Departing from the Takeover Festival at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, this research project employs experimental formats to develop new modes of engagement with music and specifically addresses younger audiences. It investigates how architecture could temporarily repurpose the place during the festival.
Through a dialogic process with festival organisers, participants, and actors within the wider urban community, the project identifies and activates latent spatial potentials — with a particular focus on thresholds and interstitial spaces. These existing spatial conditions are examined as opportunities for establishing new forms of interaction between the cultural institution and the public.
Performative objects generate temporary spatial configurations that critically interrogate existing boundaries between the Festspielhaus and the city, while enabling alternative forms of encounter, participation, and spatial appropriation.
The project is guided by the principle of “economy of means”. Through the strategic reuse of existing components, and locally available resources, it explores spatial practices that maximise experiential and social impact while minimising material and energetic expenditure.
Within the framework of the Takeover Festival 2027, the project will be realised as experimental prototypes and evaluated through their application in the festival context.