While a traditional mock-up is understood as a full-scale prototype used for instructional or experimental purposes, a performative mock-up goes beyond mere representation – it becomes a shared experience that reveals the interplay between behavior and spatial configuration. By creating spatial situations that foster diverse interactions among participants, these reversible installations encourage spontaneous and unexpected encounters, transforming them into moments of collective learning.

Description

Unlike the student's typical approach of first planning and then creating models for review and visualization, the performative mock-up embraces uncertainty and finding comfort in not knowing. It is a 1:1 prototype of an installation used at the beginning of the design process in order to learn from its performance and the reactions towards its form, function, placement, idea etc. When used as a research medium, reactions to such an installation can often reveal people's needs and interests more effectively than direct questioning, as participants may not have been fully aware of them beforehand. Experiencing spatial change firsthand can be provocative, uncovering unconscious behavioral patterns and making them more tangible. The performative mock-up thus becomes the focal point of discussion, where diverse spatial experiences take shape and crystallize. Experiencing the transformations in situ, with their whole bodies and senses, allows participants to recognize the added value of these interventions—an impact that extends beyond spatial improvements to include social, structural, and psychological benefits.

How to Use

The performative mock-up played a central methodological role in the two “Informal Learning Spaces” studios, during the fieldtrip in “Studio Plovdid” and the free master Thesis “Lavadouros”. Rather than relying on verbal explanations, the projects were demonstrated through embodied experiences of transformation. Instead of merely listening to the description of the design proposals, participants engaged with them physically, either by performing them or allowing them to perform. These choreographed review situations became collective sensory experiences, encouraging a diversity of stakeholders to feel the potential of change rather than just discussing it. The idea of the performative mock-up was additionally exhibited during the 

 at Swiss Architecture Museum (SAM) in Basel.

Context

[Studio Informal Learning Spaces Team] Grégoire Farquet, Charlotte Schaeben, Seppe De Blust, Beatrix Emo, Freek Persyn, Momoyo Kaijima,

[Studio Plovdid Team] Michiel van Iersel, Ellena Ehrl, Ina Valkanova, Freek Persyn

[Master Thesis Lavadouros] Students Chiara De Libero and Maria Margherita Innocenti, supervised by Lukas Fink

Credits

Formats

The Performative Mock-up

The “Room of Entanglement” is a scenography which shows a variety of analytical and propositional work in relation. It is constructed as an immersive spatial setup which acts as a playground for discussion. The exact form of the “Room of Entanglement” can vary, as long as the room is the central element (of a design studio) where all individual contributions come together.

The “Room of Entanglement” serves different purposes on various levels. In relationship to practice it is a setting to inspire and to stimulate various actors – students, practitioners and stakeholders involved in urban transformation – to transgress current ways of thinking. By showing different contributions in parallel, the room encourages to think in relationships, to think beyond the plot, and to think in different time spans.

On a pedagogical level the room becomes a collective output and the “boundary object” of the studio. This means the main focus is not the individual “project” as such, but rather the setting where these proposed interventions – as well as the assumptions, emotions and world-views they are based on – are communicated and discussed. Here, the role of the design proposal is rather to activate the setting, to become an object and tool for dialogue and to help others to engage. Arguments, design details, maps, metaphors or renders are no longer there to convince but to invite to add, change, execute, test, cherish or play around with. The fact that students do not present their project in isolation can help them to learn from and with others. It helps to enhance the ability to think about the relations between different projects and to relate an individual contribution to a larger narrative.

Besides, working on the “Room of Entanglement” means that each student or participant takes up different roles: Next to the work an individual contribution one becomes scenographer, production assistant, host and much more.

The concept of the Room of Entanglement as a collective output and structure of the semester was the central element of our spring 2022 design studio on Zurich Altstetten. During this studio we tested four different alterations of the Room of Entanglements. The guests we invited to these sessions rather became active contributors than visiting “critics” or experts.

