Sam Jacob (FAT)
Tuesday 10 February 2009, 1:00pm
Sam Jacob, Fat presents
The Villa, Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet, Rotterdam
‘not Arcadia, but an imaginary Arcadia’
Part of The New Suburban Civic series of lunchtime talks.
FAT, The Villa, Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet, Rotterdam
The Villa is a community building which sits at the heart of the Heerlijkheid park designed by Fat. The design is intended to create a 21st century civic architecture for a suburban new town. It is a decorated shed, using timber rain screen cladding to create an architecture of communication which evokes Hoogvliet’s industrial past. The references to elements of nature in the entrance and in some of the “cut-out” features of the façade, recall the bucolic ideas on which the design of the New Town was originally based.
‘We wanted to manufacture a sense of place. Our approach is like Critical Regionalism from the opposite point of view. It is about abstraction and stylisation, but an abstraction that’s not heading towards meaninglessness, but trying to find a meaning. We want to articulate the complexity of the story, not reduce it.”
