Workshops

by Stijn Rybels

“tactive”| adjective; engaged in active travel through tactical interventions

MAPPING THE ROUTES; ACTIVE TRAVEL FROM A CHILD’S PERSPECTIVE
Children are faced with a number of spatial (and socio-economic) barriers to active travel that are similar to other groups in general but have some specific differences. In a first stage we will try to understand the current barriers to active travel for children travelling to school by mapping the routes of the children by accompanying them from school to home. By using the walk-along and cycle-along technique we will either walk or cycle along with the children in their own environment. This will enable the students to get detailed information on how the children experience, see, hear, feel and interact with their environment during their route from school to home. Through mapping techniques these routes and barriers will be visualized.

TACTICAL INTERVENTIONS; HARD- AND ORGWARE THROUGH A COLLABORATIVE DESIGN PROCESS
In a second stage we will seek for (temporary) tactical interventions in the built environment through a collaborative design process to promote and stimulate active travel to school.
Besides physical interventions (hardware) also organisational mechanisms (orgware) are explored based on the barriers that were identified in the mapping process.

by Oliver Froome-Lewis & Penélope Plaza

"When they woke up, the dinosaur was still there."
 The Dinosaur, Augusto Monterroso, 1959

From above, we see a road, in a ring, a pulsating drivosaur laid out in the-places-that-avoid-and-separate-more-important-places. From the ground, we see individual vehicles, two-ton monsters carrying humans and cargoes: Herring from Stockholm, Haggis from Aberdeen, Marcolini Chocolates, Cheese from the Balearic Islands. Modest use of brains: steering, braking, choosing another lane, or another track, fingers tapping to music on the steering wheel. We see the dusty bustle of trucks, tractors, and bulldozers. At night the drivosaur becomes a snake of colour and light, passing without beginning or end. When this drivosaur goes underground, which it will, perhaps with a fumeless electric whirr, it will still be there. Meanwhile, we imagine.

This workshop will look ahead to the ghost vehicles of the ring-road. We invite students to collaborate with school children to imagine and construct drivosaurs that will be drawn, modelled and constructed as 1:1 mobile urban interventions in Luchtbal. Tissue and paper models first, bring your hairdryer, filming the traffic go by, day and night, making and running with some bigger prototypes. Reveal the drivosaur!

By Sabrina Morreale & Lorenzo Perri (Lemonot)

What are the spaces across scales that enable us to come together differently, to
have new forms of conversation or to change our behaviours, habits and rituals?

All forms of engagements need to be designed. Through the construction of this
confessional, we will discuss new spatial contracts that could be formed by collective
acts of negotiation, contamination and disclosure.

We will use fiction as a strategy of understanding power dynamics - students will
work on switching roles in this inhabitable scenography - an itinerant and inhabitable
device inviting different audiences to reach us.

The confessional will act as a spatial framework, where everyone is invited to
discuss strategies of resistance. What do you fear? What do you consider a support
structure? Those conversations will become virtual scenarios and layered filmic
sequences.

The odd, the uncanny, the uncomfortable, the disproportionate, will be guiding
principles against the norm, with the intention to reveal and intensify uncharted
ordinary rituals - potential thresholds to live in Luchbal in the next 15 years.
We will create a common vocabulary - a lexicon of usership - in which the
confessions will become a way to initiate new collaborations sharing tools as a form
of co-ownership.

A safe space, in which confidentiality and camouflaging will become our form of
protection - turning the audience from spectators to future owners of the urban
space.

by Fabian Tobias Reiner & Sven Högger

Extended infrastructure has always been a driver of progress, yet its linearity and energetic power create unwanted borders and nuisances. Therefore, it is favourably put underground. With the ring road, another infrastructural necessity will be hidden away from sight, made believe its non-existence. However, the moment a stream scratches the earth’s surface, we come to admire a miraculous mountain spring, the quick roaring of a hundred foreign trucks, or perhaps a warm breeze from the metro exhaust air. The experience’s immediacy is key to our delight.

We introduce to the students and the local school children a broader understanding of—as well as a radical empathy towards—infrastructural flux and its urban impact. Walks, discussions and lectures will accompany us during the week to better recognize the potentials of superposed urbanism.

We will scour Luchtbal for national and global networks underneath local soil. Construction sites already lay bare the veins pumping the city’s elixir. In groups of four, the students will reveal and access the infrastructural flux through text, drawings, metaphors. Each group will construct a small installation that exploits the potentials of the site. We seek to detour the flow of goods like electricity, water or exhaust air in one specific place in order to make it visible. Feasible projects such as a new fountain or an ephemeral light show will create an aura around the site; will create a sense of belonging.

by Alexandra Sonnemans & Caterina Viguera (rotative studio)

Path of Play is a sequence of interactive elementary structures that pop up in Antwerpen Luchtbal. Introducing play as a form of design – as a new way of experiencing and imagining space through interaction, improvisation and suggestion – participants are invited to establish a dialogue with the existing context to uncover new potential places.

