Workshops

by Hélène Aarts and Sarah Westphal

Harry Potter, Superman, Wonder Woman & co; What they all have in common is their special abilities to overcome struggles and grow though given challenges in life. The super heroes do this by invisibility, elasticity, transformation, time travel, duplication, changing size, telepathy, speed, flight, high sensitivity, special healing abilities, to rise from the ashes. Resilience is that quality which allows people to be knocked down and come back stronger than ever. This seems even more necessary in these times, where the world is shocked by manifold sources of violence, social conflicts and natural disasters. The complexity and high speed of change confronts us with our responsibility how to cope with this.

In the workshop we will step away from measurable plans and models. Instead, we will bring Resilience to a personal level, searching for how much you can handle and where is your breaking point. How much resistance do you have and how much counter-activity can you develop? And is this resistance functional, helpful or just counteracting? Resisting a virus is functional. But also "breaking" and getting fever builds up resistance and thus increases resilience. We will work with an old object that has survived time and is specially chosen by you. By means of different media such as drawing, photography, film and installation, we will search for the identity of the object and its user. How does it change its character in relationship to you and to the other (objects) in the group? Which dynamics can we develop by exchanging our thoughts and come to a co-creation?

by Menna Agha

Marginal groups offer humbling lessons to spatial professionals; they find ways to generate spaces despite adversities by dominant institution/s. The marginal has the ability to resile by carving spaces within the cracks of the system and then create phenomena such as spatial hacks, shadows, temporalities, and transgressions. But can we help? Us architects, designers, planners... etc. knowing that we are trained to be agents of dominant institutions, can we lend our skills to those who are spatially disenfranchised? Can we speak the spatial vocabulary of the margin?

To examine the extent of our possible contribution; in creating marginal spaces; contesting exclusion; and carving with the dominant, we have to debate concepts such as spatial justice, legality, relationality, and care. We will learn lessons from political movements, cultural minorities, performance and installation artists, and economic marginals, we will also solicit knowledge from fields of moral philosophy, feminist epistemology, and postcolonial theories.

During the exercise, we will go about the city of Antwerp and map cases of active marginalities, we will involve our subjective selves in chosen cases, and attempt to produce spatial products that promote spatial justice and/or contest dominance. This workshop is designed for the activist in heart, who is willing to suspend his/her sovereignty, but NOT for those who wish to be heroes.

by Dewi Brunet and Elsa Bouillot

30% of the European waste comes from construction and demolition (European Commission). The total waste production from the construction sector in Belgium in 2012 was 26.400 tonnes. These numbers are increasing rapidly and the amount of construction waste has more than doubled since 2004 (Statistics Belgium).

Nowadays, more than half of the world population lives in urban areas. This number is set to increase up to 66% by 2050 (UN). To provide enough shelters, cities will have to adapt themselves, create innovative habitation strategies and build in a more efficient way. The future of our cities will reside in preventing voluminous amount of waste and invent new opportunities of reuse for them. Adaptability and sustainability are becoming cornerstones of a society’s necessary resilience for the global challenges to come.

In order to reduce the impact of this waste we have to rethink our consumeristic approach of building cities. Construction materials issued from the destruction of an outdated or inefficient building, often considered as waste, are generally of high quality and should therefore be considered as a valuable commodity, in line with EU goals of a fully-fledged circular economy.

Architecture Faculties have a crucial role to play in this transition in triggering the opportunity to reuse materials. Better management of these materials will soon move from being an innovative idea, to a critical priority. The time to start is now.

by Daisuke Hattori

If we are in a room caught by sunset, is the reddish color of this room then belonging to this room or to the light in it? Leonardo Da Vinci practiced an act of recognition with his students, from which they had to draw and sculpt. The act called as Macchia connects us with our ability to perceive and to define. If we consider that in Ancient Greek, 'Esthetikos' means Perception, the training of our perception could be considered as a search for the aesthetical qualities in things. Qualities that have almost become forgotten design criteria, ungraspable by our image thriven modern apparatus with which we make architecture.

