Master Vacant NL - Vacancy Studies
The aim of Vacancy Studies is to equip designers as well as teachers and students in design education with new insights and tools to carry out this novel design task. This book marks a new professional field of study. Our starting point is the ‘Vacant nL’ exhibition for the dutch pavilion at the 2010 Venice architecture Biennale. The installation presented here demonstrated the unprecedented possibilities opened up by the 10,000 vacant public and government buildings in the netherlands. These structures date from seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twentyfirst centuries and include churches, convents, airports, palaces, prisons,water towers, lighthouses, fortresses and bunkers. this ‘sea’ of vacant heritage sites offers opportunities for unique uses as well as space for experimentation
and innovation.
The exhibition led RAAAF to start a number of follow-up projects and initiatives, such as developing the Studio Vacant NL master’s programme for the Sandberg instituut. The programme is a world first, aimed at training participants from different disciplines as specialists in the temporary use of vacant buildings and sites. Besides developing ‘temporariness as a strategy’, Studio Vacant NL is known forits one-to-one testing of the ambitions and development of tools for sequential temporary use: the constant moving from one building to another.
Data
Master Vacant NL | Vacancy Studies
Founders: Jurgen Bey, Ronald & Erik Rietveld
Education: Sandberg Institute (Master Gerrit Rietveld Academy), Amsterdam
Team: Ester van der Wiel, Barbara Visser, Martine Zoeteman, Ronald & Erik Rietveld
Support: Arna Mackic, Frank Havermans
Status: 2011-2012
Boekontwerp Vacany Studies: Studio Joos Grootens
Special thanks to: Ester van de Wiel
Reviews
Failed Architecture
What’s refreshing about RAAAF’s approach, is that their strategies start with research, and that they are not in the first place – if at all – about architectural design. In some cases (in their own work and in that of their students) it is more about ‘designing’ new collaborations in the hybrid knowledge economy, insightful maps and inventories, or unconventional real estate lease models. Eventually concepts are built and tested 1:1. Moreover, their Master’s programme allegedly is the world’s first dedicated to the subject of vacancy.
Archined
“Master builders of the in-between time, the emergence of a new field of practice [...]
The way Ronald Rietveld/RAAAF has, over the past five years, not only put the issue of vacancy in the Netherlands on the agenda, but has also contributed to a consistent way of thinking about and dealing with this spatial challenge, is truly inspiring for the Office of the Chief Government Architect. It is their open and inquisitive way of working, coupled with an intelligent and strategic approach, that arouses curiosity: is Rietveld/RAAAF also capable of putting new and other urgent spatial challenges on the agenda, and of connecting their potential to other societal issues?”
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