Visserijplein – cities are for people

A report of the third public lecture on the five Rotterdam Europan 15 sites.

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Investigating the Visserijplein site for Europan 15? Live in the area? Have a stake in the development of this bustling Delfshaven neighbourhood? You’ll want to read this report on the third public lecture on Visserijplein. Teams competing on the site are tasked with designing a multifunctional building block in the heart of this multicultural, and vulnerable neighbourhood. This building must incorporate part of the existing local market, and provide space for new forms of living, meeting, learning, making, playing and working. How do you even begin to create a strategy to accomplish so much with a single building? How do you measurably enhance quality of life for the residents of Visserijplein and fulfill Rotterdam’s objectives?

Read on for insight from architects with dedicated perspective on approaching design commissions of this nature.

 

Gert Kwekkeboom: ARCHITECTURE EXPRESSES WHAT WE CAN BE
Thirty second summary
With each project that Civic Architects embarks on, they are interested in architecture that supports society (private, communal, civic). To do this, they explore societal themes as they relate to spatial design. Exploring themes of safety, the erosion of local cultures in an increasingly global civic context, providing platforms for individuals to be heard, and facilitating the sovereignty of cities, Civic sees the architectural commission as the question to which the architectural response is a solution to a larger urban and or social problem. Through architecture, they create what we want to be, or present what we can be as a society. They aim to do this by investigating flows and activities in and around a given project’s site.
Walking the audience through different projects, Gert articulated themes driving each investigation and spatial solution: celebrating the familiar in Willem II’s public passage with augmented brickwork recalling the Tilburg vernacular; providing a generosity of space in the adaptive reuse project LocHal, a public library that is host to a variety of uses, activities and events; reducing pressure on space in Tilburg’s Piushaven Pavilion, yet maintaining public access to a communal amenity; facilitating shared experience in the Bushmesse Literature Salon of Frankfurt by using the senses as a communication medium to include all visitors, regardless of their level of literacy.
Tops

• The theme is the departure; it bridges the space between the present and the potential
• Societal themes have a spatial expression
• Design organises and anchors moments
• There are no universally shared values you can communicate through architecture

Tips

• Find neutral language to communicate in architecture, be inclusive and accommodate
• The architectural project has the potential to do more than simply respond to client requirements
• Define a relevant theme and use this as the foundation for a new spatial / social order
• Design with people at the heart of the strategy (technical problems can be solved with engineering, but the human scale works at a different level)
• Program activities that matter: make space to disagree, space to have a good time
• Organise ways for people to come together, people that wouldn’t otherwise come together – these moments need to be anchored through design

About Gert Kwekkeboom

Gert is one of four founding partners of Amsterdam architecture office, Civic Architects most recently celebrated for their LocHal public library in Tilburg, which received the BNA’s best new building of 2019 award. LocHal has since been hailed “the new beating heart of the Tilburg Rail Zone.” Their work is defined by the belief that architecture is not an autonomous discipline, but chiefly a public task.

 

Jeroen Zuidgeest: CITIES ARE FOR PEOPLE
Thirty second summary
Jeroen’s lecture focussed on two things: using development as an opportunity to implant new public programs, and strategy as design for maximising quality of life and upgrading cities. He has established his firm, Studio for New Realities to address these more complex challenges and it operates with the understanding that design, as a top-down initiative itself, is not sufficient; it is only a podium for what really happens. To craft cities and spaces that serve people, designers must work with existing urban ecosystems, both physical and social. To do this, designers must carve out a new position: as co-creators of urban futures.
Vibrant new urban futures have communal living at their core, and as such, relevant inner city developments must present new public program (like Price’s Fun Palace). The studio addresses this in Willemstoren, a housing tower in Rotterdam, by implementing a shift in approach which enabled savings that maximised communal, shared spaces, making a strong economic case for the real estate developer. They did this while planting qualities and spaces which will provide an opportunity for community to flourish, making space for new program. Such significant upgrade is required in Rotterdam that the slowness of the profession and its processes will no longer suffice, so, Jeroen maintained, strategy must be at the forefront.
Tops

• It is time to drastically upgrade the city by making it serve the people that live in it and their needs
• Sustainability and humanism work in tandem
• Spatial designs exist in the triangle of hardware (spatial), software (programmatic) and orgware (people)
• There are larger urban / social questions that design can (and must) attend to

Tips

• Define the intentions and goals that organise and drive your intervention
• Co-stage the show, make space for co-creation with existing qualities / people
• Find the anchors in the site (be they: the historic city, heavy industry, green space) and draw these threads together to generate space for new program
• Invent program that does not yet exist to program the in-betweens (accelerators, programmatic condensers, free spaces, learning labs, health hubs)

About Jeroen Zuidgeest
Formerly Head of the Strategic Planning Department and architect for renowned Rotterdam office, MVRDV, Jeroen initiated Studio for New Realities which stands for maximising quality of life, to create a new reality that is more humane, healthier and more responsible. The office is based on the conviction that there must be a better way to organise our environment and to contribute to a world that is more attractive, sustainable, and healthier.
About the lecture series
This lecture series is a co-production of the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Architecture Institute Rotterdam (AIR). Wishing to play a more decisive role in the development of the city, AIR worked directly with the City of Rotterdam to help select sites that have the potential to support ambitions for growth, enhance public values, while promoting healthy, inclusive, dense city development. Visserijplein is one such site, ripe for change, holding great potential to address these issues.

Register for E15 NL via: www.europan-europe.eu
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Competition E15

Europan 15 closed on Sunday July 28th, 2019.

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