The project is based on the integration of the already present programs-trade and transportation-underneath one roof that contributes to the city on multiple levels.
In an attempt to relieve the old colonian centre of Accra from the infrastructural pressure caused by its economic opportunities, the project both questions and affirms the idea of the “hub” within the city. Normally considered a cluster of programs that is centrally situated within the city, in the case of Accra’s historical train station it is not the added program or the built structures that turned it into a hub, but rather the lack of them.
By using the already present logic of the self-made roof as an architectural strategy for the project, the area can be redeveloped in a formal way that is inclusive and organized. It attempts to highlight that contemporary African architecture does not have to be a copy of what is or has been popular and seen as modern in the northern part of the world, but rather responds to already present conditions while opposing the exclusive logic of major planning boards.
As a basic piece of infrastructure, the roof is there for everyone: public and private parties, multinationals and street-market traders, home-owners and homeless, the clean and the dirty, the car and the train.
By looking at human-nature relationships from different perspective, ZOOOF develops a number of (counter-) proposals for the non-human habitats in the contemporary zoo.
A conversation/interview between a practicioner and a scolar: Nanne de Ru of Powerhouse Company (and director of the Berlage) and Wouter Vanstiphout, Professor of Design as Politics at the TU Delft (and partner at Crimson Architectural Historians) about the role of the architect in a city.
As a housing type Hortus Conclusus Conclusus explores a new way of living within the most industrialized productive landscape of the Netherlands.
The Westland is one of the Netherlands most fascinating regions, consisting mainly out of glasshouses that cover its rural landscape. Such a productive landscape has many spatial implications on the domestic environment, and the project focussed on the characteristics of these little islands of domesticity within the perpetuating glasshouses that provide the region its wealth.
After studying what is specific about the domestic world in the Westland and comparing them to other places in the world that deal with similar conditions, the intervention started to revolve around the idea of the enclosed garden. Normally a Dutch house or farm, will stand floating on its plot, rather than using the house to form a domestic enclosure. The project employs this idea on multiple scales, providing the inhabitants three types of garden in which different levels of private and collective gardens become integrate in the domestic environment.
After completing my BSc of Architecture at the TU Delft, I packed my bags and went to South-America for 9 months. In between a trip from the most southern point of Chile to somewhere high up in the north of Colombia, I stayed in Santiago de Chile for an internship with Max Nuñez and Nicolas del Rio, then known as dRn Arquitectos.
During my time there I spend most of the time building models, both digitally and physically, of the Casa Beranda.
Marseille, 2013
with Izabela Slodka, Maciej Wieczorkowski and Lennard Rutten
For the design of a Mediatheque in the Vieux-Port of Marseille, the column is employed as the element structuring the intervention, both dividing and merging the different programs that is dispersed over the site.
Starting with the landscape, which is flattenend on certain points to create spaces to reside as opposed to the gradual slope of the rest of the terrain, serving the program (a gallery, library and open-air theater).
The augmentaugmention of the grid of the column around the permanent activities, emphasizing their contrast with the regular grid. Then the grid was lightened, deleting columns to create openness and transition zones between the existing urban environment and the mediatheque.
From here the field of columns forms the base for a web of beams on top, connecting and seperating it, providing shelter, guiding and misleading the user. It creates a roof over the square from where you can watch the columns dissapear into the port.
To make the spaces within the grid inhabitable in all seasons ETFE cushions filled with air are put on the beams to keep the rain out, and where necessary glass curtain walls are added for the programs that cannot do without a fully controlled climate. Finally the furniture is added, filling up the spaces within the grid and providing the possibility for it to be used accordingly.
As an intervention in the political and physical landscape of a silicium quarry, the project confronts the ending of the welfare state with the desolate state of an exploited landscape.
The history of the site as a mining colony, which is still very much alive within its population, and the specific site that is being excavated for silicium (a valuable resource used to make glass, solar panels, ceramics etc.), are integrated in the project to create a catalyst for the inhabitants of the surrounding area to organize and start to develop and maintain their own public spaces and facilities, as a commentary on the fading wellfare-state.
The ideas in the project are supported by two documents: a literary and typological study of the “People’s Palace” and a survey of the site that relates it’s history to the contemporary political condition (with planning documents, legal frameworks, interviews etc.) in order to project an intervention that integrates all these aspects.
The implication of the design in the site, by using the excavation and the desolate state of the land, is a vital aspect of its architecture by embedding the structures in the landscape and building them from its material. For the intention is to create a public building, made for and used by the inhabitants, they have been engaged to get involved in the ritual of building generating relevance and a relationship to the facilities.
Designing and Thinking with Animal Images, Metaphors, and Analogies
Adaptation of O.M. Ungers Morphologie / City Metaphors from 1982, to link the architectural, morphological and analogical nature of the zoo with that of the city.
