By virtue of their renowned reputation as scientific institution and profound knowledge of plants the Sitio Roberto Burle Marx proved to be the ideal partner for such a project.

The pilot is installed next to the guesthouse Roberto Burle Marx built for his brother. The house is located adjacent to the nurseries and the shade houses where numerous tropical species are grown. The house is now functioning as an office for scientists and will double up as a place for artists in residence in the future. The installation is implementing the full cycle of the holistic Água Carioca strategy: A bathroom (sink + toilet) is connected to a new recycling system, consisting of rainwater collection for the roof of the guest house, a rain water storage tank, a septic tank connected to the new toilet and sink, a constructed wetland and a water tank for the recycled effluent and rain water.

The aim of the pilot is to create a functioning pilot that deepens insights into the system’s functioning while making it simultaneously more widely accepted by the general public.

Since it's creation, Ooze architects, along with local partners, have hosted several visits to the site, and the area is open to all visitors of the Sitio. For a period of time, the Sitio also hosted an exhibition of the Água Carioca project. To arrange a visit to the pilot, contact the Sitio Burle Marx (↪ sitioburlemarx.blogspot.nl

Read more here: ↪ www.aguacarioca.org

The Blue Crane is a relic of past times. It is a well-known landmark of the port industry which gave the city of Offenbach in the 20th century it’s identity. The project Blaue Sonne (Blue Sun) investigate the possibility of reinventing a new symbolism for the blue crane by converting the old obsolete industrial heritage in a new infrastructure collecting energy and providing a point of connection and gathering for the public space surrounding it. In that way the Blaue Sonne becomes a new landmark for a new culture of life in harmony with nature and its resources. The five public platforms climbing around the crane are reinventing a new type of public space spiraling and ascending the crane to reach the final point where the sun sets on Offenbach. The same Sun is transferring his energy to a large circular photovoltaic panel which redistributes the energy to be used for connecting mobile devices and providing connecting points for organizing events on and around the crane.

The Earth Forest is an installation of columns made of the soils of Europe. The soil columns are extracted at a number of locations all across Europe and transported to Frankfurt. The excavated columns reveal a layered landscape of natural earthy colours and represent the characteristic soils of Europe. Soil supports life, and all life depends on soil. Soil unites the peoples of Europe and is central to our common heritage. The Earth Forest thus carries a political agent: it makes us think about the land(s) of the European Union beyond political alliances and national borders. Installed in the space between the Entrance Pavilion and the ECB building, the columns create a permeable area through which visitors and ECB employees pass as they go to and from their destinations.


Our Special Relationship with Soil

The Earth Forest celebrates the special relationship between the soil and the peoples of Europe. Developed over millennia, Europeans’ connection with the soil serves both humanity and the natural environment. It the basis of many of our traditions and the cornerstone for a sustainable future in Europe.

Soil is among our most valuable natural assets. A nonrenewable resource, it is precious to every nation in Europe. In our traditions and imagery we associate it with fertility and regeneration. “Down to earth” thinking is essential for the survival of Europe. Beautiful and natural, soil underscores the importance of being good stewards of our planet.

As people walk through The Earth Forest, they experience a landscape made from the planet’s crust, which we normally never see. It is as if they are walking simultaneously above ground and below ground. This “grounding” experience is both humbling and inspirational.


United in Diversity

The nations of Europe have agreed to live together in the European Union, a political alliance in which many different peoples, both centuries-old cultures and recent migrants, coexist and mutually contribute to our shared European culture. Soil is one of the main pillars of our culture of living. Soil zones cross national borders and administrative jurisdictions.

Soil diversity is one of the characteristic features of Europe’s topography. Europe is blessed with extremely fertile arable soil and vast natural and semi-natural areas, where soil plays a vital role by conserving biodiversity and supporting global environmental systems. Soil is a living system, an available natural capital that enriches the lives of all Europeans.


Stability and Independence

In Europe, the close relationship between soil and people remains a fundamental living practice today. It benefits human society and supports the soil’s own ecosystem. Today, our relationship with soil is a basis for social and economic stability, a healthy environment, and prosperity for all. Nations that deplete the soil or cause its erosion sacrifice an essential system for supporting life.

As the European Union stresses the importance of regions and localities, people who live in the countryside, in small towns, and even in huge metropolises are learning to understand and respect their dependence on the natural environment. While a culture of living that preserves the special relationship between people and the soil must be locally based, the benefits and knowledge it produces cross all borders. The independence of Europe and its connectivity to the world reside in a personal awareness of this give-and-take relationship with the environment.

Casa de Rui Barbosa 's mission is to promote the preservation and research of memory , literature and humanistic production as well as initiatives for reflection and debate about Brazilian culture, incorporating daily attendance to visitor and users.

Memory - The presence of the absence
The Annex building will be built in the place where today are 3 houses. The volumetric trace of those buildings will be left to highlight the issues marked by this visible absence and to develop a dialogue between preservation, cultural memory and the city in transformation. The volumetric representation of the urban past (absence) , covered by Annex (presence ) creates a poetic tension and a constant warning about the fragile state of the changing culture and the importance of understanding the past to make a better future .

Connectivity - New routes
Ramps, stairs and landscaped paths weave a connection between the old and the new. These multiple forms of connection establish a link between the two buildings. Providing a spatial experience for employees and also for the general public .

Permeability - Hanging Gardens
The garden around the original Rui Barbosa house is extended with a series gardens allowing to circulate around the existing annex building and up above the new building. The first new roof garden above the exhibition hall is a living archive of rare Brazilian plants. The second is an intermediate observatory where people connect visually to Asuncion Street and prepare for the final ascent: the reading room in the open above the Annex building. Visitors can enjoy a semi sacred experience, a meditative space away from the noise of the city, in connection with the sky and the view of the most beloved cultural symbol of Rio: Corcovado .
Materiality , structure and Cycles
The physical materiality of the new building is extending the legacy of the great era of modern architecture in Brazil by using cast ornamented in situ fair faced concrete . The use of sustainable environmental solutions for the new spaces will provide necessary heat protection (walls and green roofs) and ensure a temperate climate within the space for the visitors and also the controlled space of the archives. Natural ventilation and heat exchange system will be combined. Rain water harvesting system will be placed for the irrigation of new and old gardens. On the roof of the existing building will be installed photovoltaic panels that contribute to feed power from mechanical ventilation and the new irrigation system for gardens.

Representation and Archaeology
The facade of the Annex will be made in situ ornamented concrete. The frescoes will be designed by a Brazilian artist. The shallow relief will express and represent a modern representation of Rio and Brazilian culture in an archaic form, a coded representation of history in the making.

TOF SOIL AND WATER: THE KING'S CROSS POND CLUB

'Of Soil and Water: The King's Cross Pond Club', located on the King's Cross Central Development construction site in London, is a micro-ecological environment with a natural swimming pond at its centre. The temporary available land is transformed into a place where visitors can take a swim next to aquatic plants cleaning the water.

THE POND

The pond consists of three different zones: a swimming zone, a regeneration zone and a plant-filter zone. The water is purified by a natural process using water plants, nutrient mineralisation and a set of filters on the edge of the pond that supplement the natural filtration. The pond is free of chemicals. When it is being cleaned, the water loops back to complete the water cycle. This is a closed-loop system. However, the loss of water through evaporation is automatically replenished from the main water supply, which is also filtered. The daily number of bathers is restricted by the amount of water the system is able to clean. Thus, the use of the pond remains in balance with what nature can absorb and regenerate.

THE SOIL

The soil zones around the pond range from an area of meagre soil and pioneer plants to a meadow area of rich soil where lush grass with wildflowers and shrubbery. The plants are chosen according to the specific types of soil. As they grow at their own pace, they clean and enrich the soil. Here, day after day, season after season, year after year, visitors can observe, experience and enjoy an environment rich in biodiversity.

