In a curious counterpoint to the accumulation of comfort and anxiety on the ground, Rotterdam finds liberation in its phantasmagoric skyline. From a distance, it is a promise of urban intensity, but once the city is entered, on the ground level, the intensity is gone.
In essence, the project by Untitled is positive: to (unabashedly) embrace Rotterdam’s dream of creating a city of towers and to redirect this power to reshape the public domain. In this project of ‘towers and squares’, the main question becomes how the tower volumes relate to the (public) surface level.
Untitled is founded in an intention to make architecture, to try and tackle (any given) topic with architectural project. At odds with the contemporary architectural discourse, Untitled tests whether architectural design can still be poignant when put in parallel with urban scale enquiries. It formulates methods for composing (architectonic) spaces and for doing research by making projects. It practices architecture as a discipline of space and phenomenology and tries to investigate the consequences of these ideas.
Fear of the City
Rotterdam’s public ground reveals a pattern which is to a large extent build to the comfort of its inhabitant. Ticket machines, ATM booths, pavement protection, video cameras, paid parking places, fences, poles and signs, the ‘neighborhood watch’, the rubber-tile playground, are the city’s sedimentation of certainty.
The Untitled project is developed in the context of Groepsportretten 04 [group portraits 04]. For more information on Groepsportretten and the program of the whole day, check www.gp04.nl.
Group portraits of young architects 2004 (GP04) is a project from the Architecture Fund and the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture organized by Urban Affairs.
A project by UNTITLED: Milica Topalovic, Bas Princen, Office Kersten Geers David van Severen.