In this studio, we will be resilient towards the modern day reductive tendencies of our understanding of architecture. We will investigate to which extend space is able to receive its qualities by having them from withing, resiliently withstanding its outer influences, or opposite, to which extend it is unresiliently only able to have qualities by receiving them from without. Who has ever before considered if a space can be completely neutral towards the sunlight, still dealing very strongly with it? What if we would be making space that does not have a graspable quality without the presence of shadow? How can we discover its hidden spatial character? How will we build these things and what can they be? We will look for beauty and coherence as we will practice the ability of our perception in a similar way as musicians practice their instruments.

by Franziska Hederer and Andreas Gratl

We are many. Incredible many. The term of the individual is no longer supportable. To separate ourselves from the others and build our own house, with our own garden, with our own car, with our own swimming pool, with our own fence, with our own...etc. etc. makes us fragile in case of disruption.

Resilience in terms of community, buildings and the ecosystem is referring on diverse systems operating like an organism in “multisymbiotic” structures. The US-biologist Lynn Margulis suggested already in 1993 to replace the idea of an individual by the idea of a HOLOBIONT (Greek: holos = the whole, bio = life) which implements the principle of symbiosis to generate survivable, resilient formations with the potential to increase to very big communities. She proclaimed the human as a holobiont.

For our workshop we created the term „HOLOBIONTIC STRUCTURE“ which is a loanword from the discipline of biology. Investigating the basic principles of a holobiont we want to develop architectural and respectively urban living structures, which apply these principles and form a resilient built organism. These experimental design studies should be situated in the city of Antwerp. We search for existing and especially strong building structures equipped with some kind of public infrastructure like electricity, water, information or social, medical or educational services where we can implement our design solutions in the sense of a symbiosis.

Pictures
(1) Nikolaus Gansterer / Drawing a Hypothesis / Part of the Drawing: Questions of Order and Relational Characteristics of FIGURES OF THOUGHT
(2) Structure of a coral reef
(3) Stephane Malka / La Defense Paris

by Hannes Hulstaert and Dianjen Lin

“Resilience thinking is about understanding and engaging with a changing world. By understanding how and why the system as a whole is changing, we are better placed to build a capacity to work with change, as opposed to being a victim of it.”
Resilience Thinking: Sustainable Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (Brain Walker & David Salt)

What does "resilience" mean to you?
How do you relate to resilience on a personal level?
What does a "resilient future" look like to you?
How will you actualise your resilient future?
How do you make a future scenario tangible and legible for others?

In this workshop, we will fully explore the definition, interpretation, and adaptation of resilience by inviting the participants to share personal perceptions and examine various references within the realm of art, design, literature, technology, environment, politics, economics and systems.

By practising techniques of design sprints and scenario building, we will conjure up possible visions of future resilience and the participants can depict their own fantasies via 2D and 3D realisations. Both metadesign philosophy and design methodology are quintessential elements of the workshop, everyone will be bathed in metaphysical yet playful discourses as well as delving into new perspectives of approaching design by processes such as rapid prototyping, mood boarding, mind mapping and speculative design.

Our futures may be bleak and apocalyptic or auspicious and utopian, in this workshop, imagination and speech shall run free while physical outcomes will be pursued and perfected. Participants are free to work either individually or in pairs. We would like to invite those who are keen on stepping out of one’s comfort zone to board a journey of sustainable design futuring.

Pictures
(1) Radical Seafarin - © 2009, Swoon
(2) Revital Cohen - dog - © 2008, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen
(3) trailer Slaton Sea - © 2000-2005, Kim Stringfellow

by Daniel Modol and Pati Nunez

Would you be able to live in the classroom where you attend class? What is the difference between a hospital and a hotel? Can a train be a hostel? How many different uses can one space have at a time?

We use the title of the famous Smithson's book to rethink the design and uses of some spaces and provide them with more adaptation ability.
One of the main challenges facing our cities is to establish strategies to be resilient and that means the optimization of resources. The architectures of our cities are becoming outdated in a double sense: because they no longer respond effectively to the people’s new ways of life and because they are not designed with resilient criteria.
Within the universe of terms that surround the resilience, we want to focus on the duplication / multiplicity of uses that together with the optimization of spaces will determine not only the great decisions of the urban design of the cities but the management of each of its spaces and buildings.
What role does design play in changing the new forms of management / occupation of the spaces that surrounds us?
From foresight, sociology, communication, design and architecture we are going to rethink some habitual spaces with criteria of resilience. Are you prepared for disruptive ideas and experiences?
We will start changing the art of uninhabitable right now.

