Hello Wood

international workshop & festival for art and architecture

July 11-19 2015 / Csórompuszta, Hungary

Mahatma Ghandi once said: “the Future of India lies in its villages”. Yet contemporary architectural discourse has focused mostly on the role of the city within society. How many times have we heard that more than half of the world's population now lives in cities? What if, for a moment, we moved away from our obsession with the city, revisited Ghandi’s famous words and said:The future of the world lies in its villages!

The traditional understanding of the village suggests the smallest urban formation, in which different community roles take an architectural form. The village is an outgrowth of its own socio-political, historical and environmental context over a long period of time.

Can this process be addressed differently? Can settlements generate their own context?Can a week-long exercise in real-time masterplanning, practicing the craft and politics of building, partying and constructing our own community lead to a new form of village?

Project Village 2015 is propaganda for reversed urbanisation.

By leaving the city and by occupying a piece of the countryside for a week- long workshop we will build a community-settlement.Hello Wood asks professionals and students from around the world to bring their experience, their pre-conceived and revolutionary ideas of each part of the village and to negotiate these against time and material constraints, the neighbor’s lot, and –most importantly– the common purpose.

Hello Wood all have our culturally influenced idea of what a village is. By challenging the informal and rural fantasy of the village, Project Village will become an instant functional settlement. The major programmatic parts will include those of a traditional village: Community space, dwellings, market, school, barn and so on. All will be infused with the pleasure and fun of the temporary collective. What defines a cohesive community settlement? Will we find the wooden prototype for an ideal market stand? Will we establish our own economy that informs a new type for the place of trade?

Let’s try to find out if tomorrow’s villages will be about sustainability, survival or pleasure.Join to this debate and help realize Hello Wood's collective fantasy of a village designed, built and inhabited by its architects.