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Mobile Academy - Akademia Ruchoma

Part 2 Project 2007
Sarah Hollingworth
 University of Sheffield | UK
The Mobile Academy is an education institution based in the Jarmark Europa, Warsaw – Europe's largest informal market. The market is home and livelihood to 30,000 Vietnamese immigrants. The project aspires to take responsibility for the unacknowledged, supporting and celebrating the displaced and clandestine immigrant.

The Academy is not confined to a set curriculum or predetermined building. Instead, knowledge exchange is understood as mobile and the built project is open to uncertainty and change. The architect has relinquished control and all those involved in the project are recognised as collaborators – students, teachers, tourists, traders, and commuters...



This exemplary project for a Mobile Academy in an overlooked part of Warsaw, explored the possibilities for collaborative knowledge. The proposal built on the skills and expertise of the immigrant workers of the Jarmark Europa informal market. It aimed to reinvigorate sustainability debates with an awareness of the complex threads of relationality and interdependence between people, things and systems. The project challenged preconceived notions around migration, illegal status, climate change, community involvement and alternative economies. The intellectually rigorous yet playful and imaginative approach questioned some of the assumptions made about the way we understand, represent (and therefore design) cities.

2007
6th Nov '07 - we departed on a joutney to 3 European cities to explore notions of interdependence.
Questioning assumptions on the understanding of place by mapping my imaginary journeys in time and space.
Interdependence and migracy are explored in the journey and use of a trunk in this short film.
Uncovering the story of the trunk.
Site - Busy, informal market populated by migrant workers and immigrants.
Interchange - The market is a transport and import-export interchange. Mobile Academy is a knowledge interchange.
Education Ethos - Mobile Knowledge is not static. Knowledge is dispersed and shared, and continuously grows through participation and experimentation.
Mobile site plan - The design acknowledges a limited life span, the possible need to move site and the ability to evolve and grow.
The Mobile Academy grows and evolves around a permanent framework.
Listening to the market, time and uncertainty are realised... growing and changing in ways unprescribed by the architect.
Collaborative design and construction realises the education ethos of shared control and involvement.
The Kufer (trunk) is an archive of knowledge that is used for learning and exchange, responding to the agenda of mobile knowledge and inquiry based learning.
The work of the Mobile Academy is presented back to the wider community to encourage widespread participation.
Self-build & Retreat - Education for action...change must occur, so that education extends beyond intellectualising and posturing to actually living differently.
Acknowledging spaces of uncertainty.
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