by Henry Ng and Isaiah Miller

On 27 August 2017, Hurricane Harvey hits Houston as the perfect storm. For decades, an acute deregulatory climate in one of America’s fastest growing cities had led to sprawling high-risk settlements and poor resiliency investment. Rampant development in flood prone territories had been inflated by systematic underestimation of risk by flood mapping and weather agencies. Harvey was the third storm in three years with a supposedly 0.2% chance to hit Houston. The result of this high-risk urbanism and a blissfully ignorant approach to climate change and infrastructure is one of the worst urban disasters in a generation.

At the moment when urgent action and consensus is most needed, the country’s lethargic and contentious political climate has made top-down approaches unreliable. Instead, agility, ingenuity, and responsiveness on the ground are key to rebuilding and preparing for the inevitable, next crisis. Five Days Later returns to the events of Hurricane Harvey through five allegorized days. On each day, participants receive a new brief based on the successive failures and crises as the storm progresses, from its nascent stage as a wave off the coast of Africa to the aftermath of a city in ruins. The goal of the workshop is to engage both temporal and spatial complexities of hazard mitigation and to catalyze the speed at which design generates response. The workshop aims to discover new forms of emergency design, ingenious infrastructures, and urgent techniques that can mobilize designers in an age of crisis.

by Susana Piquer

Renew: To make new or as if new.

Given the impossibility of making a restart to the space that surrounds us, and the world we inhabit, it becomes necessary to develop our capacity of creativity and adaptation, to create new stimulating systems that evolve with the cities we live at. What if we are able to generate visionary and innovative proposals that coexist with the city, as we currently understand it?

The workshop will provide the students with conceptual tools that will allow them have a multidisciplinary approach that will change the way we look at the space that surrounds us and create new standards of living.
Creating a creative dynamism, the students will examine the current space where we live at, question it and propose new, innovative, sustainable and fresh solutions.

After an introduction to lateral thinking and the viewing of references, brainstorming sessions and creative exercises will be combined with the development of the projects.
Participants will work in teams to develop different proposals; this will include both the conceptual and the physical prototyping of its elements.

The students will be encouraged to think in a free-ranging, open-minded manner, in order to develop unusual ideas.

Pictures
(1) Casa básica - Project: Casa básica by Martín Azua - Picture by Daniel Riera - link to the project
(2) Tricycle house - Project: Tricycle house by People’s Architecture Office + People’s Industrial Design Office - Picture courtesy of People’s Architecture Office + People’s Industrial Design Office - link to the project
(3) Insulation - Project: Selective Insulation by Davidson Rafailidis - Picture by Steve Mayes Photography - link to the project

by Gro Rødne, Nina Haarsaker and Johanna Gullberg

To satisfy our need to fulfil our ideas we transport materials across the world. To reuse or "upcycle" materials from the immediate surroundings is one way towards a more resilient practice, but could this way of working and thinking also lead to different or even more innovative results?

We invite you to play. Using a set of instructions and the bricolage technique¹, we will use materials considered to be waste and make beautiful spatial interventions. By planning, making and reflecting simultaneously (Making is thinking²), the exhibition will grow around us and will reflect the process.

Being open to and appreciating the unusual, the strange and the unexpected may prevent our work from being predictable and vacuous. What if, as Tim Ingold proposes, we pay attention to the world rather than impose our intentions upon it?³ We will challenge design habits ('design fixations'⁴)and reveal new possibilities for elastic ways of thinking and making.

¹ Bricolage: (in art or literature) construction or creation from a diverse range of available things. Oxford Living Dict.
² Making is thinking: http://makingisthinking.net
³ Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines, Routledge, 2015.​
⁴ ’Einstellung Effect’ or ‘Design Fixation’: «Where good ideas can block better ones, or when earlier transformations and shifts that have had positive effects can subsequently prevent further transformation, and have a pernicious effect by inhibiting new ways of seeing and thinking.» Ray Land. See also: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/thinking-inside-the-box

Pictures by Vegard Forbergskog, Johanna Gullberg, Svenja Wehrend

by Leonid Slonimskiy and Artem Kitaev

Resilient future city: learning from temporary infrastructure

"The only really constant thing is change."
Heraclitus

The workshop proposes the participants to design a City of Constant Change: an architectural speculation on the resilient temporary city which easily adapts to rapid social changes: shift of political regimes, new types of transport, population migration, mass events etc.

