Oats
Oats is an homage to the dutch Architect Aldo Van Eyck.
Oats investigates the potential of public spaces.
Oats is an open-call proposal for the 2018 Biennale of Architecture of Venice.
The 2018 Biennale of Architecture of Venice theme is "Freespace".
Our proposal for the open-call launched by the Spanish, Belgian and Dutch pavillions, is an homage to the Dutch Architect Aldo Van Eyck’s work.
The site of our open call represent an undefined freespace in between three separated national pavillions. We intended freespace as a space of potentials, a place of unexpressed imagination.
This is the chance of considering that many of our cities suffer nowadays of a lack of well designed public spaces, especially in those suburbs areas where many social tensions grow up every day.
Free and forgotten areas don't allow people to enjoy their social and public life.
We believe that this small intervention could be much more than an ephemeral representation of ideas.
We’re convinced that this site could work as a 1:1 experience of the potential of simple elements in a space. Our proposal is an experimentation to engage people with a real experience of public space during the next Biennale inauguration.
From a given Freespace to a designed and livable public space.
Reminding Van Eyck’s work, our team would like to show the potential and the importance of public spaces in our time urban life.
We decided to occupy the site with 4 representative elements of the playgrounds made by Van Eyck’s in the Netherlands during the II World War reconstruction.
Aldo Van Eyck started designing minimal playgrounds all around Holland, occupying the lots leftover by the war bombings. Those interventions on abandoned freespaces totally converted the neighborhood life. Children started going out for playing, for meeting, for imagining a new life after the war.
Van Eyck’s playground have been a spatial experiment capable of changing many urbanism ideas.
A bottom down way of thinking the urban environment, starting from minimal precise elements, that we’d like to bring back to the Biennale.
Architecture has the power of making people life better. Small scale interventions in unexpected undefined areas could provoque deep changings in everyday people life. This is what we want to show.
During the inauguration day we imagined 4 possible uses of our 4 elements, but much more could be imagined.
Our proposal is open and everyone could use these elements as he wants. This is the potential of a space made for people.
Tumbling bars could the base of an ephemeral table for a welcome drink, the jungle gym could be the place where new medias projection take place while children are playing. A sandpit could a super small open air hall to present all the open calls and the stepstones may work as a relax place of an informal talk.
For Aldo Van Eyck Place and Occasion were the keywords of his interventions.
We want to bring back his lesson to our time, showing how a freespace in front of 3 important national pavilions could completely change his nature becoming a shared area of meeting, solidarity, collaboration and new opportunities.