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Design of Co-creation in Rotterdam Central Station (1996-2007): Architecture and urban design roles in the multi-stakeholder collaboration
Full text linkThis article explores the pivotal role of design as a decision-making tool within multi-stakeholder collaborations, focusing on the early phases of the Rotterdam Central Railway Station and its surroundings project. Spanning from 1996, when it gained National Key Project status, to 2007, when construction commenced, this period precedes the preliminary design, during which the design process becomes the primary method of collaboration among multiple stakeholders, including designers and clients involved in the station area’s development.
After introducing the post-war reconstruction of the station area and the ‘Platform Zero’ experiment, this article defines three key stages of design in the initial phase, each of which left a distinct mark on the station project. These stages are:
- From 1996 to 2001: Design for political communication.
- From 2002 to 2004: Parallel design.
- From 2004 to 2007: Design co-creation and integration.
To provide a comprehensive view of the design’s development, this article includes insights from conversations with architects and planners engaged in the process. In a dynamic exchange between various stakeholders and designers, the evolution of Rotterdam Central Station’s design reveals how political decisions have been informed by thorough design studies, offering a platform for robust discourse on critical issues
Artistic Practices as Architectural Research
Full text linkThe potential of implicit architectural knowledge extends beyond the realm of sciences and technology. It is worthwhile to examine its role in art, artistic practices, and artistic knowledge. This article explores several practical examples from art and architecture, spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. These examples shed light on artistic practices that, apart from enhancing designerly qualities and fostering a reflexive approach, may have a significant research impact in architecture. The methods, processes, and topics of these examples are examined, and their potential for critical improvement is highlighted. Particularly, the concept of ‘not-knowing’ is emphasized as a valuable asset for addressing contemporary and future challenges, not limited to architecture
On File and As Files: Tracing Communicative Processes in the Byker Archive
Full text linkIn this paper, we piece together threads of communicative processes between residents, architects, and other parties, as found in the lists and letters of the archive of the Byker Redevelopment in Newcastle Upon Tyne (1968-83). Documents that are usually discarded or neglected by architectural researchers - from a stack of various papers documenting residents’ lists of complaints, evaluative papers such as an audit report, and architects’ memos, to a resident’s letter of complaint - enable us to reconstruct, first, how a mainstream practice collected and filed residents’ experiences and understanding of their homes, and second, how, through the circulation of those papers in action as files, residents’ notes were also embedded in the design process
Design against Extinction at New York University
Full text linkThis article reviews the eco-social design work of students at the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies at New York University over the last decade. Environmental justice movements and the effects of global warming pose significant challenges to the architecture of dwellings, landscapes, and urban design communities. In response, students have placed socially and ecologically sensitive projects at the center of their design education. The justifiable moral outrage of our students has prompted us and them to rethink the methods by which we teach and imagine social environmentalism from the perspective of equity, inclusion, and the biosphere
Drawing Time
Full text linkThis issue of Spool – ‘Drawing Time’ – departs from the observation that the metropolitan landscape is subject to time, in many ways. The metropolitan landscape, as it has been studied in Spool over the years, is conceived as the interrelation between urban, infrastructural, rural and natural formations: a dynamic, intertwined and layered urban-landscape structure. The urban condition is viewed from the perspective of the landscape as a permanent underlying substructure and as physical open space with its own spatial, compositional and perceptual characteristics. Time aspects of the metropolitan landscape can be found in processes of growth and decay, seasonal manifestations, disruptive forces of wind and water and also in the ways in which humans inhabit and use space or in which urban development processes take place. Designing for the metropolitan landscape means dealing with a wide range of dynamic phenomena, unstable systems and variable conditions. It implies the exploration of future situations, bridging time spans from seasons to decades and design tasks from small-scale interventions to large-scale strategies. It connects landscape operations that build upon the garden, the park and the forest to complex, layered design strategies for transformation, migration and climate change. This Spool issue discusses the importance of time in such design processes, and its reciprocal relation to representation
Ontological Upgrade: Indigenous Futures and Radical Transformation