Traditionally, architecture "built for ages", with its’ Vitruvian "firmness" is inverse to resilience. Can we re-think architecture in order for it to be resilient and flexible?

In order to do so, the workshop will start with a research phase, focusing on temporary utilitarian architecture of the cities, such as scaffoldings, walkway sheds, fences and other temporary infrastructure. These structures are the examples of truly adaptive and resilient architecture, which appear purely out of necessity, serve a certain purpose, and disappear/transform easily after.

Parallel to this, students will pose the questions and formulate the changes that challenge the cities. Examples:

• Influx of migrants on one side and "shrinking cities" on the other
• Change of ideologies and political regimes
• Mass events (e.g. Olympic games), which leave unused infrastructures after

Combining the methods learned from the "temporary infrastructures" and the questions risen, the students will create a City of Constant Change - an urban model that is permanently temporary and is able to adjust to the drastic changes of the society nowadays and in future.

by Anne Britt Torkildsby

The world is facing emerging global challenges, such as the climate change, the food crisis, and financial crisis – not to forget war, migration and population growth, and the fact that by 2050 the world population of sixty-year-olds will have doubled. Thus, the next generation designers, architects, engineers, etc. ought to be adequately equipped to deal with whatever problems this brings along.

Traditional design methods focus on creating practical solutions to the problem; e.g. by applying functional analysis into the process. This is all well and good. However, it may not be enough as regards to addressing today’s emerging universal design issues, such as the one of altering the built environment to fit the increasing amount of elderly. Universal design is commonly described by the three keywords inclusion, access, and participation.

• What if design, architect, engineer students, etc. were equipped with methods to turn these terms upside down and so be able to implement, early in the design process, a critical design method that makes it possible for them to turn everything – they thought they knew about universal design – upside down and see things from another perspective?
• Moreover, can critical thinking and a certain amount of provocation provide the students with alternative starting points for creative thinking, and thus generate more tools in their problem-solving toolboxes – making them ready to be even better problem solvers when they later down the road steps into the real world and will have to deal with universal design at some point in their careers?

Pictures by Elizabeth Higson

by Charlotte Truwant + Dries Rodet and Malik Hammadi

With 3x one hundred we will investigate resilience as a tool or as a design opportunity. If one defines resilience as the capacity to successfully adapt to changing conditions or the ability to rebound from a stress or a disturbance, then it becomes a fundamental aspect of the design process. Nowadays resilience is an important quality for a designer, as the demands imposed on the profession increase exponentially. Being under constant pressure, the designer is facing two options, either to give in to pressure or to surpass him/herself and bounce back. He can turn problems into opportunities, allowing the initial idea to keep its clarity and radicalism while it’s being processed, questioned and translated into a finalized project.

For the workshop 3x one hundred, we will use the resilience of the participants as an opportunity to push the limits, to get off the beaten path and to design without preconceptions. The demands of the design exercises will become too big to handle in a conventional way and rather than succumbing to the self-imposed pressure we will use it as a lever to reinvent our working methods. We will have to employ techniques such as abstraction and suggestion not to get stuck in details but to be able to keep a focus on the essential.

With 3x one hundred we will try to answer the question: "How to make one hundred models, drawings and visualizations in one day?"

by Tüüne-Kristin Vaikla and Urmo Vaikla

The place offers people a space that empowers their identity, where they can meet other people with whom they share social references. According to Marc Augé 'Non-Places, introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity', the non-places, on the contrary, are not meeting spaces and do not build common references to a group. A non-place is a place we do not live in, in which the individual remains anonymous and lonely.

The workshop focuses on the relationship of the spaces (past) and the users (future), evaluating spatial layers and human behavioural patterns. The workshop investigates, on the basis of case-studies the activation of space and forms of spatial intervention tactics focusing on physical, mental and social strata of space.