Participants will start by selecting specific open public spaces and create and install five distinct structures.

• These interactive structures are tactile, transformable artefacts (metal tubes and strings) that are meant to be touched, stretched and twisted into various geometrical figures, suggesting space through minimal means.
• They act as anthropomorphic elements that mediate between body and space, with the body as the unit of measure and as a tool to modify and create spaces (and confer significance).
• Their adaptability allows participants to generate new places, infusing them with personal and cultural values, creating new common meaning.

Playing with the structures in the susceptible moment of the meantime, can foster reconstructions of space from primary notions such as the topological relationships of proximity, separation, order, enclosure, as well as open up a dialogue on cultural and historical continuity.

By the end of the week, Path of Play will be handed over to the community as a large-scale ‘drawing of potentiality’, resulting from all the interactions.

by Willem Coenen & Aline Veelaert (Atelier Scheldeman)

karkas functions as a three dimensional framework to set up brainstorm sessions about how to intervene architecturally in the urban landscape. We’re aiming to design and build, on site, scale 1:1, in one week. Driven by dreams of local kids, who we see as clients, we will translate and develop a concept, until a tactile installation. karkas reacts as a tangible toolbox leading and showing the possibilities of modular building principes. It consists of elements and knots, offering a building method to workshop participants. The orthogonal lay-out leads to clear constructive choices, creating conceptual and spatial freedom.

As a starting point we present an interactive site plan to local children. The scale of their neighborhood, personal environment, movements and connections will be analysed through a kid’s eye. Searching the interrelation between building blocks, water, roads, greenzones, ladders and other fragments of the environment as an introduction to the creation of architectural and urban links. What is a link? A mental visual or physical connection? How are links made in nature? How do links work between human beings? Which links will be created in the oosterweel-future? Which links would you like to make?
Rethinking / Relinking the neighborhood offers podium to create dreamy utopian interventions in their future playground.

By Diego Inglez de Souza & Julien Ineichen

In 1963, the situationist artist Constant Nieuwenhuys drew his
plans for the New Babylon over Antwerp maps. This illustration of
the unitary urbanism utopic and futuristic city created connections
and layers of collective spaces to offer the citizens unpredicted
situations, new possibilities of interaction and meeting. Using the
transformations that will take place with the ring capping as a
starting point, we pretend to stress the relation between the possible
and the desirable urban situations during the meantimes with
unexpected uses of the public spaces. Our aim is to unveil the
imaginary of New Babylon over Antwerp in our days, designing
collectively a new cartography to represent pre-existences,
emergences and the desire of its actual inhabitants.

Over a public space in Luchbtal, directly on the urban ground, we
will draw with cray and paint our version of a gigantesque New
Babylon map to building an ephemeral situation of play that will
discuss connections and interactions on Antwerp nowadays, fading
away after some time and rain. This ephemeral cartography will be
designed and debated by students and local youngsters through
participatory dynamics and a hands-on urban intervention. Like a
hopscotch, it will stimulate a joyful and playful situation for the
direct interaction of the inhabitants with the representation of their
city and expectedexpecting

​

by Inés Ballesteros & Michela Dal Brollo

​How can we facilitate the projection and activation of temporary common spaces
designing and using a shelter as a research tool?
The workshop will start in “Archipel” atelier with an introduction about the project
“Living Equipment: Portable Spaces”, presenting the tools we will use to
collaborate with a chosen location within Lucthbal. The equipment consists of a
portable: oven, printing atelier, shelter, map and multifunctional cargo bike. After
that we will walk around Luchtbal and work on our map looking for locations and
urban elements to instal the shelter.
How can we perform the shelter to infiltrate liminal spaces of the neighborhood
and contribute to their future meanings?
During the second and the third day we will set up the structure together with the
students, looking at how it can adapt and collaborate with the chosen location.
During the fourth day we would like to collaborate with the school to imaging
togheter the possible activations that the shelter can host in the future, recording
ideas and notes with the portable printer.
Which kind of activities and actions are demanded or needed by the neighbours
of Lucthbal?
How can a temporary installation be part of a long term “pollination process”
inspiring future actions and provoking new questions?
For the last day the structure will be activated with the portable oven, preparing
food and creating a collective moment where the participants can share their
thoughts about what happened during the week.

by Philippe Buchs & Angélique Kuenzle (SUJETS OBJETS/)

I, I can remember (I remember) /
Standing, by the wall (by the wall) /
And the guns, shot above our heads (over our heads) /
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall) /
And the shame, was on the other side /
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever
- David Bowie

Byproducts and Side effects

The roads have produced an entire ecosystem yet to disappear.
Petrol stations, car wash, parkings, drifts, neon lights, rodeos,
rave parties and graffitis, the life under the bridges which carry
the highways will be for one last time the hero of the performances
to come.

