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Heal the World, Make It a Better Place

Heal the World, Make It a Better Place
Tutor: Paul Steinbrück
Campus: Ghent
Language: EN
Engagement: Urban Cultures
Semester 3

Head image: Abdijkaai swimming pool Kortrijk, 1960’s

HEAL THE WORLD, MAKE IT A BETTER PLACE

Heterotopias as Tools for Societal Cohesion — from Interim to Post Pool: the Kortrijk Case

The studio explores how architecture can act as a catalyst for societal change, taking as its starting point a single, concrete site: the disused outdoor swimming pool at Abdijkaai in Kortrijk. Where last year’s studio departed from outdoor swimming as a cultural practice across the city of Ghent, this studio narrows the lens to one walled, abandoned pool and asks what future, or futures, it could hold, for a community it might yet serve and for the city around it. The pool is between lives: no longer what it was, not yet what it might become. Students are asked to design for both moments of that transition, the years in between and the time after, and to decide, within that double horizon, where to place their own focus.

Architects as Activists

The studio begins with a reflection on the role of the architect. Boundaries and responsibilities are never fixed: architects can act as service providers who alter spatial environments within an economic context, as researchers who analyse and steer urban development from within academic or administrative frameworks, or as civic actors who address pressing societal challenges from the bottom up. In this activist role, architects claim agency beyond commissions and conventional briefs, defining their own agendas to confront urgent crises.

A particular skill set allows architects to engage in this activist practice. They are trained to observe and understand the physical environment, to synthesise complex and often conflicting demands, and to navigate the processes and actors involved in spatial development. They are accustomed to complexity, collaboration, and compromise. They are able to propose complementary scenarios in iterative processes, to communicate ideas effectively to non-professionals, and to manage project development across scales. At the same time, they recognise the limits of their own expertise, financial, legal, or social, and embrace the necessity of interdisciplinary work. This studio asks students to take up that agency directly: not designing for an abstract brief, but developing proposals in dialogue with the organisation and the city that will actually have to decide what happens to this site.

Wheatfield – A Confrontation, Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
The Little Garden of Paradise, UPPER RHENISH MASTER CA. 1410/20, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

The Wall: Heterotopia and Hortus Conclusus

The Abdijkaai pool is, above all, a walled place. That single fact carries the studio’s theoretical ambition. The wall produces two kinds of otherness at once, and both are the studio’s material to work with.

Socially, the pool can be read as a heterotopia in Michel Foucault’s sense: a space that stands apart from everyday routines yet remains deeply entangled with them, where other rules, rituals, and encounters become possible precisely because it is set apart. This builds directly on last year’s studio, which explored outdoor swimming places as heterotopias of the everyday city. Here, the enclosure is literal rather than implied: a bounded site with its own gate, its own hours, its own history of undressing, transformation, and shared bodily exposure. The question is what social world such a wall can still, or newly, enable, whether or not swimming remains part of it.

Spatially, the same wall can be read as a hortus conclusus: an enclosed garden, a world apart with its own climate, its own rhythms, possibly its own flora and fauna. The site could be developed as an architecture of multiple species rather than of humans alone, or as a place whose atmosphere departs deliberately from the city outside it. Students are free to explore this register with a light touch: a certain spiritual or esoteric undertone may surface, but it should remain a texture within the project rather than its subject.

The studio treats these two readings, social and spatial otherness, not as separate assignments but as two effects of the same device. Every project should be able to say what its wall does, and to whom.

Abdijkaai swimming pool Kortrijk, 1960/70’s

The Kortrijk Case

The outdoor swimming pool at Abdijkaai in Kortrijk was built between 1864 and 1867, among the first “swimming schools” in Flanders, reflecting the era’s growing emphasis on bodily hygiene. Between 1951 and 1952 it was rebuilt by architect E. Coigné, a post-war extension of the international, interwar concept of the modernist “solarium”. This new complex, largely in a 1950s style, comprises two central basins integrated with the surviving nineteenth-century swimming basins, together with ancillary buildings: changing cabins, an infirmary, a cafeteria, lifeguard posts, entrance halls, long narrow corridors, and roof terraces built for sunbathing.

The pool was run by the City of Kortrijk until the private operator built a new indoor pool elsewhere in the city; as part of that agreement, the private operator also took over management of the Abdijkaai site for three years. That period has now ended. The pool is in poor condition, both technically, the basin and water treatment, and in its buildings, which urgently need renovation. The city’s ambition is to eventually transform the old chlorinated basin into a natural swimming pool. The realisation will be prepared in the coming years. During this period, the city does not want to close the site. Instead, it envisions a temporary use of the whole site by engaged individuals and organisations, who can continue to offer the public a qualitative space with a range of activities, while using the time to experiment: with functions, management models, financial models, and forms of community building, so as to better understand how to develop the future natural pool and the buildings and spaces around it.