THE NATURE THEATER

The enclosed site presents the natural environment in miniature, a landscape in motion, a theatre of ecological cycles: the water cycle, the plant cycle, and the soil cycle. It is a mise en scène of the processes that occur between humans, water, soil and plants. All life starts in water. Plants move from water to land; they grow and move across the land, fertilise the soil, and eventually die. The sensual experience of swimming in the pond allows people to enter the narrative of the site with ease. By swimming, walking around the pond, playing and resting on the grass, visitors participate in a living laboratory that reveals nature's ability to restore itself. The project gives them the opportunity to learn about the resilience of the ecological system through their own direct experience.

THE STAGE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

When we swim, we feel weightless and free. It is a rejuvenating experience. By dipping their feet in the water and taking a swim in the man-made natural swimming pond, visitors effortlessly enter into dialogue with the Anthropocene Age. This term refers to the current geological age in which human activity profoundly changes our relationship with nature: we become co-creators of new natural processes. In 'Of Soil and Water: The King's Cross Pond Club', the pond is a relational object, creating a relationship between swimmers and the ecosystem of the site. The elevated pond becomes a stage where the swimmers perform the balancing act of coexisting with nature. From this stage, they can watch the evolution of the surrounding neighbourhood and the ever-changing city, where new possibilities and new possible futures are being born.

THE CLUB

Everyone is welcome to swim in the pond, but the number of people who may enter the site is restricted; it is calculated according to the capacity of the water filtration system. Visitors must agree to certain house rules, such as showering before entering the pond. Here, the joy of swimming combines with awareness of our responsibility toward the environment. The Club not only facilitates the building of community; it uses community-building as a tool to develop a more resilient liveable city.

THE PUBLIC ART PROJECT

'Of Soil and Water: The King's Cross Pond Club' is the first public man-made swimming pond in the United Kingdom; it can accommodate up to 163 bathers per day. Living with water is an ingrained part of London's everyday life. The King's Cross Pond Club is a public art project commissioned by King's Cross Central Limited Partnership. The project was initiated by the 'Relay Art Program'.

Hortus Oblitus is located on a square in front of the Market Church in the center of the medieval city of Paderborn. Enclosed by a wall on two sides and a school and the church on the other two, an intimate space is formed, close yet far from the buzzing life and the commercial pressure of the pedestrian zone. It carries the spiritual memory of previous centuries and is nevertheless a truly public space since secularization.
Hortus Oblitus is a temporary installation revisiting the medieval garden. The loose arrangement of 100 raised square boxes sitting on legs of different heights creates a pixelated geometric order, an adapted contemporary version of a traditional medieval garden as we know it. 100 different useful plant species from the Middle Ages are growing in the sequence of boxes: crops, herbs, shrubs and bushes that are generally forgotten and not part of the city scape, different types of medical plants, wild vegetables and plants commonly regarded as weeds such as the nettle. Some of plant boxes are covered with grass and invite people to sit and relax on a soft and green bench amidst the growing and blowing plant scape against the backdrop of the stony square. Some others grow outside the confinement of the walls and start to enter into the pedestrian zone.
The garden becomes a place of communication, a place to meet each other in a peaceful and healthy environment, it invites a discourse about more actively participating in the making of our cities. Hortus Oblitus is a place to share knowledge about the power of plants and how to integrate and merge the useful with the pleasurable. It also questions who is using (or not) and taking care (or not) the shared spaces in our cities that are actually a common good.

↪ blog-tatort-paderborn.com

The Wind Lift

The Foord viaduct, which brought the railway, and prosperity, to Folkestone in 1844, is the kind of monumental infrastructural project that was typical of the nineteenth century. During the 2014 Folkestone Triennial, The Wind Lift project uses one of the viaduct’s nineteen arches as a wind funnel. A wind turbine large enough to fill the entire upper section of the arch produces energy, which is stored in batteries and powers a construction passenger lift.


Waiting for Wind

The lift operates on an occasional basis. When enough wind energy has been collected, the lift is able to ascend. However, it cannot operate if not enough energy has been harvested. People who wish to use the lift thus embark on a somewhat risky sight-seeing adventure. While the safety of the lift is guaranteed, the operation times are not. The lift ride also exposes them to the natural elements, such as rain and wind.


The View

The lift offers views from the top of the viaduct in two directions – towards the sea (the English Channel) and towards the sprawling city. For visitors who take the lift, this is a memorable personal experience; what is more, they become part of the project. By using on-site wind energy to power the lift, the lookout opens up a fresh perspective, not only on the surrounding landscape, but also on humanity’s dependence on natural resources at a time when people are looking for a more sustainable culture of living. More generally, the lookout opens up a view on our relationship with nature in the Anthropocene epoch, in which humans play an instrumental role in the earth’s natural cycles.


Cycles

The new infrastructure becomes part of the old one: The Wind Lift is attached to the viaduct. Here, two different infrastructural projects meet, one from the past and one from the future. The viaduct represents the top-down organization of the railway system. The Wind Lift represents the harvesting of energy from renewable, locally managed natural resources on the site. Developing a sustainable energy infrastructure is one of main challenges of the twenty-first century. The Wind Lift, essentially, becomes a lookout onto the future.


The Elements of The Wind Lift

The four basic elements of The Wind Lift are: a wind turbine, batteries that store energy, a passenger cabin, and an escape ladder. The lift is run by a lift operator two or three days a week (someone could easily be trained to do this). The wind turbine will be custom-designed, but the other components will be standard off-the-shelf prefabricated products. The project will be produced in the United Kingdom.


↪ vimeo.com

While much of the existing Aalto University campus is covered with nature, there is no active participation between it and the users.
Otaniemi is Us! is a response to the site’s current landscape and conditions by bringing nature from it’s own proximity into the centre. The planes of Laajalahti Bay and that of the existing site come together and overlap, and where they meet, a central square
starts to grow, propagating programs from its perimeter towards the existing adjacent buildings.
Fundamentally, the project is a shelter and an agora, a place where students, teachers, scientists and the public can come together with a common purpose to engage with and learn from one another. The space becomes a playground where people can discover and participate in examples of coexistence between urban life and nature, a laboratory where they see a new kind of campus imagined and constructed.
Otaniemi is Us!

Research project analyzing the potentialities for natural, self-sufficient and decentralized small-scale water management in informal settlements by means ofseveral case studies in Rio de Janeiro. The research will result in an innovative design proposal for a pilot project in the Maré district, integrating a closed water cycle into its social, spatial and ecological context.This study and other related projects realized by OOZE in various cities in Europe will be exhibited at the CAU (Centro de Arquitetura e
Urbanismo do Rio de Janeiro) in 2013. With this exhibition about ÀGUA
CARIOCA and a publication in the form of a magazine, we aim to create heightened
public awareness for the potential of such alternative systems and hope to raise
funding to implement and realize this pilot project in 2014.

The temporary Visitors Center for EMSCHERKUNST.2013 and the Art Camp for local art associations are made from re-used oversea containers which house the different programs. By keeping the layout strictly on ground level and referring to a path through a village, not only the space inside matters, but also the various in-between spaces, sheltered by a roof or open-air.
In this way a variety of social spaces are created while keeping the site fully permeable.
Along this path spanning from the visitors center to the art camp and connecting the Rhein-Herne canal to the Lindnerstrasse, different activities are plugged-in. The
journey through this village and the sequence of activities go from rent a bike, information, cafes, shop, cinema towards artist village with art production and education and finally reaching the artist in residence.
The path itself is defined by the different qualities of the ground: pallets, pebbles, gardens and flower fields. The roof shadows the containers, create spaces sheltered from the elements underneath and offers a spatial chromatic experience while walking through.

