PAO
Pao, workshop, architecture, summer, camp, schwabhausen, bauhaus, dresden, weimar, dessau, thüringen, erfurt, school, students, professionals, lectures, teaching, play, learn One of the many meanings of „Pao“ is „tent“. The tent is the basic architecture: with a tent, nomads define a short-term place for life and work. Mongolian Horse tribes, the Native Americans of the Great Plains, the Chinese rules, as well as the travelling European masterbuilders of the Gothic Cathedrals – they all lived and worked under tents. Greek philosophers, we may suppose, gathered with their students under a tree, under a sun-shading tent. The tent marks places where people gather and socialise. Close to nature, the tent is a place for immediate experience of wind, sun, and earth. For the PAO architecture summer-camp, the tent is a program, a symbol, and a workplace at the same time.

For one month in summer, we retreat from our accelerating world of media and ínformation. We travel to a small village courtyard in Central Germany for intensive learning and work experience. In a kind of monastery-atmosphere, in a committed community of professional architects, craftsmen, students and university teachers, we endeavour the different practices of architecture. The rough, basic, though pleasant environment of a garden cottage, under summer sun and starlight, we set up our location for immediate architectural experiment, for creative production, for concentrated thought and lively personal exchange.

Rural Schwabhausen village is located in the very heart of Germany, the area of Luther, Goethe, Bach and the Bauhaus. Weimar city – the founding place of the Bauhaus, European Cultural Capital 1999, and todays location of Bauhaus University is 20min by car. Erfurt city - capital of State Thuringia with an international Airport, 15min. Gotha city – the local county capital, 10min. Thuringian mountainsides and forests, as well as fairy tale-like castles are right at the frontdoor.

PROGRAMME
Students as well as teaching personnel come from different continents, from different walks of life, from different professions. Oriented at holistic Bauhaus-pedagogics, PAO teaches contrast and difference. Our world is made of contrasts and differences. As architects we are supposed to design these complexities and create forms of order within them. We will learn to talk different languages, and to understand different ways - to see through the eyes of the other. Only because of that we will be able to understand the complexities in ourselves and around us. PAO is the site for that: hands on, difference at work.

At PAO, fresh ideas meet an old cottage house; abstract thinking meets solid matter; professional level meets student idea; international practice meets local condition. We will burn our own brickstones, and build cybernetical gadgets too.