The not so visible life on a building site
Rebekka Schächer is a creative researcher, spatial designer and story-teller based between Rotterdam and Munich. In her multi-disciplinary approach, she seeks to visibilise overlooked narratives, support communities in their struggle for emancipation and question the role of the architect. She believes in the interrelatedness of all things and likes to draw connections between the small details of the everyday and the broader socio-political context of a place. Making knowledge accessible is one of her biggest goals.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Technical University Munich and a Master’s Degree from Delft University of Technology, funded partly by the DAAD. She has worked at Enzo Valerio in Rotterdam and together with Leyla Hepsaydir on the creative research project Stories of a Street. ‘Stories of a Street: Unfolding the narratives of the Nieuwe Binnenweg’ develops an interdisciplinary method of architectural research, demonstrating a new role for the architect as carer as opposed to form-giver. The project introduces Steps of Caring - Collecting, Drawing and Sharing narratives - that can be adapted to other urban contexts. Through these steps, Stories of a Street collaboratively creates an unconventional graphic archive of everyday urban stories.
The project has been funded by Creative Industries Fund NL, the Municipality of Rotterdam and Fleur Groenendijk Foundation. With Stories of a Street, Rebekka has given lectures at TU Delft for the Master’s elective ‘The Living City’ and at KU Leuven in Brussels for the Master architecture studio ‘A House is not a home (for all)’. They have hosted a walkshop at Placemaking Week Europe in 2024 in Rotterdam and have hosted many community events in neighbourhood spaces along the Nieuwe Binnenweg. Stories of a Street has been exhibited during the Architecture Month Rotterdam: in 2024 at OMI in the group exhibition Current Traces #1 and in 2025 at the main group exhibition Sustainable space making.
A graphic novel exploring the ecological entanglements of construction
The building sector is responsible for nearly 40% of global CO₂ emissions. A significant share of this comes directly from the building process itself - not just in what we build, but how we build. As architects and spatial practitioners, we are complicit in this crisis. While sustainability is increasingly integrated into our methods - through material choices, energy modelling, and life-cycle analysis - construction continues to disrupt local ecologies in ways that remain largely invisible.
This project, ‘Where will I go? Or the not so visible life on a building site’, seeks to make visible the hidden processes and stories of those affected by our building culture, particularly the more-than-human actors who are rarely considered: the soil organisms displaced by excavation, the birds whose nesting grounds are lost to scaffolding and noise pollution, the fungal networks severed by concrete foundations.
Taking the form of a research-based graphic novel, this work will visualize the often-overlooked web of life on and around construction sites. Inspired by the method of artists like Liv Strömquist, the project combines thorough investigation with accessible storytelling to render complex ecological entanglements tangible - to professionals and non-experts alike.
The preceding ecological, historical and material research will be translated into the proposed graphic novel. It can also be turned into other forms of publication, exhibition format or creative output.
The long-term goal is to make visible what we routinely ignore: to reframe building not as neutral progress, but as a cultural act with ecological consequences, and to offer a medium for imagining alternatives. This can spark intergenerational conversations about our responsibilities towards our environment as architects and non-architects alike and even serve as a pedagogical tool to children, students and adults.