↪ www.domusweb.it

↪ phaidonatlas.com

The Public Space Society is an experiment that articulates a shared public space organized and managed by residents on the neighbourhood level.
Inspired by the knowledge and self-organizational experience of the Swiss Genossenschaft, The Public Space Society attempts to design a new model of public space by taking into consideration all pertinent parties: the owner of the land, the users, nearby residents, visitors, and the citizens of Zurich. A temporary open public space is installed and demarcated by over-sized markers, which form a lightweight construction in the shape of a square.
In Switzerland, when someone applies for a building permit, they have to erect a Baugespann – a set of markers that indicate the size and shape of the future building. The Public Space Society employs a similar Baugespann to mark a symbolic void in the city and encourage the public to participate in a discussion about how the neighbourhood’s future square will be shaped.
Zurich West is a location where the rapidly disappearing public space collides with different forms of coexistence, such as housing associations (Kraftwerk1), the Bernoulli garden city project, expensive offices, lofts and activated wastelands like Stadionbrache. What will be the future neighbourhood space, where people want to meet, talk and encounter each other? The project is realised in cooperation with Sadion brache Hardturm association.

www.artandthecity.ch

'Source de Friche' produces drinking-quality water from the polluted pool of accumulated rainwater and ground water in the existing depression at the location of a former
industrial site, which was contaminated during its previous use by the Shell oil company.The site has recently been partially
depolluted to allow it to be used in urban development. The pool of accumulated water is already home to many indigenous helophyte filter plants, which, as part of the natural
water cycle, purify the water. Next to this existing pool of water, the project adds a small constructed wetland, in which newly planted helophyte filter plants will enhance
the cleaning water process. The purified water is stored in an underground water container, where it is further cleaned with a carbon filter. It is pumped to the
surface through a simple water pipe. Here, visitors have access to water of drinking quality. The project takes visitors of the site to a journey of discovery of a wetland in an urban wasteland. Theirs is solitary
and personal experience.


www.parckdesign2012.be

The Commons, or in old Dutch "meent" or "mient", were traditionally defined as the elements of the environment - forests, atmosphere, rivers, fisheries or grazing land - that are shared, used and enjoyed by all. This form of joint ownership hardly exists anymore today and was transformed into private ownership on one hand or state ownership on the other hand. The research project "The Commons", refreshes the idea of the commons and explores how common property and its use can be organized.

The Commons focuses on two unused sites near the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. One is a small wooded area, a remnant of the former dune forest, bordering the garden of the museum and, a short distance away, an empty tower, built by architect JJP Oud in 1969, considered a monument of modernist architecture. The strip dune forest is synonymous for nature commonly shared since centuries and the tower for enormous potential of vacant buildings in the current economic crisis.

The Commons takes the two sites – one is part of nature, the other a cultural artefact – and mirrors them by constructing a platform in the woods that is the same size as the footprint of the tower. This physical platform is intended as a conceptual platform for the exchange of knowledge by participants and visitors to the exhibition. From April to August workshops, lectures, fairs and an open public court on topics related to the common interest and the local environment such as sustainability, peace and justice will be programmed. Together with visitors and locals alike The Commons experiments and works out ideas for the functioning of a 'commons' in current times. The spatial interventions developed will focus on the unique qualities and potential of the Tower of JJP Oud.

The Tower of JJP Oud, being temporarily renamed the Commons Tower, functions as a conceptual framework and engine for the development of a new public function for this building. In collaboration with a group of sympathizers and future users, cultural and social organizations and private initiatives, a project plan will be developed with the intention to acquire and maintain the property.
The final proposal will include a business plan, an organization and management structure, a program design and plans for a sustainable use of the tower.
This plan will be submitted at the end of August the current owner of the tower and the city.

Théâtre Évolutif is, fundamentally, a shelter and an agora, a place where groups and individuals can come together with a common purpose to engage with and learn from one another. Equally important, however, they can engage with and learn from the ‘relational objects’ of the Théâtre Évolutif – the open-roof structure, the water-supply infrastructure, the vegetable gardens, and the animals. For visitors to Evento 2011 Place André Meunier becomes a playground where they can discover and participate in examples of coexistence between urban life and nature, a laboratory where they see a new kind of city imagined and constructed.

The project is organized around three cycles: the dynamic cycle of citizenship (participating in the remaking of the public space), the human water cycle (the drinking water station and the public toilet), and the bio-dynamic cycle (interacting with the natural world for example, through gardening and beekeeping). The project enacts coexistence between the architectural site (Chantier architectural) and the social site (Chantier social).

The open roof structure is a symbolic construction that recycles tree trunks salvaged from the Bordeaux region as its columns. The tree trunks allude to one of the basic architectural archetypes – A man is a tree is a column for a house – and suggest that the residents of Saint-Michel are themselves the pillars of the neighbourhood. The open roof structure is organized into clusters, which host a number of activities in separate areas, such as a library area, an area for expression, an area for children, an area for bricolage and storing tools, a music kiosk, a city of bees, a city of insects, a laboratory, and a picnic area; it also includes the drinking water station and the public toilet.

The drinking water station and the public toilet are part of a water-supply infrastructure that people can interact with. Rainwater collected from the roof is used for the open-air toilet and the drinking water station, where the water is purified by helophyte plant filters; the drinking water station thus offers water of drinkable quality. The toilet is not enclosed by walls, but rather it is surrounded by plants that provide sufficient visual protection from the urban surroundings. The water can also be used for the garden. In this way, as people take part in the human water cycle (eating, drinking, peeing) by using the drinking water station and the toilet, they become more aware of the issue of water as the 21st century’s most precious natural resource.

The new terrain on the square, in the form of small hills that can be cultivated or simply used for leisure, re-create a natural ecosystem. These “hills” have been made from the earth that was excavated for the construction of the public parking garage (the construction site occupies half of Place André Meunier and remains active during Evento 2011). The new terrain provides spaces for various activities in and around the roof’s clusters.

↪ www.youtube.com

↪ ecosistemaurbano.org

↪ ecosistemaurbano.org

The project The Water Bridge is a bridge that connects the urban setting of the King’s Cross Central development with the wilderness of Camley Street Natural Park, a nature reserve. At the same time, the bridge incorporates a complete and ecologically sustainable water-treatment system that recycles grey water from the urban district and delivers clean water on the nature reserve side. The main attraction of the project is its clear presentation of water collection, purification, and use. Visitors become part of the project themselves as they use the system, which demonstrates both nature’s ability to restore itself and human participation in the natural cycle of water.

The Ruhr region has for the last two centuries been one of the most important centres for coal mining in North West Europe. Its history has left it with a dramatic heritage. Today it is one of the environmentally most devastated regions in Europe: rubble hills of polluted coal waste shape the topography of the landscape, the ground holds reservoirs of toxic waters and the land on top of the hollowed out mining shafts is collapsing in an unpredictable way. The instability of the landscape threatens all underlying natural and vital systems.
Sustainable development, in our point of view, considers not only the implementation of new processes that are inspired by a new way of thinking in cycles: processes which make use of renewable resources and re-use these. Sustainable development also takes account of the traces that have been inscribed into the environment by human practices, both social and economic, in earlier times. We think that there is no bright future without considering the past.
We suggest that the uncomfortable and often threatening environmental heritage present in many urban regions of the world can be used in a positive way, that it can form a source of inspiration for strategies which strive to realize a sustainable future. Through establishing a dialogue between the past and the future, the sustainability of regions becomes a political enterprise that is driven by the awareness and urgency of current and concrete problems. And: specific environmental problems hint at the spatial, socioeconomic and cultural structures which have caused them to exist and thus require transformation. The past is the frame of reference within which people are able to understand and act.
With the project COAL LAKE CITY we intend to contribute to a political dialogue on sustainability: We demonstrate how the Ruhr region can make use of its environmental deficit to shape its future. We imagine that the instable land on top of the collapsing mining shafts sinks to form a city of lakes. And: we imagine the land to sink in a strategic way, one that induces new possibilities: possibilities to generate energy, to close water cycles, to strengthen the social and economic structure, to create zones of retreat for nature and island of condensed urban activities. We imagine the past to help the future.

