Builders' Jam Bolivia: Higher than life

In 2014 we organised the largest participatory construction site ever – apart from Rajneeshpuram, the pyramids in Egypt and the Colosseum in Rome. But in our case, people came under their free will. With a total of 120 volunteers from 25 nations, we built the largest skate park in South America in three and a half weeks. With its location at 3800m above sea level, it is also the highest skate park in the world.

With the financial support of Levi's, we left for La Paz in 2014 to find a plot of land and support the local skateboard community by building a skatepark. Not that easy when you really don't know anybody in Bolivia. But the coincidence and our lack of evening clothes have played into our pockets, because we landed directly after our arrival at the German Embassy on the day of German reunification via detours, which are now no longer comprehensible. There we, as obvious label outsiders, quickly got into conversation and were able to inspire so many people with our idea that a week later we were provided with a huge plot of land in an inner-city location. Only a short time later we spent the complete budget for flight tickets and material and organized the biggest Builder's Jam we and the world have ever seen. The principle of a Builder's Jam is to build without a prior plan. But because the building authorities in La Paz made it a condition that they want a final plan of the skatepark before the start of construction, we kept to this rule, but extended it a bit: We drew really big pro forma plans that said very big that the result would definitely be different. And because such a plan doesn't apply if it hasn't been stamped, we got the biggest stamp that there was in the city and stamped everything. All the bureaucrats were happy with that and we could start.

Buildersjam

We organized a camp with sleeping places and communal kitchen and picked up our friends from the airport by bus. In a megalomaniac, invisibly structured and highly productive chaos, we not only built the skate park in a very short time, but also a small house that is used as a skate school and homework help. The special thing about this way of building – without a plan and without fixed responsibilities – is that it creates a certain kind of communication, social interaction and mutual support which is mainly based on empathy, which is completely unusual on construction sites. This does not mean that our construction site was not rough - on the contrary: we threw ourselves into the dust with open hearts, got our hands dirty and moved small mountains together with a growing mission. The result is not only an extraordinary architecture, but also many, many friendships all over the world.