Kring Brasa— the “Circle of Embrace” in Surinamese —is a non-profit community organization, formed by residents of Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer neighborhood, in the Southeast side of the city. Their purpose is to repair—through a focus on green development and green education—the urban wound created in their neighborhood by Highway A9. A9 was part of the modernist urban plan for Bijlmermeer, designed to connect effortlessly the residents of the area to their offices in the center of the city. Despite the visionary intentions behind the masterplan implemented in the early 70s (Fig. 1), Bijlmermeer never attracted the middle-class residents it was intended for. The high cost of the apartments and the lack of public facilities led instead to big vacancies. The municipality ended up housing Surinamese immigrants in the neighborhood, ultimately creating a ghetto. To repair some of the social inequalities that ensued, Kring Brasa has been working towards the creation of the Brasa Park on top of the A9 Highway—part of which has now been moved underground (Fig 2). The Brasa Park is meant to connect Bijlmermeer with the adjacent neighborhoods, giving residents access to a shared green area which they can develop according to their cultural and social needs. Our recent master level course, “Designing with Others,” collaborated with the community towards this future. The students designed and built a light green structure in the Brasa Park, to serve as the meeting point for the community. The course was designed in close collaboration with the community, over multiple meetings, in which hopes, aspirations, and concerns were exchanged. Recent community-design scholarship (A. Becker, et all., 2020; B. Mackay-Lyons, 2014; J. Simonsen & T. Robertson, 2013) offered an overall theoretical framework. The community was actively involved in the weekly studio meetings, following the students who investigated the area and developed their personal designs (Fig. 3). The midterms took place at a local museum, where everyone from the neighborhood was invited to see the students’ proposals and express their preferences through voting (Fig. 4). Thereupon the students worked collectively to develop one common design from the scale of the site plan to that of 1:1 built elements. For the finals, the students along with the locals, built the light-structure on Brasa Park (Fig. 5). In the process they experienced first-hand how community leaders, inhabitants, builders, local actors and local authorities are responsible for co-creating the built environment—a premise on which the course is built. This paper will begin with a presentation of Bijlmermeer’s urban history (interconnected with its international, cultural, and sociopolitical aspects), will focus on the Brasa Park and its engaged community, and will showcase the process— with its successes and shortcomings—of designing and building the light structure. Grounding the conversation on community design discourse, the paper will draw conclusions on the capacity of architectural education to prepare socially responsible designers, capable of developing and implementing tactics of care and repair in their engagement with others, addressing harsh urban realities, like segregation, in our often, broken world.@en

Can architects design with words? Can they move from words to models and then hands on making, bypassing the medium of drawing altogether? “Homing Objects” was a recent four-week workshop that tested this possibility. The workshop–part of the master level design course “The Space of Words” which explored different ways to address the above questions–was taught by three architects combining expertise in architectural theory, building technology and timber construction. “Homing Objects” asked architecture students to fabricate unprecedented domestic objects that were dreamed up and drawn out through language. “Homing” (borrowed from messenger pigeons) intends to turn “home” into a verb and an act, through a journey into memories and words that engender new possibilities of enacting and finding home, disrupting our preconceived notions about home and domesticity. We introduced the students to literary texts that describe everyday familiar objects. This introduction was meant to question and bring forward new possibilities of what a domestic object can be, as the literary texts offered unusual, uncanny, and unpredictable ways of seeing and relating to these objects. Following the close study of these texts, students were prompted to bring objects from their daily life to a shared common table. They “warmed up their inside voice” by writing short descriptions for three of these objects, in such a way that objects were hidden between the lines and were not named directly. This instruction pushed the students to see the familiar otherwise. Then they imagined possible combinations of these objects (or parts of these objects) that would create unprecedented new ones. Based on these imaginary combinations they proceeded with writing narratives that would describe, explain, and envision the new objects in the space of a home. Iterations of these narratives harvested, always in writing, design ideas for experiential qualities of these unique objects. Through writing and re-writing, many students moved further in envisioning objects that did not connect any more with the ones that were brought to the shared table. The students moved then to scaled models that gave the imagined objects a three-dimensional presence. The decision to exclude drawings from the process shifted the focus from what these invented objects might look like, to their sensorial qualities: what does it feel to hold an object in your hand, what sound does the use of an object create. Offering feedback on the models, always relating them with the narratives, led to more nuanced versions of these mock-ups and took us to the construction of the objects as finished and reproducible products. The students concluded the workshop composing a narrative that describes the use of their object from the perspective of a particular character. This narrative communicated functional aspects of the objects: elements that somebody could not easily understand without directly engaging with them. The end of “Homing Objects” meant the reinterpretation of what home might mean and the beginning of the studio’s final assignment: the building of full-scale domestic rooms, merging again through writing and language, that further questioned the notion of domesticity.@en

Engaging the example of the course “Binckhorst: A Palimpsest of Architectural Lives”—a master level design studio—this paper addresses issues of cohabitation and coexistence between past and current actors, activities and programs in Binckhorst, The Hague. It discusses explorative methodologies of analysis and design, that aim to create innovative and anchored urban interventions for the transformation of post-industrial landscapes. Binckhorst is an exemplary case-study to this regard. Home to a 14th century Castle, a 1920s cemetery, 1950s-60s heavy industry buildings and empty offices, postmodern housing projects and contemporary refugee settlements, it currently witnesses an accelerated change. Small-scale creative industries, event venues and apartment buildings transform and redefine its architectural identity. Moreover, Binckhorst’s strategic location next to the city’s center and a major train station, has attracted the interest of local and international architects, planners and developers. The course “Binckhorst: A Palimpsest of Architectural Lives” engages the students with this rich context and guides them to develop design methods where the old and the new can be actively part of the area’s new blooming. Through innovative site analysis assignments, personal interactions with the area’s actual actors, careful and in-depth study of the Binckhorst’s heritage, a precise selection of The Hague housing typologies, and the employment of bottom-up design methodologies, the studio advocates for a pedagogical approach in which the knowledge acquired from the analysis informs every step in the design process. The studio follows a structured sequence of three phases: “Description,” “Transcription,” “Prescription” (Havik, 2014) ensuring the constant interweaving between analysis and design. It culminates in a big-scale housing project that needs to incorporate the area’s past and present layers and suggest architectural propositions that envision a future for the co-existence between the old and the new. A thorough presentation of the studio’s theoretical context, the methodological framework, the topics and parameters of investigation along with selected student’s examples, will unpack in detail the pedagogical topics addressed by this studio and suggest possible courses of action for architectural education.@en