The process is dealing with the questions:
How to revitalize an anonymous space (a derelict space or a non-space)? How is it possible to direct people's behaviour through physical space and how space affects the human atmosphere? How fragile could be transformed into resilient?

The topic is about activating an existing anonymous space with the help of design solutions, installations, using fragile material like paper, plastic, thread etc to create and discover the potential resilience of its structure. The aim is to create a new synergy working on sites in interdisciplinary groups of students and local community. The task is to search for physical and mental layers of flexibility and elasticity how to transform fragile into resilience.

by Camiel Van Noten and Angel Solanellas Terés

Structure and cladding
During this workshop we will investigate the concept of resilience by returning to the primordial idea of the enclosure, which protects and gives form to a space. Resilience implies both persistence and change: two seemingly opposing concepts, which are embodied in architecture by both structure and cladding. This distinction is perhaps most famously illustrated by Semper’s thoughts on the origins of architecture.
According to Semper, the true and legitimate representation of the idea of enclosure was originally enacted by woven fabrics. First there is cladding, a building’s dress, second there is solid wall or structure to hold it up. Besides providing protection and shelter, cladding is by necessity representational. It forms a buildings face and is the visible, colorful, and sensible - in a word symbolic - boundary of space. It can be described as a discourse predicated on the surface.

An imprint on a surface
Making and consequentially thinking though making, will play a central role in the workshop. Over the course of a week we will focus on the technique of casting. We will study the work of artists in the likes of Rachel Whiteread, Isamu Noguchi, and Ben Nicholson. By pressing, casting, scraping, by the act of making, we will work collaboratively to produce a set of life size cladding tiles: a hands-on experiment in texture, scale and shape and an investigation on the symbolic and representational potential of cladding.

by Thomas Wiesner

CUTTING CORNER [s]
straightforward hand(s)-on explorations of space-body morphologies through the exhaustion of a particular space / place as thought provoking, radical experiences, (mis)using simple analogue and digital street-wise tools as design instruments to gauge the nature(s) of potential states of resilience of reality and virtual.

The workshop intends to probe a variety of resilience conditions by intensively exhausting a (one) particular corner space / place in Antwerp. The activities will focus on radically uncovering more acute states of awareness regarding morphologies and sociologies of bodies and space(s), via observations of events and happenings and disruptions thereof/in.

The activities during the workshop will be intense, and focus on a constant blend of direct actions and observations. Via apparently "simple" analogue and digital paraphernalia used as radicalised design tools, a constant production of material is expected. Comprehensive realisations of the activities are expected at the end of the workshop, in the form of an adhoc exhibition with on-line presence, communicating overlaps of virtual and real.

Materials/tools to be used during workshop:
a/ analogue: white paint, black markers, large paper rolls, paint brushes
b/ digital: iPhone(s) with IOS11, ARKit apps or similar, laptops.

The workshop activities are expected to transcend usual academic/artistic boundaries, thus offering a possibility for radical analogue/digital experimentations within constrained and focused experimental boundaries set-ups.

by Julien Ineichen and Louis Méjean

This workshop will be lead by En Commun (encommun.ch) represented for the occasion by Julien Ineichen and Louis Méjean (on site) and Diego Bis (co-design of the event).

With the capping of the ring road Antwerp is facing big challenges. The ambition is to transform the ring from a barrier outside the city into a new mid-city metropolitan landscape, seducing citizens to take the bike, bus or tram and make their city more resilient for mobility pressure. To this end, the curator for the ring road cap invited all inhabitants of Antwerp for a design-driven co-creative process.

A piece of already existing cap on the A12 highway, near the Jan De Voslei could be a testing ground. An abandoned park could be transformed to evoke the bicycle-oriented landscape of the future. We want to involve the inhabitants of the social high rises along the ring road and on Jan De Voslei, who would be among the first beneficiaries of the tremendous changes the ring road cap will bring about. We want to increase their awareness of the issues at stake and the chances for solutions for their community needs.

Making design ideas more tangible during fun events, design sessions and building campaigns can stimulate such awareness. We think of this workshop as a deed of tactical urbanism, instigating change and increasing the organisational capacity of the civil society in appropriating government plans.

This workshop needs brave designers who want to roll up their sleeves and realize a fun bicycle oriented park together with children, youngsters and other inhabitants of the neighbourhood.