Room No. 1: For the first room we invited developers, citizens, gardeners and activists engaged in Altstetten. They are all closely related to a specific ongoing transformation project in Altstetten. The goal of the room was to enrich our reading of Altstetten. In an immersive setting of drawings hanging from the ceiling, guests could choose what relates to their stake, focus or interest and new material and layers were added.

Room No. 2: For the next room we invited planners, architects and colleagues from ETH to refine and test the elements, developed by students, and to introduce a map as a common layer. During the session we co-created a first draft of the collective map.

Room No. 3 & 4: Room number three served as a rehearsal for the fourth and final room. For these rooms the map was further developed by students and all the studio’s elements were brought together in a collective performance, including a kind of “live power point” presentation. For this session we invited the city administration of Zürich to test the Room of Entanglements as a setting to discuss the densification plans of the city.

Afterlife: A later and more detailed version of the Room of Entanglements and the map was made within the context of an exhibition at ZAZ (center for architecture Zurich). This alteration of the room and the map became the starting point for another series of discussions on urban transformation with a variety of stakeholders.

[Studio Team Altstetten] Seppe De Blust, Lukas Fink, Chloé Nachtergael, Freek Persyn

Urban Practice

The Room of Entanglement

In this letter from 2023, offering a prompt for Studio Winterslag, Philippe Vandenbroeck invited the students to attune themselves to the post-extraction terrain of the “terril” of Winterslag – a site he has extensively explored in his PhD research

You are about to enter a very special place. Looking towards the slag heap – ‘terril’ as it's called here – from the C-mine campus in Winterslag, it seems innocent enough. ‘Innocent’ might not be the right word. Nondescript. Featureless. It’s just there. But join me on a walk now. We go west, and at the end of the campus, we make a sharp turn north, cross the bridge over the road, and enter the belt of birch and assorted trees. You will notice that the atmosphere changes. The forest is labyrinthine. You have no idea where you are going. Soon enough the vista opens up again and you gasp. Wow, it’s big, and wild! The sheer mass of the terril presses in on you. And yet the sheltered and verdant cirque right in front of you feels like a sanctuary. The south-west ridge, to our right, rises elegantly and confidently. The upper reaches beckon like a real summit.

Before you dash for the top, take a breather. There is a lot of complexity here. A painful history of extractivism. What does that mean, today? Also: think about your own history. What brought you here? What kind of invitation do you feel this place is offering you?

In exploring these questions, let’s move beyond the politics of exclusion, of atonement and of amnesia that have reigned over these black mountains. They have been razed. Museums, adventure parks and heritage trails have been built in their shadow. Trees and scrub have silently taken over the dusty flanks.

Let’s approach our research as ‘soul work’, in the sense that James Hillman (yes, man-of-the-hill) talks about it. For the longest time we (in the West) have become captive to the dualism between mind and matter. Hillman says: we have forgotten the in-between domain of soul. It's not a thing, but a mode of apprehending the world that acknowledges ambivalence. One might say that soul constitutes the very phenomenon of ambivalence. Image, in its metaphoric richness, is the language of soul.

Therefore, in approaching the enigma of this place, and its deeper relationship to our own being, ‘we stick to the image’. We are interested in The Black Triangle’s potential for polysemy. The terril as tomb, as mountain, island, breast, ruin ... Images saturated with mythic resonances. Metaphorical launching pads for rich imaginative amplification and for collaborative, performative experimentation. There's a double movement: a vertical, into the self, and a lateral, reaching out to the world and its many human and non-human entities.

Research as soul work is therapeutic, not in the sense that it aims to have a healing effect (although it may eventually do so), but in the sense that it charges our lives with the power of Eros. Research becomes a personal and collaborative libidinal pursuit. My assumption is that this process of research-creation will set in motion something that has the quality of what we, at Newrope, call urban transformation. A weaving which transcends the intentionality of the planning subject and that lets the terril speak.

Let’s move on and climb its grassy slopes. On the spacious plateau of the summit, we feel alive again.

[Subject] Re-imagining the Winterslag terril

Re-imagining the Winterslag Terril

Resource