Cities are sites for the extraction of profit and wealth, where capitalist delusions of grandeur materialize in the most delirious ways. Real estate, at times in collaboration with city authorities, continues to project newer and bigger developments on top of existing lived realities. In the process of enacting their fantasies, entire neighborhoods and communities are violently wiped out. Many of these processes remain ongoing, even though the wounds of past events are not yet healed.This is the case for Brussels North, a district deeply affected by trauma. The city’s economic optimism that followed the 1958 World Fair, and the establishment of the first European institutions that same year, prompted the conceptualisation of the Manhattan Plan. This urban, modernist master plan, euphorically oriented towards its American namesake, envisioned the Northern district as a business hub connected to an immense highway network. The plan was never fully realized; only two of the originally eight planned World Trade Center towers were erected, causing, however, the demolition of an entire neighbourhood and the eviction of its inhabitants. Enthusiasm fainted, forcing the city administration itself to enter some of the buildings.
Such aggressive strategies of urban renewal have inevitably forced cities to become places of resistance and emancipatory struggle. Massive protests that followed the Manhattan Plan prevented authorities from pursuing further demolitions of the old city fabric. Today, Brussels North District is being reinvested in once more, with renewed optimism.How to deal with trauma? In this dramatically monofunctional district, investors and planning authorities have recently agreed on a 10% public utility within every new construction and renovation. We will use this as an entry point to question and rethink the notion of the public, as well as its mirror, the counterpublics.

Being densely inhabited environments, cities carry the immanent potential of radical change due to the continuous collective reinterpretation of urban culture. Through carefully listening, observing and collaborating with a variety of local positions, we will gain a deep understanding of the complexities at play. We will become active and intervene as designers while being aware of the paradoxes of practice. Sometimes making something sets unforeseen processes in motion. We will identify underlying risks, such as gentrification, commercialization and displacement, to prevent another chapter of trauma for Brussels North.

Further, we will ask ourselves: How to relate to utopian visions of the past? How to deal with the decaying and failed structures of burgeoning times? Even more so, within an overbuilt world facing ecological collapse?

The studio‘s endeavour is threefold: to strengthen the students' literacy/awareness with critical spatial theory, to articulate individual positions and to test alternative architecture practices and doing so by engaging and learning with and from artistic practices. The design studio will be tightly knit with a diverse group of local actors, We will cultivate a reading club, propose interventions in Brussels and Zurich, host a symposium and curate an exhibition.

Studio Brussels – Paradox of Practice

– Phase 1: Trauma I-IV
– Phase 2: Paradox of Practice
– Phase 3: Curation
– Fieldtrip to Brussels 10-11.10.2023

Urban Practice

Design Studio

Open Public Structures

Design in Dialogue

Deconstructing Power Dynamics

Europe

Brussels

Power

The first excursion, on 11 June, was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. A new date will be announced on our website shortly.

On the occasion of the double exhibition 

 (VAI) and the NEWROPE Chair organize a series of excursions and dialogues on how designers can take care of the future of our planet. Each of the excursions on June 11, August 20 and September 3 focuses on another part of Belgium.

During a day long bus tour, we will visit a selection of projects that are presented in the exhibition 

Care for Space for Care - Scenes from Flanders and Brussels

. Each excursion is followed by a public dialogue between the architects, excursionists, the team of VAi and NEWROPE and (other) invited guests.

 takes place on Saturday 11 June and combines a visit of Sporthaven by Import.Export Architecture with Huis Perrekes of NU architectuuratelier. A 

 includes visits to the observation tower in Negenoord, a project of De Gouden Liniaal Architecten, Ecotron of noAarchitecten and ends at Z33, a project of Francesca Torzo. The 

 contains visits to Le Rideau, a project of OUEST and Grand Hôpital in Charlerloi by Bas Smets. The three excursions will each treat a combination of the three themes of the exhibition (interdependence, maintenance and posthumanism), making this a variation of different insights on caring architecture.

For more infomation and to register, please follow these links:

– Date first excursion: 11.06.2022
– Start excursion: 11:00
– Price excursion*: €12
– Location excursion: Antwerp (exact location will be communicated after registration)
– Start debate: 17:00
– Entrance debate: free, but you need to book a free ticket
–  Location debate: VAi/De Singel, Desguinlei 25, 2018 Antwerpen
– Production: Flanders Architecture Institute, De Singel and NEWROPE
– With support of: the Flemish Community
– Other dates:


*If you cannot afford the ticket for the excursions please contact us with a short note of interest via email to Elise Verstraete: elise.verstraete@vai.be

 in Antwerp, Belgium, are focusing on the impact of care on the built environment with a double exhibition:

 Critical Care: Architecture for a Broken Planet

, an exhibition developed by the Architekturzentrum Wien, is a plea for greater care and collaboration in architecture. After stops in Vienna, Zürich, Dresden and Berlin 

will link the international case studies from 

 to projects from Flanders and Brussels. Interdependence, maintenance and posthumanism are the anchor points for the further exploration of care in architecture.


Visit the 

Focus on care

School of Transformation

Exhibition

Changing a Culture

Excursions and dialogues - Care for Space for Care: Scenes from Flanders and Brussels

Culture

Care

Collectivity

The physical space of the Chair of Architecture & Urban Transformation, the Design in Dialogue Lab, is located inside the ONA building, a repurposed industrial building on the border of the neighborhoods of Seebach & Oerlikon in Zürich, Switzerland. The building is currently shared by a range of smaller companies and several institutes of ETH Zürich’s Department of Architecture.

As a versatile work and dialogue setting, it offers a variety of configurations that allow us to come together, test new ideas and practices and to reflect, share and relax. Combining theatrical elements with tools for co-production, the Lab offers the conditions for a variety of work sessions, informal gatherings, small presentations, collective cooking and public events.

In the context of the Open Public Structures (OPS) programme the NEWROPE chair wants to gradually open up the Design in Dialogue Lab to the wider neighbourhood and transform it temporarily into an open public space, a convivial place, where students and staff members of ETH Zürich can meet and mingle with a mix of local residents, entrepreneurs and others.

Imagine it as a laboratory or incubator for the development of concepts and formats for similar open structures around Zurich and other European cities, or as an Open Neighbourhood Atelier. We see the Open Neighbourhood Atelier as an experiment on openness and publicness. A gesture from a big academic institution toward the neighbourhood where it is placed. And an invitation to all to re-imagine and re-define notions of collectivity and community in a time of forced isolation.

During this test phase the NEWROPE chair will use the Design in Dialogue approach to bring different stakeholders and (other) potential users together to collectively define the aims and constraints of this shared effort to open up the ONA building. During a series of Design in Dialogue workshops representatives of various communities will help to write a programme for a number of open spaces and public activities in and around the ONA building. In parallel, ETH Zürich students and experts from various fields (architecture, sociology, ecology, anthropology), will develop temporary (spatial) interventions that can be used to test certain ideas and formats.

Questions that will be addressed include: How open can a university (building) be towards the neighbourhood and the city? How public can and should it be? What type of interactions can be enabled? How to balance the interests of primary and secondary users of a space? And how do you make sure that such spaces become and remain open and accessible to different users and activities?

Simultaneously, the NEWROPE chair is involved in similar attempts to create new open public structures and learning environments across the campus of ETH Zürich and in other European cities. Slowly these experiments will create a growing network of Open Public Structures.The first (design) phase of this project will take place in the spring and summer of 2021. Please let us know if you have questions or want to get involved in this experiment by contacting Charlotte Schaeben schaeben@arch.ethz.ch or Panayotis Antoniadis antoniadis@arch.ethz.ch

Opening up ONA

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