“Forest life” is a mixed residential and commercial project located in Gundala located 35 km south of Hyderabad city centre , India. The aim was to create an eco-community with different individual villa typologies located within the existing forest next to a much denser mixed use development with residential towers and a commercial podium with proximity shops leisure activities and offices located along the main road leaving Hyderabad towards the south. A communal sport / cultural centre and a temple were also located amongst the Villas and the Forest.
The design focuses on the integration of the existing natural landscape, the slope and the forest with the built environment. The client requirements had very strict requirements imposing rectangular plots and north south orientation following the “vastu” principles for the infrastructure and the residential units.
This gave birth to an interesting planning methodology combining a strict matrix grid of built structures interweaving with the natural elements of the site: Forest, water, topography. The interconnections between the different small quarters were one of the most important criteria of the urban design to insure that each unit is accessible by car, foot or cycle. Every part of the site is reachable via a network of half natural half landscaped public green spaces penetrating the built structure and creating zones for social interaction, natural screens that create spaces of privacy. Each living unit has one front access to a street and one back access to the green.
The typologies of the villas are based on the idea of a natural living in symbioses with nature. The garden is experienced as an extension of the living room. Patios and balconies include nature within the lived in environment. The boundaries between outside and inside are intentionally blurred.
Every unit is designed following sustainable criteria’s taking in consideration life cycles and autonomous systems incorporating the aspect of water, energy, and waste at different scales: the house, the community, the neighbourhood.
A climatic skin reinterpreting the traditional ornamental “Jali” (perforated stone or latticed screen) wraps around the living spaces. It is an evolving feature which transforms itself according to the orientation and the privacy requirements for each residential unit. Every unit is unique.

“A Trip into the Wild”
In the highly cultivated landscape of the Rhine Delta, the Oostvaardersplassen stand out as a pristine wilderness, seemingly untouched by the hands of planners. Its contradictory artificial origin, however, makes it into an emblematic space that allows us to explore the nature of the natural in a country that, like no other, has artificially recreated its natural landscape.

The new visitors centre, the Oostvaarders Trails, is designed to prolong this exploration. Firstly, raising the question to what degree it is possible to satisfy our desire for wilderness in such a highly urbanized setting as the Randstad Holland and secondly, questioning to what extent we can truly allow nature to run its own course. That being said, the interaction between nature and culture is not a static relation but a constant struggle in which the frontlines are fluent and ever changing. The visitors centre reflects these transformations and moves along (shapes itself) concurrently. The Oostvaarders Trails is not simply a building but a strategic experiment on the expanding need for nature in highly cultivated societies.
Into the Wild
The visitors centre is designed to be a tree of trails that invites visitors to move from the highly cultural landscape into the nature of the Oostvaarder Plassen. It moves from the public to the collective, from being broad to being narrow, from loud to silent. This slow immersion, that introduces the visitor to the Oostvaardersplassen, is given shape through seeking the close proximity to nature and the exclusion of disturbing elements and through seeking proximity to nature. Buildings are low and invisible to not disrupt the skyline of nature. They react to the different types of nature that the Oostvaardersplassen offer.
The Oostvaarders Trails are a means to discover the area. They are not a manifested route, but its branches are dedicated to the different experiences that the Oostvaarderplassen offer. Each experience has its own right and moment. Frequent visits will establish insights into the life circle of nature.
Nature is in constant evolution. To anticipate its dynamics the trails are changing their route through time. Nature can recover from the man-made and man can rediscover new wilderness. The buildings along the path follow the cycle of nature. Their configuration can be changed according to new ecological requirements. All buildings, including foundations anticipate on this.

'Between the Waters: The Emscher Community Garden' is a water-supply
infrastructure line between the Emscher River and the Rhine-Herne
Canal. The project is a complete and sustainable water-supply
system. It uses only water from the immediate area: the Emscher River,
the Rhine-Herne Canal, rainwater and waste water. By putting the
treatment process on display, it shows it is possible to reclaim and
restore the natural habitat by using low-tech processes to construct a
high-tech system. The main elements of the water supply and treatment
installation are two toilets located above the Emscher River (the most
polluted river in Germany), a pump that draws water from the river
into a septic tank, a constructed wetland, a rainwater-harvesting
roof, water storage bags, and a fountain located above the Rhine-Herne
Canal that offers visitors water of drinkable quality. In addition,
the system provides water for irrigating the Community Garden.

↪ www.labkultur.tv

↪ www.labkultur.tv

Interview Eva Pfannes - Ruhr TV (german)
↪ www.youtube.com

Interview Eva about "Between the Waters for 2013" (german)
↪ www.labkultur.tv

EMSCHERKUNST.2013: Between the waters - Marjetica Potrč und Ooze Architects (englisch
↪ www.youtube.com

The project re-think about an alternative sustainable model to apply together with the inhabitants of the “Nieuw-west”, to stir up imagination amongst them about a future environment, to stimulate re-appropriation of the space in the neighborhood, to empower people. The project take as a case study on one hand a non-accessible public green to transform it into community cultivated gardens, on the other hand a derelict corner shop and transform it into a community kitchen.
This project is carried out as part of the collective Wilde Westen and the artist Marjetica Potrc for the stedelijk museum

www.kkvb-cfwn.blogspot.com/
www.stedelijkindestad.nl/projects/in_west

This detached Rotterdam house had been extended several times in recent decades. Ooze architects translated the owners desire to recycle the 'soul' of the house by transforming it in an unusual way. The young architectural firm began with a commission to design a kitchen that then evolved into a complete renovation. The design was based on the maximum building envelope: ridge height, as well as the depth of the extension was defined by the zoning plan. "We simply connected these points" says Eva Pfannes, the architect who designed the transformed house along with her studio partner, Sylvain Hartenberg.

The house on which Ooze began to work had gradually grown over the years. It now consisted of two perpendicular building volumes with a pitched roof, a lower semicircle building in between connecting the two parts, and several extensions on the other side in the angle of the hook-shaped house. The owners wanted to reform these incoherent parts into a logical and comprehensive whole. The pre-defined maximum envelope formed the guideline for a new skin that wraps around the old house and shapes new spaces for inhabitation.

The new kitchen and a brief to increase the number of bedrooms were the launch for the redesign of the entire house of which the staircases form the backbone.
The layout has been totally reorganized around a central void. A new staircase on the north wall is servicing first and second floor.
Inside, the building manifests itself through a formal language based on prefabricated, solid wood triangles that have a direct reference to the old roof. Folds and facets were generated by an intuitive rationalism following what was permitted and what would benefit the space inside. This skin becomes the structure which sits like a hat on top of the existing one and works as a load carrier to bring down the additional weight burden of the new floors and roofs.
The only construction method able to provide the precision and speed of delivery requested by the client was prefabricated solid timber panel (Lenotec) for the structure of the skin (roof, walls and floor). The prefabricated, solid wood - LENOTEC - elements were cut and arrived as a 3D kit on the building site.
This internal structure communicates a sense of the new and the old: living in a new structure as well as with the old walls. The transition between the two is subtle and gradual - as you go up in the house, the new gradually supercedes the old. The spaces generated for inhabitation become very different and very specific, enriching the life within in the house.
The material also allowed the outer walls and roof to remain relatively thin. Within the given building envelope a maximum interior space could be realized.
By varying the thickness of the single material, it could serve as outer wall, roof, interior wall, stair balustrade and stringer.
The result is a succession of spaces where the difference between ceiling, wall and floor are gone and thus overlap.
The intervention that started the process of transformation remains the most important. Through the creation of a void, the architects transformed the dark and cramped existing stairwell into a bright and social space.

The exterior references traditional Dutch farms through the use of sedum green roofs and black stained ACCOYA* planks in a standard width of 15cm. The lines of the cladding wrap around the house like a continuous new skin.
Beyond style or architectural aesthetic, the aim was to engage in a process of rediscovery of the vernacular, to introduce a dialogue between the old and preserved and the new, and to explore a new language which reinterprets the old. It is not an object, it is a collection of very comfortable spaces which are intertwined with the landscape, an extended envelope which extends the possibilities of inhabitation. We are convinced that reclaiming the past is a form a rediscovery of a different future, away from the tabula rasa, a more sustainable and inspiring way of enriching the environment we live in.

