Settle
Prayer flags are an ancient Tibetan Buddhist tradition. They are strung up in the Himalayan mountains and their colorful flags are intended to carry benevolent mantras through the wind over the peaks into the world and ensure more peace and harmony there. We want to take up this tradition with our “Settle” design, reinterpret it and try to capture these messages as an object. This allows you to meditate on the prayers. The construction manifests the wind so that the prayers carried into the air from Tibet slowly come together, form a unity and finally run so close together that a sitting surface is created for meditation. Meditation is now possible on this, with tradition as the foundation and a view of nature as the ladder of thought.


Hovering above the ground
Since the prayer flags have the rule that they must never touch the ground, this also had to apply to our design. The entire wooden band is therefore connected to the trees by ropes and floats above the ground. As the structure progresses towards the sky, the wooden slats are increasingly omitted to symbolize the dissolution of the form. The wooden slats running parallel to each other are held by threaded rods from which the entire object is suspended.
As part of the excursion week in May 2024, the design “Settle” was realized by the students and helpers of the University of Kassel. The wooden slats were manufactured using steam-bent wooden elements made of larch in thicknesses of 5mm and 8mm and assembled using AR technology.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the generous support of the sponsors:
Lidauer, Sägewerk Löberbauer, KFD and Fologram, as well as to the supporters Wolfgang Sparber, Ernst Beck, Hannes Reittinger, Florian Reittinger, Ulrich Gegendorfer, Dirk Jung, Leon Jung, Florian Hermann, Julian Lienhard, Georgia Margarita and Guido Brinkmann.
Students: Jonas Baumann, Edwin Koch, Chiara Nickolmann, Sara Fee Panzer, Max Schulz-Helbach, Emmelie Schwegmann
Organization: University of Kassel, Department of Design and Building Theory, Prof. Mag. Arch. Marie-Therese Harnoncourt-Fuchs, M.Arch. Sarah Blahut, M.Sc. Harun Faizi, B.Sc. Vanessa Nadine Fricke





