BiUM

The inhabitants of the city K. felt the earth shaking for several years now. And everybody knew that the stronger tremblings would eventually approach the city. The first cracks were, indeed, appearing here and there. That is why the people were very cautious and during day- and nighttime they involuntarily watched what was happening beneath them. The inhabitants of the city K. almost never looked up. And so they didn’t notice that between themselves and the world above very lightly constructed buildings were forming that floated above the existing buildings. As if the city K. was trying to disengage itself from the unreliable earth and had far more confidence in the laws of thin air. 

That matter arises from energy we know since the days of Einstein. Still we often forget this relation, especially when it comes to the creation of physical space. When our surrounding is insufficiently connected to non-material features there arises a thing-like collection of designed manifestations that we have become accustomed to call architecture. It is possible to do that differently, for instance by grounding the design-process of space on non-material issues. That results in buildings that are, indeed, made of stone or wood, but that do derive their presence first and foremost from their existential contribution to life.

Causing things on this world asks for some responsibility. That goes for everything we do; the words we utter, the way in which we approach other people. Let us, for this reason, especially think of a building’s eventual ending when designing buildings. And, subsequently, ‘reconstructively’ design the life which a building is to live in order for it to seize existing in this way. This approach will be apparent from the very start.

The center of the neighbourhood had come into existence more than 40 years ago and had not changed since that time, actually. When it was asked to intervene on this, we spent some time there and took a good look around, talked, listened en felt what the air was like. And then we made the decision to start working from the hypothesis that in all these years the average daily temperature in this place had risen with at least 5 degrees. (meer…)

On the other side of the river there is a building at which passers-by often glance upwards, and then look again. Not because it is either a very impressive building or because there is something spectacular happening high above them. Something very different is going on. The building consists of floors of which it could be easily established that they ‘re not designed for that particular height. Sometimes it is even said that the floors were lived on at that particular time.Nobody knows exactly when, but years ago these floors had been randomly put on top of each other so that a vertical settlement came into being. Exactly because the appearance and design of all those floors have little to do with height, it seemed as if the vertical settlement is higher than it actually is. It is not about something made of concrete and stone; here, the world itself is lifted and it seems that this is why the people who have let themselves be lifted along live there for such a long time.   (meer…)