PLAYGROUND BINNENPLAATS (Competition, 2024)

The square and fountain between the gymnastics school buildings in 1931. (Rotterdam City Archives collection)

Extending Historic and Existing Relationships

A Public Interior / Forum

Future Legacy of Relationships

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Competition for P1 Projects / De Sportschool. Team: Freya Spencer Wood and Setareh Noorani
P1 Projects, SN/FSW studio and Wijkraad Oud- Charlois present Playground Binnenplaats: a pavilion and mobile forum for conversations and actions on the right to the city.

Located in Oud-Charlois, Rotterdam-South, and connected to a newly reclaimed building called de Sportschool, the proposal refers to the location’s historical programme of the neighbourhood playground and square. The project re-mobilises this capacity and offers a venue to enact forms of reclaiming and rethinking the value of space, through a public forum, artistic interventions, and play. The programme is supported by a range of designed elements, a tool kit, that function as mobile infrastructure which open up the potential to move the public forum to other locations in (Oud-) Charlois/Rotterdam where such activation through gathering, reflecting, and playing is needed.

Extending historic and existing relationships

Through the reuse of the square/playground of the newly founded Sportschool, the proposed pavilion and playground rehabilitates the local, historical landmark and connects the interior of the Sportschool with the primary school and the residential neighbourhood between the Dorpsweg and the Boergoensevliet. It also forms a community anchor towards the building of arts collective Foundation B.A.D and the nearby primary school Portus Juliana. The proposal rethinks the transient capacity of an entrance and how it can extend into public space, thus offering a gesture of an exteriorised interior that hinges on the original courtyard markings, water fountain and lantern of the pre-1970s building. Through extending relationships and histories outwards from and throughout de Sportschool, the playground pavilion offers a shelter, civic infrastructure and programming devices for practising resilience and joyful encounters. The extension spatially translates the wall/roof shape of the older building fragments of de Sportschool while the design language adopts cues from the gymnasium – celebrating the entrance space in the public realm.

A public interior/forum

The playground serves as both a working metaphor for practising democracy through assembly and assemblage of elements, and a literal playground for all generations in the neighbourhood. The pavilion is an abstraction of an exhibition module: it creates a (semi-)permanent autonomous living room and playground for social gathering, play, and rotational information. The assemblage acts as a moving forum: a room to ask locally relevant questions that could relate to topics such as the housing crisis, squatting, incomes, stakeholder networks, greenwashing neighbourhoods etc. The main structure (roof and walls) is made out of demountable, reusable segments. Moveable furniture displays research and objects as well as hosts performances and conversations from and between human and non-human members of the community.

Mobile civil infrastructure toolkit

The space is made up of components that are both interior and exterior and which can mutate into new configurations. Display walls/gym benches, seating/podium, lantern (flood light), water fountain and planters are designed to be mobile and sustainable (in material and detailing). Designing the programmed elements will be collaborative and will include a panel of local inhabitants and the Wijkraad Oud-Charlois (potential members of the initial cooperative of de Sportschool).

The elements are cooperatively owned, and thus can be ‘borrowed’ by anyone. When the pavilion moves, the abstracted sports floor markings, canopy, and base walls remain as demarcation and infrastructure for future use.