Lunds Universitet
Leeuwarden, Netherland
In collaboration with Raghad Als-Haki and Eleonor Verant
The world is growing at an unsustainable rate in many terms. By 2050, the world’s population is calculated to reach 10 billion, a 2.5 billion increase in 30 years. At the same time, we have reached the tipping point where more people live in cities than in the countryside.
As invited architects by the city of Leeuwarden to explore new projects in and around the city, we started asking questions of how people relate to their landscape.
What is the landscape? What cultural properties and difficulties does it contain?
We argue that as an urban population, we have lost our understanding, knowledge, and connection to what we call the countryside—the rural.
What we, however, have not lost is the dependency on the countryside and the people still living their lives within it. Our goal with this project is to show the dependency and relationship between city and countryside and, through architecture, reinvoke an identity connected to the landscape we live in.
What we are introducing is an agora, a democratic space for meetings and events about the landscape where everyone is invited. The building sits within the landscape, and its location forces visitors to travel through the landscape by foot or bike to reach it. Other features include roofs that collect water, with the filtration process exposed as a room-dividing element within the building.
Lastly, there is a server room where a virtual space is set up, hosting information and forums about the landscape, within the landscape. It highlights the paradox of virtual spaces and juxtaposes the servers to the present Friesian landscape.