Lieve Zussen Stoere Broers, construction playground and social sauna.
Pictures by LZSB

To coordinate this interim period, the organisation LZSB (Lieve Zussen Stoere Broers) proposes a strategy for making it happen. LZSB is a well-known player in Kortrijk’s socio-cultural field, active through projects such as construction playgrounds with and for children, a community sauna, a radio and concert programme, and a range of smaller and larger events. It is closely connected to other middenveld (civil-society) organisations in Kortrijk and beyond.

This is the situation the studio takes up: a site suspended between an operator that has left, a city that cannot yet invest, and an organisation proposing to hold the space open in the meantime. Every project developed in the studio should address both horizons this situation produces, a short-to-medium-term scenario for the interim years, and a longer-term vision for what the site becomes after, while choosing, in its concrete spatial and organisational proposals, where to place its depth: on the interim occupation, or on the site’s longer-term future, from something close to the city’s own idea of a natural swimming pool to something entirely different.

Studio Activities

  • Early collaborative stakeholder mapping with LZSB: an understanding of Kortrijk’s current social, cultural, and middenveld landscape, of who could take up a role in the site’s development, what actors present in other cities are missing or could be valuable here, how such actors might work together, and what role the public (visitors, users, consumers) could play beyond that of a passive audience. This mapping should inform, and be revisited through, the proposals developed later in the semester.
  • Introduction to Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias, and to the notion of the hortus conclusus, as complementary theoretical frameworks
  • Research on natural swimming pools, on precedents for temporary or interim uses of sites in transition, and on comparable pool architectures and their conversions
  • Collaboration with LZSB and representatives of the City of Kortrijk to explore the site’s history, its current condition, the political and administrative context, and the ambitions held by each party
  • Site visits to the Abdijkaai pool
  • Personal reflections on enclosed, walled, or otherwise set-apart places, translated into spatial and social narratives for the site
  • Development of project briefs that define both a short/medium-term and a long-term vision for the site, in direct relation to LZSB’s and the city’s actual situation
  • Group work, with group size to be defined collectively in one of the first studio sessions, depending on a shared reflection within the studio group and the number of participants
  • Ongoing critical reflection, including in consultations, on the consequences and “usefulness” of design choices: students are encouraged to dream, but every dream should rest on a well-reasoned basis, including, where needed, a clearly defined alternative context (climate, politics, regulation, or otherwise)

Expected Outcome

  • A project for every group that addresses both horizons of the site’s situation, the interim years and the longer-term future, while concentrating its concrete spatial and/or organisational elaboration on one of the two
  • Proposals that provide LZSB and the City of Kortrijk with genuine material to think with, ranging from:
    • long-term visions for the site’s future, with or without a natural swimming pool, including possible usage routines and management principles
    • interim scenarios for the next three to five years, with or without swimming in one form or another, including the functions, actors, and models of management or financing that could sustain them
  • A stakeholder perspective grounded in the mapping developed with LZSB: who could carry the site forward, what is missing in Kortrijk compared to other cities, and what active role the public could play
  • A considered use of the site’s specific architecture (changing cabins, corridors, entrance areas, lifeguard posts, roof terraces), whether reused with minimal alteration or transformed more radically, with the heritage listing engaged or knowingly set aside
  • Balance between vision and feasibility: proposals may be genuinely utopian and are not bound by the constraints a city authority or other real-world actor would have to respect, but every dream must be argued: through a well-reasoned basis, and, where the present context does not allow it, through a clearly defined alternative one
  • A built-in critical stance toward the studio’s own premise: proposals should reflect on the consequences of their choices and on what “usefulness” means for a public space like this one, rather than treating feasibility as an afterthought
  • Together, the projects will form a body of visions and strategies, from imaginative provocations to actionable proposals, that can support both LZSB’s coordination of the interim period and the city’s longer-term decisions for the site

Deliverables

  • A digital presentation, developed for both the mid-term and final critics, that tells the narrative of the proposal in a form that can also be shared afterwards with LZSB, the City of Kortrijk, and other external project partners
  • A (collective?) model, situating and relating the proposals within the site
  • One large-scale visualisation per project, representing its ambitions and outcome, fit to be presented at the Super Salon after the semester
  • A condensed explanation of the project in 300 signs
  • Any other material that helps communicate the project: sketches, visualisations, plans, schemes, films, or otherwise

Depending on how the situation in Kortrijk develops, the work produced in this studio could inform a possible future studio in Craftsmanship, in which students would work with LZSB more concretely on the temporary use of the site, though no such follow-up is planned at this stage.