City Research, Dutch Design Week 2010

During DDW, (23rd - 31st October) La Cittá Mobile, itself a building with a long tradition of  reuse, became the setting for a variety of activities on the known and unknown aspects of city planning, mapping and experience. As a follow-up on Day of Architecture, City Research included some takes on the city as a hotbed of dominant and unacknowledged monuments, of use, abuse and reuse:

workshop “Beauty of Decay”

led by Irene Curulli and Jan Schevers

Disrepaired buildings are often neglected and omitted as natural, everyday facts of life. Actually, they challenge our idea of ugliness and dislike; they inspire attention and fascination to people, they record memories and recall memories, whether real or imagined. And this decay that we experience as beauty because of the passing nature of the abandoned place becomes more precious when we realize that those buildings will be swept away. Will we ever see them again?

Such premises inspired the international workshop, promoted by the TU/e - University of Technology in Eindhoven. From Monday 25^th to Friday 29^th of October, students and professors from The Netherlands and from several international universities worked on revealing the “Beauty of Decay” along the Eindhovensch Kanaal, a former industrial area in the eastern part of the city.

The workshop aims at the development of ideas and design proposals that make us reflect on the value of abandoned sites and disclose how meaningful and alive they are.

Students worked in La Città Mobile, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., in groups of six. Guests were invited to follow the process and to comment on the designs. The location was open to everyone; interaction with the general public was  seen as important in order to create awareness and stimulate curiosity regarding the topic.

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photos: Patrick Meis

lecture “Reusing the City”

Uri Ben-Ari

Our design schools teach us to innovate, to initiate, to cast away our inhibitions and above all, to be original. And yet here we are discussing reuse.

The way adaptive reuse is presented and implemented in the Netherlands is open to debate; and whether it will become a dominant value for planners, architects, designers and users is still questionable. In fact, for a growing list of reasons why we should be encouraging reuse lies a mountain of complexities making it a challenge, even a burden to all parties involved. No   patch of land is “new”, no creative process is entirely original. So what’s new about reuse? What defines and what confines it? Is adaptive reuse only one trend among others? How can we bridge the gaps between reuse as a vision for the future and as a factor in the present?

a lecture for the students on adaptive reuse as it was, is, and could be.

lecture “Postcards from a Journey” 

Remco Roes

Picture postcards show you the buildings you absolutely had to see while visiting a city. The Sagrada Familia, Tower Bridge or Saint Peter’s square; a multitude of cards dictating the tourist’s route in the city, from one attraction to another. The way a tourist traverses the city is defined by commercial tourism, marketing and city branding. Postcards from a Journey is a series of five cards with detailed photos of different cities. These portray a lively, ever-changing organism that is influenced by the adaptations of countless individuals, and the futility of placing it on a card.

lecture: “Urban change and making sense of Industrial Heritage”  

Dimitra Babalis

As a Researcher at the Department of Civil Engineering Dimitra Babalis has been involved in various research activities on sustainable planning, theoretical and applicational basis of ecological design principles to urban form, urban regeneration and redevelopment of derelict industrial areas. She is currently Director of the “International Centre for Urban Design of Florence-CISDU”, in the Faculty of Architecture of Florence.

presentation “Ontwikkelingsvisie Kanaalzone” by Jelle Groot

An elaborated presentation and discussion concerning the 15 years’ urban vision of the semi-industrial Canal Zone and the outlying neighborhoods by the municipality of Eindhoven, prepared in 2009. read more

Jelle Groot is an urban planner in the gemeente Eindhoven.

photo: Patrick Meis

lecture - Jozua Zaagman 

 “My work deals with our understanding of public space. I will try to expose the relation between economic structures and the informal use of space, the unorganized, individual infill of (urban) spaces. I will do this by means of maps, photos, videos, audio recordings, drawings, texts, installations, spatial interventions, concepts and designs. Besides researching and registering, my work strives to show the given public space at its realest. Not by identifying, but by observing without judgment. I have been mapping out public space in different scales in Barcelona, Belvedere (Maastricht), Bucharest, Calaf, Eindhoven, Euregio Maas-Rhein, Liege,  Manresa,  Montréal, Napoli, Transvaal (Den Haag) and Tirana, individually or in groups.”