The workshop will be structured in three temporalities:

1. We will explore the site by walking under and beside the highway.
   We will meet the users of the ring road, we will drive, we will
   dance, we will scream.
2. A precise and sensible cartography of places under extinction
   will be made.
3. A selection of the identified, condemned spaces will be made.
   They will consequently be activated through performances and
   architectural fragments. The experience will be immersive and
   beautiful. Just for one day.

by Alberto Pottenghi & Mariana Sendas (MONOatelier)

Following the reasons that prompted us to reflect on how to tame the large infrastructures present in the area, during the IDW2020 edition, we keep going with the theme of soft urban edges.
Reflecting on the meaning of a new, strong, intrusive element in a community that is often not ready to accept the change of a territory. If we can identify moments in which this great intruder can offer a new scenario capable of hosting the community instead of rejecting it, offering opportunities instead of denying them.

Students will be asked to design using simple elements, as curtains or modular elements, to build new partitions and achieve the creations of new spaces where different activities events could take place. Once again, by using soft surfaces, as curtains or panels, the transition of the form is natural because they move in and out or they can catch the light or shade.

Art and architecture as tools capable of restoring the feeling of common ownership, of appropriation of, apparently, subtracted or radically changed public spaces, subject to a big change.
Art and architecture as tools to ensure that the local community will be the protagonist of this change.

“Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives.”
- Joseph Beuys

by Adrien Meuwly, Adrien Comte (Comte/Meuwly) & Theo de Meyer

Luchtbal, a territory in transformation.
The workshop aims to raise awareness of the existing
specificities and qualities genuinely gathered in an underestimated
territory, which are threatened by its foreseen
large-scale transformation.

Luchtbal – as it is today - is our Eldorado.
So many potentials and possibilities are embedded in
today’s territory: the generosity of the common spaces,
mostly left aside as wastelands, magnificent leftover
in-between giant mall’s parking and industrial halls, and
the resources to be found or reused, from the junk of recycling
plants to the assortment of the DIY markets.

All of these potentials and resources are gathered in
Luchtbal, waiting to be assembled to reveal excitement.

The participants will be asked to produce performative
devices by combining the richness of a rediscovered
place (1/3), the resources found and re-used onsite (1/3),
and the endless assortment of the DIY markets (1/3).

The site will by our laboratory. The junk our trigger. The
DIY market our catalyser.

The performative devices are going to are to be implemented
on specific sites, triggering reaction of the passers-
by, raising awareness.

​

by Anđelka Bnin-Bninski

​The meantime timegate, or the mean-time²-gate examines the spatial and cultural potentials of the construction site boundaries for the capping of the Antwerp ring road. Starting from the very notion of boundary as a multilayered concept of various limits, the space-time relation is considered as a platform for contextual explorations and the act of the threshold design tactics, tailored for the Luchtbal and Lambrechtshoeken neighborhoods.

The workshop takes approximate meantime period of the construction site (10 – 15 yrs) as an interval for social and cultural experimentation and unfolding. The mean-time²-gate as a relation between the space and time is considered a specific research tool and the main outcome of the workshop. The precise positioning within the micro-political context provokes nuanced critical attitude and awareness to evolve with time and sensitivity to differences between the local communities. The focus is on the action of a twist – turning the boundary into a gate, a threshold and open possibility for a passage, where time and movement are essential. The principal research and design tactics are drawing, spatial drawing and geometrical inquiry. While drawing is the instrument for commoning processes between the students and inhabitants, geometrical inquiry is centered on the notions of a gate, time and movement. The foreseen result is a 1:1 mean-time²-gate spatial drawing exposing and triggering the dynamics, criticality and vulnerability of multiple and complex threshold geometries.

