14 — AMSTERDAM TRANSFORMATORWEG (NL), WINNER — MEDIA SLOBODA > SEE MORE P207
the transition from monofunctional to versatile, the project links new functions: a textile innovation centre, a textile recycling pavilion, knowledge production and transmission workshops, etc. And to effect the transition from an isolated production area to a productive urban milieu, the project also introduces porosities into the existing buildings, outlines passages between the different constituents of the urban territory with what the project team calls “gate-architectures”. Leaving room for uncertainty, connecting scales, intensifying what is already there: all this is about putting the legacy of the productive city to work, and it is also 15 — GUEBWILLER (FR), WINNER — PRODUCTIVE ARTICULATIONS > SEE MORE P211
about changing our methods of design with the aim of not creating tomorrow’s wastelands today. Re-member:5
architecture given to the MediaHub (combination of a
to “recall” what the productive city was and “reshape”
vertical residential plane and a plinth combining living
what it could become again.
spaces, workspaces and public spaces) should then be understood as a sort of infrastructure conceived in interaction with a digital interface. It should also be specified that this strategy of intensifying a thematic function is implemented here without even touching the buildings that initially house that function (a requirement of the specifications). An interesting point of comparison with the winning project Productive Articulations in Guebwiller, where the team reverses the order of action and proposes to intensify, or more precisely to “capitalise upon”, the productive legacy of the site by converting its built structure. Dividing, adding, connecting, revitalising: four architectural operations to reshape the built heritage of the old textile industries. More than this, though, while the project carves into the existing fabric, its aim is to redevelop a dynamic productive mesh, capable of adapting to the new conditions of the textile market and, in the process, to reconnect with its symbolic legacy (fig.15). Through the reshaping of the existing fabric, this process of intensifying the city’s historical specificities serves as a sort of updating of a model of activity that is still and already present. To affect
Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Paris, Galilée, 1993, p.94 2 Donna Haraway, Manifeste Cyborg et autres essais : sciences – fictions – féminismes. Paris : Exils éditeurs, 2007 [1985], p.106 3 Cf. the catalogue of the City on the Move Institute’s international exhibition, “Passages, transitional spaces for the 21st-century city”. New York, Barcelona : Actar Publishers, 2017. 4 Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door”, trad. Mark Ritter, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 11 (1994), pp. 5–10 ; republished in Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture. A reader in cultural theory. London: Routledge, 1997, pp.63-67. 5 Metaplasmic formulation proposed by Donna Haraway; French version by Vinciane Despret in « En finir avec l’innocence. Dialogue avec Isabelle Stengers et Donna Haraway », in Elsa Dorlin, Eva Rodriguez (dir.), Penser avec Donna Haraway. Paris: PUF, 2012. 1
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