Full text linkThis paper uses ‘deep time’, as an alternative ontology to crisis management to argue for the application of a broad decolonial approach in lieu of contemporary green design practices. Methodologically, this paper substantiates it claims by utilising conventional academic ‘knowledge’ production, as represented in literature, references, and case studies, but also supports the expansion of knowledge through a deeper exploration of place, pattern, and time demonstrated by intermingling deep time principles with Indigenous spatial practices. Fearing that urban life will descend into obsolescence and irrelevance if no such knowledge systems are taken up, this paper proposes an alternative trajectory as a preventive measure, which has all been exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic. By exploring alternative Indigenous design ontologies, specifically in Oceania, alongside deep adaptation and deep time, this paper’s authors intend to provide an important basis for research and teaching that reinvigorates connections to Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge systems. This paper proposes that by taking up notions of deep adaptation and Indigenous epistemologies as critiques of Western notions of time, property, etc. architecture, design and planning might re-situate ideas, ranging from stewardship to maintenance, within time and placebased technologies outside of the discourse of crisis
Reimagining Humanity
Full text link‘Faced with inevitable collapse, leading scientists used some of the industrial world’s last remaining technological and energy resources to design and provide an AI bot for selected people on the planet.’’ The following short fiction story explores the next version of human settlement after the collapse of this one, as predicted by Bendell’s research into ‘Deep Adaptation’ (Bendell, 2020). Dr. Bendell warns us that, unless we find ways to radically change our lifestyle, ‘human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations.’ Through this story, we illustrate the idea that a societal collapse may actually be what humanity, and most certainly what the earth, needs
Interdisciplinary Data-integrated Approaches
Full text linkRapid urbanization with the associated land cover and land use change, as well as resource depletion, contribute to the degradation of ecosystems and biodiversity and have a negative impact on human health and well-being. Societal calls for responses and results pose a significant challenge for research and education in the various fields concerned with the environment. Alongside the current environmental crisis there is a pressing need for developing ‘green solutions’ for the built environment with the help of datadriven methods, workflows and tools.
In view these developments, a shift from narrow disciplinary and domain-specific approaches towards broader interdisciplinary, multi-domain and multi-scalar strategies is required. This includes dataacquisition, data-sharing and data-integration, as well as data-driven modelling to enable the complexity of sustainability problems arising from rapid urbanization to be tackled. While there have been efforts to address the challenges of multi-domain approaches, for instance in the fields of sustainability, the urban and architectural sciences, as well as the interoperability of methods and tools, the actual problem goes deeper, requiring interdisciplinary knowledge exchange to develop adequate shared paradigms, concepts, methods and tools.
Cyber-physical Architecture (CpA) issue 5 addresses these challenges by engaging with experts from a range of disciplines involved in environmental concerns while utilizing data-acquisition, data-sharing and integration, and data-driven modelling in a discourse that identifies modalities for a broader interdisciplinary, multi-domain and multi-scalar approach
Drawing fixed moments in time: Repetitively drawing to understand and reveal consequences of growth, change, decay and idealization within the design
Full text linkThis visual essay discusses drawing time in relation to the author’s graduation project, which is based on the paradigm of a multispecies world. Three design principles are derived from this paradigm: movement, hybrid and landscape as being. These relate to different notions of time and thus on drawing time. Movement means drawing the now. Hybrid is a material structure that shows non-human presence. This materiality implies that decay has to be drawn. The landscape as being is the ongoing landscape without end. In order to draw the three principles leading to the design intervention, fixed moments in time are chosen. In this visual essay 0 years, 20 years, and 30 years are shown. Time is drawn through a repetition of plans, sections and animation stills and through drawing specific human and non-human presence. In this way repetition, growth, decay and changing actors are shown. Drawing decay opened up new design possibilities. By comparing the repetitive animation stills, drawing time became a critical tool that showed idealization within the design. This visual essay shows both the repetition of drawings, as well as the discoveries it leads to
‘The Future is just around the Corner...’ – The construction of urban narratives through temporary supergraphics
Full text linkDrawings play various roles in (and in-between) the processes of design, construction and the continuous use and appropriation of space. This article explores large drawing elements positioned at building sites. It discusses how decision makers, developers, planners and design professionals actively use such representational means to create site and project narratives for the site preparation and construction phase. Two projects and sites are presented here in order to illustrate and explore the role of large on- site supergraphics during site transformation. The main aim is to explore how they configure specific conceptions of time. The first is Ōtautahi: An Origin Story, a large comic strip mounted on the hoardings of the building site for a new convention centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, as part of the city’s post- earthquake rebuild. The second case is a ground mural in the Danish town of Køge featuring a map in a section of a temporary urban space called The Space of Time that is part of the town’s harbour transformation. The analysis engages with theoretical perspectives on visual culture, drawing and space – in particular urban comics, cartography, mapping, site thinking and transformation. It sheds light on an emerging phenomenon in contemporary urban culture – one characterized by hybrid authorships, ambiguous aesthetics and time-space constellations