Inhabiting Landscapes The New Berlin
Exploring Urban Cultures
Semester 1, Brussels, English spoken.
Master of Architecture engagement Urban Cultures, Campus Sint Lucas Brussels
Academic year 2024 2025
Tutor: Lara Claes
Inhabitation as a research
Urban landscapes house a mixture of functions, activities, people and species that all found shelter in the area for their own reasons and in their own time. Ranging from the scale of a birds nest to a 1.3km long warehouse, these different entities inhabit the landscape. The scope of the studio will revolve around a series of questions and reflections about this inhabitation:
- Which entities inhabit?
- How do these different entities inhabit?
- How do these entities live together?
- What is hospitable, hostile or invasive?
- Which entities can, or should maybe not, inhabit this space?
- Where do we find balance, where do we find friction?
- What can be improved?
*this list is non-exhaustive
These questions allow us to reflect on how we can create an architecture that inhabits its surroundings without being invasive. “How do we set a proverbial foot in the landscape without trampling it? And what if it has already been trampled?” (Alicja Melzaka)
Inhabitation as a methodology
We will work on site and engage with this particular context through collective walks, interactions with those living and working there, participating in local activities, intervening with small installations in the public space, in order to understand and learn from the local beliefs, narratives, wishes and dreams.
Through spending a lot of time on site, we will develop personal relationships with the area and its people.
With time we will bundle those individual focuses and understandings into a collective body of knowledge, to connect small scale local energies to global relationships.
Buda
Within the framework of this studio we will focus on the industrial area of Buda, situated on the border of Brussels, Machelen and Vilvoorde. It has long been a forgotten hinterland to the eyes of politics and urban planning. Buda is a former productive hub with thriving working-class culture that currently houses logistics companies and activities at the edge of legality. Currently, this zone is in the gaze of a multitude of visions and ambitions. The tensions and cracks that arise from these different perspectives form the breeding grounds of this studio.
- The Buda+ master plan (2018) was outlined, which seeks to reconfigure the area into a progressive industrial zone dedicated to circular economy.
- Several construction promoters from Vilvoorde and Machelen are nibbling at the edges of this area to develop it into a coveted residential neighborhood.
- Broeklin (former U-Place) wants to construct an enormous shopping
- Since 2023, the Border Buda arts festival has been casting a critical eye on this blind spot with the intention of exploring the area artistically and turning it back into a meeting place from that point of view.
“The new Berlin” refers to a newspaper article dating from the elections of 2018 wherein multiple politicians aim to turn Vilvoorde into the “Brooklyn of Brussels” or “the new Berlin”. Although their intentions are not clear in this article, we can assume they are referring to a vibrant cultural scene, alternative forms of housing and working, in order to make the city attractive to a young public.
Output
- Throughout the semester we will collectively construct a fieldworkers atlas: a body of drawings that intends to document, understand and play with the diverse entities and forms of inhabitation of Buda and to research the relations they have to one another.
- In reaction to what we observed and analyzed, we will conceive and construct a series of one-to-one scale interventions in the public space that aim to enhance the qualities of inhabitation in the area.
References
Life in Buda – Borghese & Hacioglu (2015)
Of Hospitality – Derrida & Dufourmantelle (2000)
The Stranger As My Guest – Agier (2021)
Veldwerk I – Kunstenplatform Plan B (2021)
Veldwerk II – Kunstenplatform Plan B (2023)
A research on rising warmth with a few detours – Clementine vaultier (2019)
Le Paysage Ménagé – Maximiliaan Royakkers & Ciel Grommen
Météore – Maxime Brygo & Ciel Grommen
Metavilla – Exyzt
Siluroño – Collectif Dallas & Pool Is Cool Border Buda arts festival
Saisons Zéro
Floating University Berlin
Planning
| W1: | Collective Walk | (Group) |
| W2: | Field work, exploration | (Individual) |
| W3: | Field work, documentation | (Individual) |
| W4: | Field work, action | (Individual) |
| W5: | Field work, review | (Group) |
| W6: | Scale up, research | (Group) |
| W7: | Scale up, positioning | (Group/Individual) |
| W8: | Scale up, project definition | (Group) |
| W9: | Scale up, project development | (Group) |
| W10: | Scale up, project development | (Group) |
| W11: | Scale up, review | (Group) |
| W12: | Scale up, action | (Group) |
| W13: | Scale up, action | (Group) |
| W14: | Supersalon | (Group) |
Ewoud Vermote & Aulona Fetahaj, Dorpsdramaturgie Haren, 2024
Sibran Sampers, Tidal Sidle, 2021
Siska Van De Casteele, Buda, 2022