt with questions of coexistence in simultaneous writing sessions as part of an artistic-performative intervention.