Illustration 1: The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2005
Illustration 2: Aramu Muru (Gate of the Gods), Peru, 2nd century B.C.E

by Marine de Dardel & Lorenza Donati

Designing the meantime – to think about the future is to have faith in today:

Inspired by the child’s wonderful ability to daydream and wander about, led by it’s subconsious desires, raw emotions and sensorial impulses,

Driven by a common fascination for the overwhelming abundance of information and endless multiplicities of perception, contradictions and complexities of sites apprehended through the means of multidisciplinary sources and a referential vocabulary,

Urged by the imperatives of contemporary situations, socio-political incentives and both historical scenarios and ficitonal narratives,

Supported by contemporary media and technologies, based on open source data and universally accessible tools,

We aim at the reporting of hard facts and data as well as the recording of subjective (his)stories, experiences and dreams.

The students shall combine systematic research and on-site surveying (such as photographic reportage and recording) with their subjective perceptions to suggest alternate stories thanks to multi-disciplinary sources. The aleatory or strategic ordering of images shall produce shock, tension and poetry, and potentially endless narratives.

Past, present, and future becomings of the ring road and all impacted districts of Antwerp will beintertwined, generating unprecedented stories in which actors, places, infrastructure, truth, fiction, promises, memories, wishes all take part. Such a collection of imagery could further be extended throughout the whole process of construction, exponentially de-multiplying the potential outcomes, and most importantly acting both as a recording canvas of the meanwhile as well as the screen onto which both adults and children may project their dreams for the future.

by Nina Haarsaker, Hanna Landfald Hanssen & Gro Rodne

Waiting for something else opens for possibilities to engage, invite, make, form former impossibilities, and if with great success: changing the ongoing process and plans, and continue for decades ahead.

The feeling of taking chances, no fear.

Being in a design process always challenges us into being in the in-between, the liminal and the uncertain. In this workshop you will be working directly and bold as a group with the simple and what we find “a lot of” of resources and materials. The goal is to rediscover what we find the most valuable in life.

What is freedom? What is the strength of the meantime?

Anything and the strange can happen.

by Kitti Baracsi

What is a place without stories? What if they can help the making of a not-yet place by experiencing its present in our imagination? The workshop aims at experimenting through the power of imagination together with children of 10-14 years old to create an already present at the construction site through specific urban legends about it. Based on an inquiry into what is the human heritage of Luchtbal, we engage in an exercise of imagination through which we can create the legends of the place. A place yet to be constructed needs a story yet to be written, but the elements are rooted in the surrounding areas’ human heritage, the way people live and narrate their lives. Narrating those lived experiences along with desires, creates the continuum between past, present and future.

The workshop builds on Luchtbal’s local knowledge, as well as the exploration of what is/will be happening ‘over the ring’. Through collective mapping, recording of sounds, photos, videos we create the base for the exercise of imagination. We collectively design and construct an installation (both digitally projected and physically constructed) to recreate the imagined legends and create a moment of celebration. Ideally, we can turn this moment into a small carnival, inspiring the subversion by the imagined ‘urban legends’, turning bodies into ‘constructions’ that carry around their ‘yet to be lived’ stories.

by Kristina Careva & Rene Lisac

The City Acupuncture method aims at improving city
life quality through regeneration of public space. The
method has 3 main pillars: small and precise
interventions in the urban fabric can significantly
improve urban life; interventions should be designed in
the interdisciplinary discourse; and with the
participation of the interested stakeholders.

The upcoming Antwerp regeneration is dramatically
changing relations and image of the city, revealing 3
levels of fracture: in space, social relations, and time.
Can small City Acupuncture interventions support this
process of triple fracture healing? How can a rough and
intensive construction process be soothed by precise
urban acupuncture? How can local children that will
grow up together with these processes be successfully
involved?

The workshop has a sequence of activities intended to
obtain fast and precise results in a short period with
divergent phase (broad mapping of all relevant facts
and ideas) and convergent phase (focusing on key
aspects and actual interventions). Students in
interdisciplinary groups will be asked to creatively react
and design small interventions in public spaces: either in
the ring itself, on its border, or close by. The
participation of the school children, as the best target
audience and critics, is intended in the middle of the
workshop and on the final presentation.

by Federico Taverna & Siebrent Willems

There is no doubt that the capping of the road will constitute a
radical change for the entire city and the adjacent
neighbourhoods. However, we believe the city can also be
transformed by everyday events: richness can come from the
adjustment in scale or context of conventional elements,
producing unusual meanings. Therefore, the workshop will
pose the question: how can we design the ordinariness of the
future?

