I came across Little Wood through one of the blogs I follow, Berlin Tidbits, and was quite bowled over by this cool project. Little Wood is a temporary urban garden on Invalidenstrasse/Ackerstrasse in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district. The makers of Little Wood, Contemporary Food Lab, describe their project as a “urban eco-system, a holistic experiment to discover and explore the sensuality of urban ecology”.
Little Wood was created in what is at the moment still a gap between buildings. At some point – probably sooner rather than later – this gap will be filled with a brand new appartment building, most likely offering high-rent units for rich investors. At the moment, however, this transitional urban space is occupied by Little Wood.
The garden was designed as a creative space, an open forum with a varied program of workshops, concerts, garden installations and picknicks that anyone can attend. Here is a list of events: www.littlewoodberlin.org/program. The garden is open from 12 noon to 10pm at night every day, from 9th to 29th August.
Little Wood also features a Solar-Kiosk – check it out! Solar-Kiosks run on solar energy (well, obviously!) and are therefore ideal for rural areas without access to an electric grid. The kiosks are designed as an assembly kit of individual components so they can be easily transported. The electronic components are manufactured in Germany, the rest is produced locally with local materials. The kiosks offer access to clean and cheap energy and apparently they can be erected pretty much anywhere, no matter how rural the area or difficult the terrain.
According to the Solar-Kiosk website, there are currently some 15 kiosks in Ethiopia, Botswana and Kenya, with 25 more to follow in other African countries. No wonder that Solar-Kiosk received the 2013 International Architecture Award and the German Federal EcoDesign Award. It is also a nominee for the 2014 Design Price of the Federal Republic of Germany.
TRENDS. TRAVELS. AND BERLIN 