"The house is a precedent in establishing a new culture of dealing with an existing structure.
"Recycling" is another nature of work; therefore it is not a formalistic but a conceptual house. The new and old come together, in fact they are melted together. The old does not disappear, it is enhanced, and all shapes of the original are still there. The new reacts to it and explodes the space, and creates an interesting expression. Everything has its value and all shapes have a reason.
An openness in both parties, architect and client, was necessary to make the project more special and more stunning. We went together through an incredible process and the project is the result of this.
Both the recycling of the structure and the process can be seen as a sign of the times that will make it into a landmark." **

* High-technology fast growing, sustainably-sourced wood more durable than teak
** Clients words after completion of the house

Before the appearance and the diffusion of cinemas and of mass media the Hakawati was the main form of entertainment in Arabic-speaking countries and most notably in Lebanon. The Hakawati was a storyteller who thrilled his audience with a story. He was the spontaneous messenger moving throughout the city, a key-figure in stimulating social cohesion and in activating a public space for all.
The social and spatial fragmentation Beirut has been undergoing, as a consequence of the civil war and of dislocating forces of urbanization, calls for a renewed Hakawati in order to resurge the rich cosmopolitan culture of the city and to celebrate its vitality.
In modern times the House of Arts and Culture is recovering the role of the missing Hakawati and transforming the city into his stage. The House of Arts and Culture is a dynamic, receptive and interactive hub for the celebration of culture on a local and international level. It is a clear reference as well as an itinerant meeting place in open dialogue with the city. It is a multifunctional platform that breaks through the walls of a “white-box” institution and engages with the urban realm.
The House of Arts and Culture is the Hakawati that takes advantage of its central position on the threshold of the city centre and spreads temporarily its cultural program throughout the city. It is a dynamic organism that extends hors limits its multiple antennas and uses the city as a stage. Its structure constantly deconstructs and reconstructs in order to relocate its diversified cultural program - such as exhibitions, concerts, screenings, performances, festivals, etc. - in parking lots, abandoned buildings, public gardens, left-over infrastructures throughout the entire city and even further. The Hakawati makes use of three types of culture carriers to spread its program in the city: super light ( a person for spontaneous actions in the public realm), light ( a truck for medium-scale events far in the city) and medium (temporary structure for Large scale events). They are leaving the building and come back in a dynamic movement from the house to the city and the city to the house.
The organization of the building is designed around the stream of public going through the House in a spiral up till the Garden roof. It provides a generous accessible public spaces which can be used for performances, festivals, and other events.
Instead of an imposing iconic building, HAKAWATI is a multifunctional structure able to merge with the city and to listen to its urban voice. It is a free space for pluralism, multiple encounters and interactions. It is a real center for the celebration of one of the most lively cultures of the middle east.

‘Tent meeting room” is a ground floor space which is used as a meeting room a working room, a storage room, a lunch room and occasionally a workshop room for kids and students. Highly used multifunctional space, it was always perceived as a leftover space squeezed between entrance lobby and exhibition space. The proportion of the room and the material palette used in this space was extremely uneasy and did not seem to take into account the numerous users of this space, an accumulation of corner spaces attracting mess and dust.
In order to balance the space a “line of horizon” has been set up. This line brings calm quietness and tranquillity to the all space. The line is where, metaphorically, the ceiling and the floor meets, a black & green border, black for walls and ceiling minimizing the uneasy feeling induced by the substantial height, and green for the continuation of the existing floor on the walls. Additionally a field of lights located on the “line of horizon” also helps the room to be perceived as more comfortable to inhabit. A set of purpose made furniture and shelves have been designed. Realized in standard plywood they create a warm environment suitable for all the different functions that this room can take, a good place to work but also a comfortable representational space to welcome visitors.

Rifugio is a seasonal Yoga pavilion. It is located on the hills next to the “Rifugio Chaligne” las construction before the Alpage. It will host yoga and meditation courses in summer. The structure is built with salvaged timber beams collected from surrounding derelict barn. It makes reference to the traditional roof frame structure of the region and turns it upside. The corner of the space are left free so that the yogi’s can embrace the view of the valley. The frame is covered with truck fabric printed with a pattern merging with the landscape.

www.chaligne.com

Shelter for the work of artist Daniele Pario Perra: “Twenty questions to Baron de Montesquieu” within the exhibition "Redefine the Enemy" at Tent, Rotterdam

the enemy Tent 19/03/2008

Knokke-Heist is a mythical “cité balnéaire” in Belgium. The apartment lies on the 2nd floor with a view over the Rubensplein.
Despite its generous size, the typology of the flat is very long and narrow which makes the current layout very inefficient with regard to corridors and effective living spaces. A clear reorganization of the internal partitions and bathroom layouts enables us to develop a new specific concept not only for the space and the materials, but also for the display of the client art collection, a mini "personal museum" A frame to look out at the ocean and towards the beach in the daytime, the apartment becomes a glowing space to look into at night time.
Increasing the perception of generous space was the prime goal pursued in order to provide a new living experience within. The idea was to blur the limits of the rooms to maximize the impression, the continuity and the fluidity of space.
This was achieved by a careful planning of niches integrated into the walls creating pockets on both sides, extending the volume from one side to the other.
These miniature rooms are not touching the ground. They are perceived as floating elements, with the floor opening out below them. The fact that the edges of the ground are not visible increases the virtual gain of space.
Immateriality and materiality are used in a dynamic way to provide a clear context of the outdoor / indoor feel, transparencies and reflections:
-Concrete for walls, ceilings, and niches
-Highly reflective glass for bathrooms and cross visual panels.
-Natural wooden floor salvaged from the original Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam creating a continuous surface that morphs into furniture, inducing this feeling of unity and space. The provenance of the floor constitutes a reference to the art world important for the client's "personal museum".
-Collaboration with the artist Maxime Ansiau has led to the design of specific tiles for the bathrooms, with manipulated illustrations of original Dutch landscapes.
-Layered curtains by Designer Erick Klarenbeck are overlaying boats and dune landscapes
They create an indoor landscape that expresses a close relationship between the client and his home country, the Netherlands.

TENT presents the 8th edition of the TENT Academy Awards, a national competition between young audiovisual artists.
The selection consists of the best final exam videos, films, shorts, and animations from all the Dutch art academies in 2007.
This year for the first time, the Awards include an exhibition in TENT, where the 2007 selection is presented alongside previous editions of the competition.
The expression and materialization of spaces of projection and visualization was the underlying theme in this installation.
Two giant screen units for the communal projections (the 2007 competition films) and four small TV units for the archive of the preceding year were constructed. Together the elements form a landscape of trapezoidal projection boxes of differing scale, for various types of projection experiences; One to be experienced in a group, the other one more intimate allowing the viewer to be immersed in the archive.


↪ www.cbk.rotterdam.nl

Tent Academy Award 2007 TENT

“Wrong Time, Wrong Place” is an exhibition featuring work by more than twenty international artists working in Rotterdam at the time of the exhibition as artists in residence.
“Wrong Time, Wrong Place” also highlights the major influence that five studio complexes have exerted on the dynamism of the artistic climate in Rotterdam.
Rotterdam possesses a network of artist residences, unique in the Netherlands, which operate on an artist-to-artist principle. Artists offer other artists accommodation in their studio complexes.
B.a.d, Kaus Australis, Het Wilde Weten, Duende, Kunst & Complex and others are studio complexes where local artists work and also act as hosts for foreign colleagues who want to spend some time working in Rotterdam.
For an artist, a residency is usually a way of gaining experience, making contacts and finding inspiration. The artist heads into the city, looks, thinks and discovers. The experiences gained surface later elsewhere in the art.
“Wrong Time, Wrong Place” turns this principle around and shows the work of artists in precisely the place where it was conceived. It is not only showing this ‘new crop’ in Rotterdam but also questions the relationship of the artist in residence to the kaleidoscopic reality of the modern city. The exhibition presents the artists at a vulnerable moment as they try to balance the identifiable desire for a home with the acknowledgement of our nomadic and global reality.
The main question posed is: Why does Rotterdam appeal so much to foreign artists? What are they looking for here that they cannot find elsewhere? And what is the effect of this constant flow of visitors on the artist community in Rotterdam?
This relationship between the city, its “art initiatives” and the artists themselves, is expressed with a floor grid and a map that forms the underlying framework for the exhibition and expresses the relocation of these art initiative territories within the TENT museum space.

