Graduation project
VERHOOGD VERTRAAGD Today we live in an urban society that is mostly characterized by acceleration, fast dynamic networks and a strongly increasing degree of social pressure. Stress, burnouts and depressions are examples of mental health complaints that are not strange in our everyday society; they are the result of an individual’s inability to escape from external, overwhelming stimuli within an urban context. However, this inability to escape excessive urban stimuli is not only a problem characteristic for urban life in the 21st century; it is also something to which individuals have been subjected to for at least 100 years (Simmel, 1903; Rosa, 2016). To find a solution for this urban problem that has only grown over time, the main question of this graduation studio called “The Aesthetics of Deceleration - Spaces of Slowness, between intermediate size and intermediate time” (TU/e 2019-2020) – is whether it is possible to link the design of intermediate spaces to the concept of slowness. This makes sure that, through the application of architectural and urban physical-spatial design elements including the mental experience of these – an individual can escape the overwhelming stimuli in an accelerated urban context: the inner city of the metropolis of Rotterdam. To find out whether there are already physicalspatial places of slowness perceptible in the current urban context of Rotterdam – in other words, places where individuals already can experience slowness in a fast-oriented urban environment – the project “VERHOOGD VERTRAAGD” (or in English “HEIGHTENED DELAYED”) started with ‘wandering through the city’ as a subjective research method.
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Striking from this search for slowness, the result was that places of slowness are scarce in the city center of Rotterdam. Actually, the city is characterized – or dominated – by acceleration, high dynamics, and the large scale highrise developments in the inner city of this metropolis. Should a new, elevated layer in the city be developed to implement this experience of slowness in the future city center of the metropolis Rotterdam; including the possibility that an individual can break free from the daily, dynamic, and accelerated city? Based on a critical reflection of the current and future high-rise developments, accompanied by the need to develop slowness in the inner city of Rotterdam, “VERHOOGD VERTRAAGD” has produced a utopian-realistic design proposal for the development of a second ground level in the future city of Rotterdam. The main concept is to implement a new layer at the height of 70 meters in particular (the current high-rise boundary in Rotterdam), consisting of a network of continuous, elevated, and layered public domains that must enable individuals to distance themselves from all overwhelming urban stimuli. Thereby, these public domains should also stimulate the metropolitan man in the experience of slowness within the accelerated urban context. In this graduation project, the concept is, on the one hand, developed as an urban strategic masterplan at the level of the city center of Rotterdam. In this masterplan, the newly designed high-rise buildings are – together with the already existing high-rise and the future high-rise developments as proposed by the Municipality of Rotterdam – divided
