Escaping to Europe

This is the adventure of four students that were sick of the status quo in architecture. Tired of the elite structure and exclusivity of clients, and frustrated by the lack of impact that creative work yielded on the real world.

At the peak of our thesis semester of college, we made a pact to ignore wasted hours preparing portfolios and writing cover letters to impress top-down architecture. We decided to throw ourselves into a completely foreign world and immerse ourselves in the philosophy of bottom-up design. This began in 2011 - we were 23 years old – and what would happen to us in Germany and abroad would guide us into an entirely new creative world with an impassioned desire to challenge the role of architecture.

Our dreams were just beginning to shape during a time when Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk were completely transforming their industries. We wanted to do the same for ours, pulling our field out of the deeply restrictive pockets of millionaires and into real communities with real need.

So we set an open-ended plan into motion. We bought four one-way tickets to Berlin, opened a modest studio and rented a tiny apartment. We started with just a single piece of paper, a vehicle for merging our ideas together. By drawing on the same page, we developed a melting-pot style of art + architecture that we used to expand exponentially. We worked on hundreds of collaborative drawings, murals, crowdfunded design, held group classes, hosted workshops, and co-built interventions. We traveled across Europe, individually pursued work in Asia, and most recently exhibited in Copenhagen as a collaboration with craftsmen and women all over the world. Over the last five years we have engaged the communities around us. Now, we’re taking a big next step.

We now have you - the Steemit community - the “internet’s small town” to immerse ourselves in and alongside you; explore the next plateau of collaborative and community art, architecture and design.

Our dreams of building a stronger, bottom-up world of design stands true for us today and through these entries, we'll be working through exactly how we pursued and continue to pursue more accessible, collaborative, and impactful creative work.

Production vs. Product-based Work

Our work is never about the final product. We value process. The principles of art and design that are so valued in academia – composition, palette, balance, perspective – seemed limiting to us as architects, and missing a key component; communication. We pushed ourselves to communicate with one another on a blank sheet paper, using our individual styles as a way of problem solving. This soon expanded to involving others in our growing community of creatives as we realized the potential to make work on paper, on the wall, as an installation, and beyond.

Collaboration and multidisciplinary work is not a new frontier. There is, however, rarely any focus on the productive exchange between professionals and community. The possibilities for impact on culture are actually endless and the implications of production-based work has an increasing relevance across many disciplines.

On Steemit specifically, we're excited about the capacity to directly engage other diverse disciplines in ways that the traditional design field is not currently equipped to do. Current models of engagement from magazines to competitions produce a lot of rich material simply due to arbitrary parameters such as writing style or imagery. Other platforms are also becoming highly thematic and specific (i.e. the subreddit). Here, we want to put our pure content forward to you and see how Steemians all can contribute towards understand the desired impact of our work on economic, political, social, and cultural levels. Comprehensively; making the create field more inclusive, and healthier towards the communities it serves.

Establishing a New Creative Field, Surviving Abroad + More Steemy Stories

We're constantly asked questions about our Berlin experience. How that has changed how we study, practice, and strive for today. How did you get work produced? What were the logistics of establishing ourselves in Germany? Can I do something similar? We share our thoughts freely in conversation but now we have a platform to offer our ideas, histories, and futures in a forward thinking community.

There is also just simply so much for us to share from our time abroad, experiences we kept private as inside jokes and little traumas that we were afraid would scare away our significant others: working out of a former soviet prison, our cocaine-addicted studio landlord, participating in dance performances that involved nudity under a rug, instructing an installation in an abandoned pool... and that was just the first month…!

There is a great deal to discuss! Until next time, from Hither to Yon!

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Next Entry - “Part 1: From Diploma to Deutschland”

Follow us and our story @hitheryon