↪ www.cbk.rotterdam.nl
Wrong Time Wrong Place TENT

Mixed commercial building in the small neighborhood in Thane northern suburb city of Mumbai. One building for an eclectic program combination as diverse as retail, juice bar, offices, film studio space, and cinema.
As the mainframe structure was being built the client suddenly decided to make a landmark out of it in the neighborhood. Ooze and Urban studio were appointed to redefine the building‘s status. The only possibility to achieve this client requirement was to work on the façade, and to adjust it so that the existing façade would not be modified too much.
None of the window and door location could be modified.
To dress the building with a new skin seemed to be the only chance to make a real improvement to the project. An homogenous skin diamond mesh steel structure is wrapped around the building to create a porous organic façade. This is not only insuring the visual recognition in the neighborhood, but also improves the facades performance with regard to functionality, solar shading, natural ventilation and visual perception.
The pattern, inspired by the branches of the local trees, is generated by sequences of perforated multi colored perforated steel panels and pre-cast interwoven lightweight concrete perforated panels.

Yewoor forest is a weekend bungalow resort development located on the edge of the Borivali national park in Mumbai, the largest national reserve in the world to lie within city limits.
The aim of the resort is to promote simple living amongst nature. Despite the fair complexity of the sites context, with 2 regional roads dividing it into 3 unequal parts, the target is to unify the development into one, divide it into equal plots, and to integrate these harmoniously within the sites natural features.
The project proposes a series of methods to blur the perception of the plot boundaries, ensuring that the bungalows and the gardens of each plot are integrated in the wild beauty of the site.
They are carefully interwoven to create separate but integrated idyllic, miniature-paradise landscapes with full visual privacy: 15 equal plots in a network of gardens, mounds, canals, pools and landscaped bushes that gently follow the topography with one living unit per plot.
The typologies are developed as either tree houses or houses built into the mounds.

Ymuiden is located at the mouth of the North Sea canal.
Not only an important port and crucial industrial city for the Netherlands it carries in itself an interesting new paradigm and new probable ways of envisaging urban design for the city of tomorrow.
The problematic of the project lies in the definition of a new urban vision for the area, starting from a former military base, “Fort Island”, in the middle of the North sea canal.
As much as historical events have shaped the topography, Ymuiden is also a place where spatial conditions inspire new developments, which in return lead to spatial changes. This results in a very different type of city in pieces, where old and new monstrous archaic structures are scattered along the horizon. Their juxtaposition seems to be incidental, the organization behind anarchic. They create the idea of an undefined land, an urban Terrain Vague, a dynamic field within which “latent forces” can be perceived, waiting to be revealed.
More than generic economical mechanisms, they relate to pre-existing links between past and future, they induce change.
The future of Ymuiden is not foreseen. What is assumed is a range of developments that are likely to take place.
Our new vision for Ymuiden is a multiple one, it relies on several interventions, carefully located designs, to trigger and activate certain potentials within the urban fabric, a sort of urban acupuncture.
The development of the Ymuiden area will be steered by large trends instead of local master plans. By recognizing these trends and providing places to accommodate them, a set of buildings called Beacons will be the focal starting point of the evolution of the area. They induce the growth of urban matter without creating the need for extensive support through infrastructure, large land acquisition or political backup. Instead of altering what is found, they overlay, intrude and extend. As such they are only hinting at a possible future by taking advantage of what is already there, absorbing and transforming the past. Together they form a network of potential for the city.
Beacons take impressions from their surroundings and cast them in one spot. They lean on an existing spatial condition, a dune, a derelict building, a wall: the condition is already there, and this process reinforces it. The places are chosen for their specific spatial configuration, or cultural, historical or social relevance, through a rationale such as the likeliness of movement around them, or for the poetic strength that they radiate.
The Beacons are: the BREAKWATER BEACH HALL, the CULTURE FIELD, The CITY VERANDA, the FLOATING DUNE, the DUNE SHELTER, The Y-CHAMBER, the WATER MONUMENT, ELBOW INSTITUTE.


BREAKWATER BEACH HALL

The Breakwater Beach Hall lies in the lee of the southern breakwater, overseeing the changing of the coast as the years pass by. Just as breakwater and beach form a unity, the sandy floor with pools of water forms a whole with the crystal roof of the hall. Because of its structure the hall can grow along the breakwater. It can be a pier, a promenade, a spa

CULTURE FIELD

The space within the Schnellbootbunker II is rigidly structured in 15 compartments separated by perforated walls of 7m solid concrete. The dark existing compartments are cast in glass and prolonged like fragile feelers into the open. The 15 halls, half of them indestructible, half of them fragile, half of them introvert, half of them extrovert, can be almost infinitely combined to different spaces. As such the Culture Field can, through its occupation modes, indicate the types of space most wanted in the experimental landscape of Ymuiden. The exterior wall of the bunker, together with the Corus industry behind it, creates a stage setting. The dunes form a natural tribune to look out on it.

CITY VERANDA
Between city and port level is a step in topography. The step appeared because the housing areas have been built on dune height, while space for port activities has been dug out. From the higher level of the city the port can be overseen. The Urban Veranda extends the public spaces of the city that are now cut by the edge, the streets, passages and squares, like a bridge into the port. The city is turned around; its backyard becomes first row. The structure superimposes height levels and merges port and city activities.


BEEHIVE
The beehive is a new layer of activity on the current one without occupying its space and disturbing the functioning of the port. By seeking for underused spaces and intensifying them it adds a layer of growth in the urban matter. It provides new cheap places for working and living. It is a representation of how the city can grow and transform without creating the need for a large amount of new infrastructure.

FLOATING DUNE
The Floating Dune reconstructs a previous condition: an uninterrupted stretch of coast that can be explored by a variety of routes: along Kennemerstrand, through the natural reserve Noord and Zuid Kennemerland, passing Forteiland. On the new connection one continues to cycle and walk. The Floating Dune operates in the least accessible but focal spot of Ijmuiden. It confronts a variety of possible uses and users with each other in precisely this spot

DUNE SHELTER
The light construction counteracts a hollow in the sand, ready to collect what seeks protection and likes to be together.


Y-CHAMBER
The Y-Chamber is built on the foundations of speedboat bunker I. It is not a monument but uses a site that has been lying idle since its ground is polluted by a gigantic mass of concrete. The building does not ignore its location either: the space that is created on the former location of a dark and introverted structure is its contrary: a light space with a wide view combining all the alien elements in an urban panorama. The void is wrapped by activities that thrive on the experimental, generous condition that is offered


WATER MONUMENT
The Water Management Monument makes an imprint not of its direct surroundings but of the broader area around. All the land- and water levels that are controlled by the pump in Ymuiden are perceivable in a compressed landscape. The contained landscape is invisible from outside. Only sounds from activities on the water and in the port intrude. They are reminders of the power of the water landscape.

ELBOW INSTITUTE
The Corus site sticks, like the hull of a ship, one end of its site towards the sea. This end is framed by a rampart which contains a cooling water pool. A thin stretch of land lies between the two types of water that could not be more different: natural and artificial, rough and smooth, contained and overwhelming. Highly visible, the Elbow Pollution Technology Institute marks the entrance of the North Sea Canal. Anyone who seeks attention on a global route might seek for this location.

Y-CHAMBER
The Y-Chamber is built on the foundations of speedboat bunker I. It is not a monument but uses a site that has been lying idle since its ground is polluted by a gigantic mass of concrete. The building does not ignore its location either: the space that is created on the former location of a dark and introverted structure is its contrary: a light space with a wide view combining all the alien elements in an urban panorama. The void is wrapped by activities that thrive on the experimental, generous condition that is offered

DUNE SHELTER
The light construction counteracts a hollow in the sand, ready to collect what seeks protection and likes to be together.

Mr Visserplein is one of the main traffic knots in east Amsterdam.
Despite the many important cultural and civic buildings located around it, it is perceived in the city to be an ‘anti-public’ void.
The “Light House” reinvests the public into this realm by taking pieces from its surroundings to bringing them together in one spot on the plein.
Like a skin wrapped around a public space, the Light-House is a shared use entity, a shell, an experimental indoor natural square where surrounding activities ooze out from their premises into the public realm, as if by a magical urban osmosis, creating a strange fusion of urban programs.
It is an ever-evolving body, which can host temporary and seasonal activities as extensions of neighbouring programs. It is public, it is sheltered, it is lush and it glows at night.
The Light-House is a giant urban lantern floating above Mr Visserplein.
The architectural body is a cast of the void below the square, making the unseen visible, like an inverted cave.

