Het Ambachthuis

Abstract

Intimate city investigates public interiors named as city rooms characterized by any scale and representation. My project conceives these rooms in my building as sequence and investigates theme of thresholds, and explores the intimacy on a border. All the rooms in the building build a sequence of interiors and exteriors, in which each space has different characteristic but the same language. They all could be distinguished by different volumes and proportions creating then the tension between each other. Ambachthuis translates into the programme of the craft school. The design, which is strongly embedded in the context the former industrial neighborhood in Antwerp and, which raises the question of the importance of craft and its architecture. Proposed programme of the craft school aims to bring public visibility to the industry in the spirit of the Productive Metropolis. Structure and geometry of the proposal are closely related to the area in which it is located to represent the prominence of craft and to become topological continuity of urban tissue. Bringing together workers and placing them into collective configuration and at the same time providing them powerful and meaningful environment is somehow an emancipation of the industry. I believe it could an important example of the way how we as architects could react to certain situation, like in my case was the depreciation of the craft education. We usually do not associate production space with the prominent interiors, although I think we can experiment with this approach and my project was certainly this kind of a an experiment for me.