Fellows

Seasonal Effective Design of Public Furniture - Renée Miles Rooijmans

Renée Miles Rooijmans ( Netherlands )

Through a seasonal lens I explored the terrain of ZK/U looking for pitfalls, friction and needs in the interaction between people and the built and natural environment. By initiating a weekly fire in front of the residency building, I invited people to experience a simple intervention that instantly brings people together in the cold public space, something ZK/U lacks during the winter months. Besides the fires I worked on two projects that both had seasonality as a theme, yet with fairly different approaches and outcomes. 

Urba(n)est was an exploration of how birds use public space and what we could learn from that, with the act of creating a nest as a warm safe place and the use of local building material as the main topics. I invited people to built a nest during the OPENHAUS with seasonal material that I had gathered on the ZK/U terrain.

Migratory Benches came from an observation I made, also on the ZK/U terrain, where I saw this bench that had been taken from it's original spot and was put underneath a shelter in the playground area. I started relating to this bench, by writing about it as if I were the bench. By giving public furniture a narrative I wanted to explore the way people look at these benches and how they use them throughout the seasons. During the OPENHAUS I let the bench tell a story to visitors about where it was from and about it's dreams.