“Vision of Geneva 2020” proposes the transformation of industrial and railway zones, located on the outskirts of Geneva, into a new living district.
Based on the inherent values of the site, a smooth and sustainable approach is proposed in order to gradually implement the changes in the area.
The historical and topographical context of the site has suggested the initial starting point of the development: a park flowing like a glacier through the site, connecting city centre, living quarters, public areas and circulation networks. The GLACIER VEGETAL establishes scale and coherence, a strong framework and a core value for all other functions.
Its generous dimensions bring quality of life to all future urban quarters gathered along it. It stands as an urban lung allowing inhabitants to recharge their energy. It also complements the populated and lively new city districts by providing major cultural facilities sequenced within it.
Diversity prevails. Each of the neighbourhoods along the sides of the park has its own individual atmosphere, its own set of principles, and its own typologies for buildings and public spaces. The grammar of the new neighbourhoods operates within the historical framework of existing types, street pattern/disposition and cadastral structures. Inhabitation and program repartition are far from being frozen: the city is conceived as a natural body in perpetual motion, which allows for the constant renewal of life and discovery.

Fairy Tale is a high-density residential building developed by Soham Group in the suburban district of Thane.
The project takes the form of a 27-storey tower. The residents’ facilities, like the clubhouse, bars, multi-purpose rooms, are located at roof and ground level.
The project examines the interface between the building and its inhabitants, and the busy metropolis. It proposes the creation of a filter, a buffer zone that protects the inhabitants from pollution, noise, sun and heat, in the form of a network of vertical gardens, wrapping around the building and accessible from each flat.
It will provide an open view onto the city, a transitional space integrating benches, miniature gardens, climbing plants, and pools. Each unit interlocks with another.
Together they weave a giant lace that combines different rhythms and ensures that the scale of the structure is dealt with in an elegant manner.
In Thane the vertical city is emerging.

Ocean Park is a low-rise, high-density, car-free residential development in the suburban district of Thane. The client, Soham Group, was looking to develop a new concept for living in such a highly populated city as Mumbai.
The project focuses on the idea of living amongst nature and sets the need of an intermediate green semi-public space of calm and leisure for the inhabitants as a priority. This takes the form of a generous communal park organised as a network of mini landscaped gardens. Together, they form an ‘Agora’ where residents can meet, play and socialise.
The living quarters are located harmoniously throughout the park maintaining the permeability of the views and a fluid access from landscape to landscape.
They take the form of clusters of residential islands, separated from the park by a giant vertical screen wrapped around them called “Jali”. This backdrop organises a smooth transition between public and private. It is an iconic, organic metaphor for nature, a modern interpretation of the original Indian “Jali”. It provides privacy, shade and cool through natural ventilation. Not only a sustainable tool, it also gives a strong identity to ”Soham Group” developments.
Within the clusters, each residential unit is assembled like “stacked row housing” in strips called “collective bungalows”. It has its own private green or terrace designed to provide full privacy for the inhabitants.

Soham Plaza is an existing mixed-used commercial building in the suburb of Mumbai.
It includes a medical clinic, a hotel, accommodation for offices and retail spaces on the ground floor. The building was built in stages which has given it a chaotic broken-up architectural form, and it lies next to a very busy road. This has motivated the client to seek a solution that would protect users from all negative environmental impact: dust, noise, pollution and heat and unify the whole development into one identity.
The PROJECT responds in the most simple and efficient way to the problem posed; it creates a coloured glass screen supported by a lightweight steel structure to shield the activities behind it. Its articulated graphic design element establishes a landmark on Thane highstreet and a flagship building for the Soham Group.

The FLOWER TOWER project looks at ways of combining the flower bulb industry in western Randstad, Holland, with tourism as a growing economy.
In order to integrate industrial activity with ecological concerns, FLOWER TOWER proposes to lift the Delfweg, one of the major infrastructural arteries through the area, so that it becomes a scenic “dyke”. From there, one will overlook the production buildings and perceive them as part of a cultivated landscape. A set of narrow buildings meander between existing glasshouses and establish a new ground efficient typology between these original patterns of occupation. The FLOWER TOWERS themselves are also part of the scene. They fit the linear process of bulb production (planting, harvesting, drying, storage, cleaning, cooling) into building envelopes. The new sheds have a landscaped roof that blends into the surrounding landscape and provide an ideal place for tourists to come and rest. They are plug-in tourist playgrounds overseeing a once rural landscape that turned into an industrial and highly specialized production landscape.

In 1999 Taiwan experienced a violent earth quake (Richter scale:7.3) starting from the fault line at Chelungpu, in Chichi. Thousands of citizens lost their lives and hundreds of cities were devastated.
The Earthquake memorial of Chichi aims to express the violence of this quake by revealing the true nature of earth. The monument is both the void and the mount created by the relocation of ground. By digging the earth in front of the fault a labyrinth of cavities and grottos appear. On the other side of the fault line the mount creates an open sloping plaza. Together they remind us of the fragile balance of the human condition on earth. Among the rocks, a number of polished stones are placed to commemorate each single soul taken by the quake. Some of the passageways within the mount bring visitors to the auditorium and exhibition spaces, while others lead to shrine cavities. Some passageways cross other paths while a few lead to the top of the mount. The uncertainty of the paths’ destinations makes us question our own destinies.

‘VOLCANIQUES’ system is a uniquely tailor made furniture series. Each piece is handmade and cast in resin polyester.

‘VOLCANIQUES’ is pure and simple forms a play with only two ingredients: cone shaped supports and a plate with the max. dimension of 250 x 125 cm, all cast in resin 2.5 cm thick.
The casting process allows for the advantages of a serial repetition as well as offering unique combinations for each piece or edition, outline and color choice to satisfy the customer.
The resulting relief is self-supporting; it can be stacked without any additional features. The height of the craters constitutes the function of the object, a functional landscape. The cone height is 28 cm for a 'lounge" low table to 78 cm for a dining table. Multi colored and mixed opacities are possible, they contribute to the versatility of the range.
‘VOLCANIQUES’ was first edited for the Vandijk Fashion Store, Rotterdam, as part of the interior design executed by OOZE, other editions were produced for VIVID-vormgeving gallery, Rotterdam, galleries in Spain, the London practice Adjaye Associates for Abbey National Bank and the “Belle et Fou” Theatre in Berlin.
↪ www.volcaniques.com

Moving from a rural landscape into urban agglomeration, migrants bring hope and ambition with them to the city. They contribute to a new social and economical energy in Chile. They do not travel from city to city as they develop their careers, but gain status in one chosen location. This process can be described as a dynamic habitation in a more or less static, immobile society.
MAGNET reflects on both the variety of living standards among the new and already established inhabitants, and the tight invisible bond between the informally growing new city and the formal old city. It also proposes a strategy to provide shelters with minimum requirements that can grow within and define a permeable public domain in these new neighbourhoods.
The public and communal spaces create shortcuts through the wider city. The spaces knit old and new programmatically and spatially together.
An architectonic device in the form of a ribbon is used to define the initial housing typologies. Within this framework, the inhabitation can expand to accommodate many ways of living to a set maximum envelope. It strives to maximise choice and quality, without restricting communal co-existence in ensuring a public space for the community.

Bunty Night Club lies in Mumbai’s old port district close to Colaba, the traditional city centre.
It is located in a 19th century office building. The upper ground floor slab is demolished to create with the basement floor a double high space with dance floors and bars.