Apparently architecture can be designed for two different types of inhabitants: the human animals that live in the city, and the exotic species that are exhibited at the zoo. The idea of constructing suitable habitats for every species has inspired architects to design extra-ordinary structures for the performances of the daily rituals of Christian families, penguin colonies, yuppies, rhinoceros, bachelors, and lions. In using the same morphological elements but structuring them differently, the zoo provides a fertile object of study, constructing a microcosm of the society that built it.
Many European cities built a zoo around the end of the 19th century, marking the edge of the city and providing a semi-rural environment for the animals to be displayed. The development of the city around it has turned them into isolated instances of city that many consider un-urban: a constructed natural environment framed by highways, housing developments, office parks, railroads, and shopping malls. As an urban fragment the zoo becomes the exception to the rule, defying the city’s grid while emphasizing the strength of its growth.
When Oswald Mathias Ungers drew the relationships between the cities morphology and everyday objects in his book Morphologie/City Metpahors, he visualized analogies that were always present in architectural language but never documented as such. The presence of animal figures in his book emphasizes how the knowledge that has been created in the zoo entered our everyday life, both physical and lyrical. This book takes his methods to the zoo, a place rich in metaphors and analogies, and visualizes the architecture of the city to that of the zoo, morphologically and/or metaphorically.
Originally intended as a form of aristocratic pleasure, the zoo entered the public realm when the bourgeoisie started looking at nature as an attractive past-time activity. After lining up exotic treasures from the colonies for scientific and artistic purposes, they finally opened up the gates to the common folk to
enter for a day of pleasure on a small fee. These fees could be spent on acquiring more animals, facilities, and territory for the zoological society to pursue their quest to grasp the concept of nature.
To improve the experience the animal habitats were dressed up to suit the species, turning the zoo into a living encyclopedia. In the beginning of the 20th century these ideas shifted and with artificial rocks and moats the suggestions
of a natural environment without barriers was constructed. The universal values of modernism brought changes to the habitats in the zoo, even the animals needed more light, clean air, and lightweight structures to be able to breath and fully enjoy the good life in the zoological park. Emulating the exoticism of both the animal and the architecture created fascinating structures, but became less popular when the living conditions were considered to be inhumane.
Currently the zoo is able to reconstruct almost every climate that exists on our planet, making it possible to resurrect extinct climates that our modes of production are rapidly generating. In this way we are able to experience how life might have been like somewhere far away, and project new natural environments that exist nowhere in the world except for the habitats that are constructed in the zoo.
Animal Analogies and Perception
Probably all of us remember the children’s stories that become graphical in our imagination through the presence of numerous animals, whether mythical or not. The difference between these stories and the empirical knowledge deducted from plants, bodies, and animals, emphasizes the complexity and contradictions of the project of the zoo.
The architecture of the zoo has developed analogously to that of the city, translating the progress we have made in our thinking processes and observations of the world around us into a sequence of buildings that provides a fantastic day of recreation within the urban environment of the city.
After the enlightenment brought us the ingredients for the modern pursuit of knowledge, it gave birth to what we consider modern science through new phenomena such as the botanical garden, the anatomical theater, and the zoo. The progress we have made since then has made us indebted to the zoo for it allowed us to perceive the animal in an illustrated encyclopedia, visualizing the stories of our childhood while providing physical matter to study scientifically.
By looking at the other in both empirical and analogous manners, we have gathered information that proved valuable for the production of knowledge, technology, and commodities, and at the zoo we were able to observe their behavior in order to distinguish ourselves and emphasize the strengths and shortcomings that proved our superiority. Since Linneaus’s first taxonomies—classifying species of animals and plants—we have been constructing webs of data related to the deduction of knowledge about ourselves, studying how we relate to our material surroundings—both living and death—and how the natural world around us operates. In struggling to assign meaning to our own existence, we still project human characteristics on animals as a means of distinction and differentiation, to subsequently form an image of ourselves. In architecture the same idea of the taxonomy has been used to study buildings types, showing the varieties within a type through comparison and classification. From the early typological studies of Durand to the later observation of Rafeal Moneo and Aldo Rossi,: the dissection of architecture in to morphological elements find its origin in taxonomy.
Metaphors
In everyday language the presence of animal figures helps illustrate our stories, while often saying less about them than it does about us, for they only exist as such—and are attributed with these characteristics—as we acknowledge them to do so. By rendering them as beings that live in the service of mankind, we either humanize the animal or de-humanize ourselves, blurring the distinction in thought while making it spatial in the architecture or the zoo.