We will reflect on the relation between the small scale of the
objects versus the large scale of the ring road, and the influence
upon the intermediate neighbourhood scale.
We will project a multitude of small-scale interventions in
order to affect the meantime of the ring road, focusing on the
effect of ephemeral and ordinary aspects of architecture, and
their role within the urban scale. We will explore the notions of
permanence and change, the notions of the ordinary and
intertwining scales, of symbolism and communication.
We will explore the potentialities of urban voids through a
speedtrip of collective designing, drawing and discussing
contemporary issues of design and urbanism. Starting from
their observations, students will define which elements can
kickstart the process of a transformation of the everyday.
Ultimately, the group will engage in the production of a
scenography, in which the interventions will constitute a
common scenario for the ring road.

by Carmen Van Maercke & Jitse Massant

Designing the meantime is understanding the meantime. But the meantime of what exactly? We propose to develop a double perspective in this workshop. One of the Luchtbal neighbourhood which has been subject to changes in the past and today has a fast changing population. A second of the building process of this enormous construction: who is building this infrastructure? What is the new temporal city that arises during construction? In history, these kinds of enormous constructions always left traces, be it the restaurants in Brunelleschi’s Domo di Firenze, the villages near the Transcontinental Railways in America (Im. 1) or the container villages arising in contemporary construction. 

How can the ecosystem of engineers, technicians, construction workers, etc. collide within this context of a fast changing community and what places of crossover do they establish? How can such a construction site not only be a burden but generate new urban dynamics? Can children learn how to built themselves in this enormous experiment? (im. 2) How does the lack of local amenities in Luchtbal react upon this temporary presence?

We intend to research how both nomadic temporalities interfere with and benefit from each other.

by Maarten Lambrechts & Alice Babini

We learned two important things during last year's workshop: 

1. there was an energy grid in the 1950s connecting Luchtbal and the Antwerp port; and
2. Lantis, the developer for the capping of the Antwerp ring road, is interested in the idea of an information centre right in the middle of the Luchtbal construction site

To combine both, students will be asked to design a platform in between the on-site cement factory, the water basin and the site cabins, so that we can merge an innate human attraction to energy sources (gather around the fire, under the tree, along the river bank) with the activity of the construction site. A turbo generator for Luchtbal's future socio-energetic network.

The result should be a complete transdisciplinary design: an urban vision for the energy grid that also anticipates the proposed Groenendaal park; a structure that accommodates both energy flows and social interaction; integrated furniture enabling activities for young and old; a site specific art installation that symbolizes the socio-energetic symbiosis of the project.

The output is an abstract yet highly performative model. The energy flows should be visible (ducts, pipes, wires) and generate as much as possible an effect on light, heat, wind, noise. For the technical expertise on the organization of the construction site, we will collaborate with the engineers of Lantis. To define a social program compatible with the infrastructure and logistics of the construction site, we will talk to children from local schools and elderly people from local neighborhood organizations.

¹ Groundbreaking ceremony and festivities at Luchtbal, 1949 

² Soviet Union festival for young workers at the construction site, 1950s

by Kristof Timmerman & Ine Vanoeveren

Over the past 18 months, virtual solutions have been used to recreate physical entities:
virtual museum collections, virtual festivals, virtual plays, etc… Most of them are an exact
copy of their physical form – a digital twin. These initiatives arose from existing institutions,
with existing, physical content and existing real-life communities.

What if we turn this approach upside down and start from a virtual concept, while
anticipating the physical space created by the capping of the road? Can we create a virtual
space and bring a virtual community together, that can be transported or transformed into
an unknown, physical environment in 10-15 years from now? How to design a space for a
virtual community, while the real-life community will only develop in the near/far future? In
what ways can we accommodate virtual concepts for an audience/community of the future?
In this workshop we will brainstorm with the students about several virtual designs,
solutions and artworks for a physical area that doesn’t exist yet. We will provide them with
virtual tools and techniques, inspiration material from digital arts and virtual performances
and guide them through the conceptual trajectory of their own metaverse.

The goal of this workshop is to develop several virtual, innovating artistic concepts, awaiting the implementation of the real-life environments and formation of a new community.

by Aleksandra Sviridova, Ann Dooms & Jouke Verlinden

Computational power aiding or replacing designers?

As the movie “Humans Need not Apply” (2014)¹ emanates, both unskilled and skilled jobs
can be replaced by automated systems that combine emerging techniques from robotics
and artificial intelligence. This can be considered as a threat or an opportunity – in this
workshop, we choose for the latter!

In Computer says Yes, we will explore the power of contemporary generative neural
networks such as Dall-E². Furthermore, the workshop participants will use emerging
augmented fabrication means to manufacture full-scale prototypes (shaper origin/digital
knitting). Finally, the results and insights will be showcased in a local exhibition.
The application of the workshop is aimed at new furniture for home/school, in such we can
engage local schoolchildren and give these high-tech means a more humane perspective.

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU 
² https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/