Floating above is a crystal like golden lounge volume for members only. The golden tinted glass is semi reflective. Materiality and configuration sets a new dialectic relationship between the different types of customer. The reflection of the one merges with the VIPs of Mumbai: to see and to be seen…...
The darkness and hard shininess of the overall space (black “Bisazza” tiles, and black shiny leather with embossed alligator skin patterns) is set in contrast with the velvet and golden cosy vibe of the floating boxes.
The basement can be temporarily flooded to enable new a type of club night - like a “members-only-Sari-bikini-party” or “Snow crash cocktail fever”…
One could fill up the dance floor with water to turn it into the ultimate hot and wet highlight of Mumbai’s nightclub scene!

In Africa, AIDS is not anymore an endemic disease within large cities, but a pandemic one. It spreads out along traffic routes into the wide countryside. The requirements needed to defeat AIDS cannot be met by municipal hospitals. They need to be incorporated into new concepts that take into consideration the size and diversity of the catchments areas the specific needs of rural cultures.
In order to provide medical support over a large area, a clinic has to be mobile. For sufficient healthcare the mobile clinic has to stay at least one week at one spot in order to treat, inform, and educate about the disease. It has to return to this spot regularly to provide long-time treatment, and to organise intermediate care as well.

The design is a combination of two parts. One is the budding mobile. The budding mobile is a structure that can be unfolded easily, which is transported with a jeep and a trailer and can thus reach areas with remote access. The second one is the healing hut. The hut is built by the inhabitants of the area according to local building traditions. It remains in one spot.

Switzerland is composed of many small spaces of inaccessible beauty. The Swiss pavilion “HEU” captures the inaccessible nature in an interior without scale. The pavilion is a hay cube stacked according to traditional method. The bales of straw come from different regions (cantons) of the country. Together, they create an image of unity formed by a communal, but different, set of identities. Gaps in and around the hay accommodate the exhibition program.
The hay mass hides cavities of ice that can be explored by the visitors. Ice and hay sustain each other in the tradition of old farming techniques to keep goods cool.
The cube and its internal, inverted ice landscapes stand as a metaphor for the fragile balance of our eco system that has been irremediably altered by the actions of mankind. As the visitor goes through the pockets, the ice is slowly melting and changing the forms of the inside. The water generated flows out of the pavilion and collects outside, gradually obstructing the entrance of the pavilion.

The VANDIJK FASHION STORE lies on the ground floor of a 19th century Dutch style city building in a typically very long and narrow space.
The shop presents itself as an extension of the street rather than a separate luxury unit. A frameless pane of glass contributes to this blurring of the threshold between inside and out. It sets the interior space as an extension of the streetscape.
The shop is transparent, elegant and simple. It combines 3 elements listed in the "retail hand book" for typical clothes shop interiors: a rail, a curtain and a mirror. Together they form a simple and efficient means of arranging, displaying and storing clothes, accessories and shoes. They are not perceived in isolation from each other, but establish an autonomous retail environment, the Vandijk landscape.

Silicon Garbage is an interactive sound installation performed during 4 days in the port of Le Havre as part of the urban landscape festival “Les Jardins Temporaires 2001”.
Silicon garbage explores the possibility of inhabiting a dirty place and by means of sound and interactive devices, this project attempts to define a strategy that will enable the visitor to imprint a fresh vision onto a place that nobody usually wants to see: a port dump.
2 types of interactive devices were located in the field of trash in the form of receiver / sender elements or tools to stimulate and induce discovery by means of physical action (pressure or movement). Some of those objects were hidden, some were accessible and could be laid on.
After a few hours of the installation, it became clear that children were the most ready to enter a true sound-scape journey.
Tool 1: tactile carpet – natural latex / pressure sensor
Tool 2: The eggs / interactive sound generator – PU foam / electronic circuit system / motion sensor

Natural city / artificial nature
Lelystad is a polder city reclaimed from the sea in the 1950’s.
Despite a prime location along the Oostvlaader seashores, the city has not managed to find its own identity and establish itself in the new urban development zone around Amsterdam. Adjacent to the city lies a former industrial zone dedicated to the possible growth of Lelystadt. Through time, it has gradually been taken back by nature, a “reborn” original Dutch landscape now named Flevoland.
The strategy to revitalize the city’s main boulevard is to ‘cut and paste’ a piece of the adjacent Flevoland landscape. This scenario will replace the existing urban void with an open field, a piece of wild nature that will be accessible to the public, and that will connect the coastline to the city centre. There they can enjoy “natural“ city living, with swamps, reeds and dykes.
To maximize this “public landscape”, the footprints of the dwellings are reduced to a minimum. Panorama height mini towers with a slender section and living spaces that project out from them will set the new architectural typology for Lelystad : The Polder Cactus.
Instead of owning the ground the inhabitants share the view. Inhabitation takes place at a distance.

JACK THE HIDE is a survival bivouac shelter which provides autonomy and invisibility to its occupant. The object is flexible and adaptable and is thus a good ally for extensive travels in the wilderness. JACK THE HIDE uses high technology to achieve a symbiosis with nature.

Suddenly the Sound was here emerging from the waters of an abandoned dock. The mass of sound is surrounding us. Far from being mechanical, the mass constitute an ephemeral journey through existing sounds and noises from the place.
They are gradually filling the entirety of the open space, responding and interweaving within each other and ultimately defining a new intimate sound-scape: a new space created by the sound mass reflecting on the water, the dock and the hangar.
Hidden at first glance the sound generators are anchored to the port. They are there suspended above the water, left over from the going down tide.

Sound: Mass of sound randomly generated constituted by sound loop distorted and organize on 2 channels computer driven and sounded by 2 loud speakers.

Anchor: 2 loud speakers tide up by a network of polyester rope to 2 anchorage bollards on the “Quai de la meuse” and “Quai de la marne”.

The SARAJEVO CONCERT HALL is located in the valley of Sarajevo at a point where the city breaks in two parts, old and new. By linking the two the hall becomes a central point in the city, a musical and cultural meeting place.
The foyer intertwines existing and predictable urban routes. It is a ‘piazza diffusa’, a place to meet and exchange. The building borrows its typology from the city of Sarajevo itself, growing along a river constituting the spine of the urban fabric and its source of identity.
The core of SARAJEVO CONCERT HALL resides in its public flows.
The programs and spaces are settled along them like stones in a river. One can also wander around the upper surface, an inhabitable city-land-scape stretching from the central square to the Miljacka River.
The Concert Hall is not developed as an architectural object, but it creates an urban lounge which is firmly rooted in the context, weaving within its body cultural and social meeting places and concert related facilities.

Created in 1973 and covering an area of 33 000 hectares, the park is an exceptional natural site, situated on the southern tip of Gallipoli peninsula, on the European shores of the straits of the Dardanelles which is included on the United Nations list of National Parks and Protected Areas.
Historically rich, the park shelters within its boundaries the Gallipoli battlefield and the site of the naval battle of Canakkale (Dardanelles) which was the scene of dramatic confrontations during the First World War, throughout the year 1915. This tragedy, which claimed some 500 000 victims, nonetheless won the unanimous respect of the international community because of the exemplary human qualities shown by the antagonists in this conflict, regardless of the camp in which they fought. On the site remain traces of the battles and also the monuments erected to the memory of the victims, soldiers and conscripts from over twenty nations.
The objective of the competition was to design a place devoted to peace and harmony, to reshape the landscape, respecting the site and the natural environment, and to define its identity through the creation of atmospheres in which visitors would have a sensitive experience of the very idea of peace.

The aim of the project is to revitalize the banks of the river Meuse as a whole to the benefit not just of the district but of the entire city.
The project envisage the development of a network of pedestrian paths forming divers places along the river weaving in and out of buildings and expanding into open spaces
The scheme involves in the first place making changes to the direction, width, and texture of the road, secondly changes the line of the waterfront in order to place a line of buildings perpendicularly positioned along it.
The river appears in glimpses between buildings, such that the desire to seek out a spot to enjoy a better view is formed.
Residential accommodation is planned against the water, together with open air performance spaces, cinemas, a small boat harbor, and some commercial units (bars, restaurants, perhaps a few shops).
A number of 5 or 6-storey finger shaped buildings provide residential or small office space above residential or retail on the ground and lower ground floors.
These finger building are to be sold as shells to be fitted out to suit individual requirements.