With increased public access to exotic animal-others after the birth of the zoo, new forms of critique and representation entered the relationship. The commodification of the wild meant it had to be packaged to sell, while an increased interest in the well-being of the animal provided larger habitats that appeared more like the natural setting from which they originated. Although the question of the animal is a topic dealt with by many philosophers, it is not without difficulties since the concept of the animal itself is an inadequate generalization of a multiplicity of life forms and perspectives for beings other than ourselves. In line with Levinas’s notion of ethics as “being called into question by the face of the other,” Derrida poses that animals of various sorts may have a face and are thus “able to call upon us and obligate me in ways that I cannot fully anticipate.” The zoo can be considered the urban space assigned to the confrontation of the human facing the animal in the most controlled environment, and while it has an ethical impact by projecting framed instances of the exotic wonders of the “natural world” within the contemporary human habitat, it is hard to defend it as such.
The captive animals both display the exotic grandeur of nature’s creations which we like to project on ourselves, but also our own everyday struggles as part of a globalized society that reduces you to nothing if you don’t participate in the rat-race. We are as much imprisoned in our own modes of production as the animals we appropriated to reflect upon our own existence, turning the zoo into a metaphor of the conditions of our own society.
Signs, symbols, and allegories
The zoo is read as an allegorical project, a sequence of living dioramas projecting fixed scenes where nature is represented as one condition: a taxidermy of the wild animal staged in a foreground that blends into the background seamlessly. Even if the argument for the conservation of the species makes sense in relation to the dissappearance of their actual living environment, it remains a theatrical event that exposes our concept of nature rather than what it actually is. At the end of a day there are three levels of reality exposed at the zoo: the factual reality, the architecture; the perceptual reality, the animal habitat; and the conceptual reality,the idea of the zoo, the idea of the city, and the idea of the natural world.
A day at the zoo is an important part of the good life, providing humanity the possibility to come face to face with nature in the urban environment of the city, their own habitat, making it a necessity for a city to truly be a city. The project makes a typological study of the components of the zoo, showing how they are analogous-formally or metaphorically-to the city in which the zoo resides.
As a starting point it reads the zoo as microcosm of our society, and analogous to the way it developed and operates. It studies it on three scales: the zoo in the city, architecture in the zoo, and animals in architecture. All of these are represented in the zoo as ideal versions of what we consider a humane place for nature on an urban, architectural and domestic scale. From the zoo’s meandering plan and the materiality of its buildings to the interior separations of the habitats: all are constructed to stage a pleasant sequence of how to perceive everyday life as an extra-ordinary experience.
Originally the zoological garden was intended as the instrument that allowed humanity to observe nature within a staged setting, making it possible to create a taxonomy of the animal world. The body of this project takes the same method and applies it on the zoo-drawing and classifying the different types as Linneaus did in the first taxonomies-disassembling the zoo into a collection of curious architectural objects built under the proposition of representing animal habitats.
The different fragments that have been classified are than viewed as analogous to pieces of city by referring to how they are present in the city itself. Drawing from O.M. Ungers City Metaphors, every individual type in the zoo is paired with an urban counterpart through a formal or metaphorical analogy. In this way the construction of knowledge through analogies-like that present in the zoo-is challenged.
In employing the same architectural language for the animals that are put on display in the zoo, as for ourselves, it alludes to future scenarios of what the zoo can mean for a city to remain a relevant urban fragment. Since our views of nature are (or at least should be) rapidly changing yet again through an increased sensitivity to how our humanities behavior influences that of the planet we live on-with the city as our primary habitat-the zoo, (and perhaps the city?) could also do with a revision.
To support this argument a diorama is constructed that resembles a 24 hour cycle taking the viewer past some of the most characteristic moments of the zoo, project the analogy into a miniaturized world of urban, architectural and interior encounters of humanity and nature. Here the ambiguity of the zoo and the city, architecture and habitat, humans and animals, is pursued to a maximum; constructing a day out that shows everyday life as an extra-ordinary experience: A Day at the Zoo.
Institute of Place-Making, 2013
with Kaegh Allen, Ilse van den Berg, Erik van der Gaag, Charlotte Grace, Rogier Hendriks, Doris van Hooijdonk, Marleen Klompenhouwer, Emiel Meijerink, Eva Nicolai, Pépé Niemeijer and Sarah Roberts
The Institute of Place Making discovers and makes visible the notion of place and how it evolves.
As a group of students we developed the idea and subsequently “founded” the Institute of Place-Making, which than appeared for the first time at Oerol 2013 (themed “Sense of Place”). The documenting of how people understood place-and which places ment most to them on the island of Terschelling-was done by mapping, categorizing and analyzing feedback of visitors and inhabitants on their experience with Terschelling’s landscape.
By first handing out test tubes, later documenting the results on photographs which were then published on a website (www.iopm.nl) with a map of the island indicating the values visitors and inhabitants endow to a variety of places found on the island. The test-tubes were then collected in cabinet’s that formed an interactive classification exhibition at the Institutes’ laboratory at ‘Duinmeertje Hee’.
