project24:Interactions
VARIATIONS.INTERACTIONS
VARIATIONS between contemplation and excitement
Variations has the ambition of being open around the clock. This turns Interactions into one of the most important factors driving the design process. Variations "behaves" the way it does by identifying and enhancing connections.
VARIATIONS. Public Baths during day, Club during night.
Both during day and during night,Variations is a public building. The most important design unit as identified by the team is one pool-space plus complementary activities (described as space between two structural ribs).
One pool-space can be used by 20 adults(inside water) and another 10 spread in complementary spaces. The same goes for children's pools (15 + 5). This means a maximum of 210 persons inside the Public Baths at any given time.(170 adults and 60 children).
The same pool-space becomes a dance floor during night. This brings the number of people using the club to a maximum of 600.
A generic association of Variations Public Baths would be The Therme Vals of Peter Zumthor. The comparison refers to a certain atmosphere that is inevitably linked to the experience of working with water:a sense of serenity, contemplation, relaxation and solemnity. Zumthor's project conveys respect towards water as a parameter of wellbeing.
In contrast, the Variations clubbing experience gives a measure of the vibrant night-life necessary for turning RDM into a destination in South-Holland and Rotterdam. Paradiso in Amsterdam can become a reference in this respect. The Club aquires a former religious space located in the heart of the city and plays with people's perceptions to create a kind of complicity with what is generally seen as the, quite shallow, cult of entertainment: clubbing.
The water project's main distinct feature is that of combining these two aparently opposite images. Variations makes The Therme Vals and Paradiso possible in one space in one day. Having this in mind Variations is all about transitions.
VARIATIONS' behavior is defined by three major connections:
Entance from The Digital Gardener, from Babel Tower / from Lusthof
The Digital Gardener Connection is supplying clean water to the Public Baths and constitutes a link to the Landscape Network of the RDM Dock. This is a permanent connection, an anchor-connection, which also allows for people information and energy to constantly be transferred to and from Variations. "Water for behavior's sake!" is the slogan that explains the need of Variations to find an actuator for the Public Baths. This actuator is the water of the RDMDock.
The Babel Connection will make Variations part of the tower's experience. Being so different, these projects can complement each other. The project needs a powerful gateway into RDM during the day, but a gateway that allows for Variations not to lose its ambition to work with water in the purest way possible. The projects are similar in this respect: neither wants to lose grip of their core idea. Variations offers the Tower a quite straightforward experience of water: WaterWorks! is the key phrase of this connection.
The Public Bath Variations are a public-private investment. The duality of ownership of the project itself and the duality of the investing party leads to a duality of the program. This duality will be referred to as Multiple Personality. It is quite obvious that most of the projects in RDM offer day-oriented activities.
As Variations needs to be open around the clock(a requirement of the team-brief) it must reinvent itself to fill the need of night-time activities in the dock. Variations brands itself as a hotspot for night-life in RDM and in this way comes closer in program to Lusthof. This is a night-time-underwater connection. Variations and Lusthof share visitors and workers, Variations transforms into an over-the-top nightlife underwater experience, supplementing Lusthof's scenario.
Variations negotiates its positions between these projects, its philosophy is that interactions must be turned into connections through behavior, and also through further refining and specializing the behavior can the connections become stronger and the project more successful.
Using these connections Variations becomes an attractor for RDM Rotterdam. In themselves the assemblages: Variations-Digital Gardener, Variations-Babel Tower and Variations-Lusthof give added value to the RE-RDM Project by creating a mechanism which can manage and bring together crowds with apparently different interests and expectations.
VARIATIONS to interactions with RDM
Variations is linked to the following entities:
People: architecture and urban planning professors visiting RDM.[[1]]
The interview is relevant to our project as it raisis practical questions as accessibility and potential for local and municipal development, but also touches isuues as: the design exercise in itself - site may be interesting for some approaches but totally uninteresting for others; to build or not to build (what is really important for the site and why)Even if the interview does not answer all the questions, it still made us think...
users&users: swarm(flock)member-royal swan:
the idea behind the tagging and analisys process was finding aspects of variation on site. The swan is a succesful actor on the RDM landscape.
Objects: pontoon(s)[[2]] This pontoon is an important connecting element between the dock and the visiting ships, creating an adaptable moving link among the two.
traffic mirror[[3]] The traffic mirror faces the land,it stands exactly at the corner of the site, changing perceptions_variations. For VARIATIONS, the mirror is an expression of changing attitudes towards the dock(from land)and vice versa.
These objects/people offer different ways of lookig at, and understanding, the site.
