Tag Archives: Strategic Interventions

A giant monkey rock, that is how the office of the future might well look like

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Sitting kills. RAAAF | Barbara Visser made with their Outstanding Landscape of Affordances a vision on the future of the workplace where the chair and the table are no longer the starting point. Barbara Visser is a visual artist and since 2014 chair of the recently re-established Society of Arts of the Netherlands Royal Academy (KNAW). This new work was commissioned by the Netherlands Chief Government Architect and motivated by a widely shared feeling of dissatisfaction with present-day standardized open spaces for “flex-working” as implemented at the various ministries, municipalities and universities.

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Medical research has suggested that constantly sitting at work is bad for you. Even worse, a recent BBC News article noted: “We can’t simply fix it by heading for the gym.” Sitting kills. The BBC-article was titled: “Could offices change from sitting to standing?” Outstanding Landscape of Affordances shows how our offices could invite a more active and healthy life style. RAAAF | Barbara Visser presented an animation of a futuristic landscape of possibilities for working while standing up, a sculpture to be realized by the artists in Amsterdam later this year.

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The mute animation ‘Sitting Kills’ shows a large rock-like structure. It is designed out of a thousand different possibilities for working in positions between standing and laying. The key is that the sculpture’s affordances stimulate people to take up different working positions during the day and promotes concentration. The richness of this landscape of affordances gives people the freedom to find the optimal position for their different tasks and needs during the working day. This vision presents a radical break with regular office furniture and current working models such as “flex-working”, which all are still based on sitting. In fact our societies’ entire surroundings are designed for being seated. This is a first step towards a future in which standing at work is the new norm. A lifelong health where we are both physically and mentally active.

This project is is also a next step in visualizing the landscape of affordances, this time focusing on possibities for standing, leaning and hanging provided by the monkey rock-like sculpture. Links to earlier visualizations related to Erik Rietveld’s VIDI-project ‘The Landscape of Affordances’ can be found here.

Designboom’s coverage of the animation can be found here.

See also how Barbara Visser has filmed the tendency towards optimal grip on standing affordances in these making-of movies: 

Update 11/12/14: The Landscape of Standing Affordances has now been built as an enactive art installation, see here.

Vacancy Studies: Toward a new professional and academic field

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Proud to present our new book Vacancy Studies!!
A first media-preview for the international press will take place where it all started: at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The book is available in the better book stores and online here and now.

Vacancy Studies: Towards a new professional and academic field

Many bunkers, forts, churches, castles, hospitals, water towers, post offices, prisons, palaces, and airports are empty. Thousands of them. The book Vacancy Studies focusses on the affordances they offer and provides the architecture world with an optimistic perspective on the temporary reuse of vacant spaces.

According to RAAAF (Rietveld Architecture Art-Affordances), there is great potential in vacant public and government buildings. At the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, RAAAF visualized the gigantic scale of these vacant spaces in an installation called Vacant NL. The worldwide media attention by organizations such as The New York Times, The Guardian and The Architectural Review shows the international relevance of RAAAF’s vision for the new field of Vacancy Studies.

Artists, architects, and other designers can make a major contribution to social issues such as vacancy and climate change, and this requires new ways of working. Climate change for instance requires re-using existing resources including vacant buildings and terrains. The field of Vacancy Studies has been further developed in the practice of RAAAF and by a multidisciplinary team at the Sandberg Institute, Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam. The book ‘Vacancy Studies: Experiments and Strategic Interventions in Architecture‘ introduces the design approach of ‘strategic interventions’, and presents new ideas and experiments. Vacancy Studies is an indispensable reference work for anyone interested in the possibilities of vacant spaces.

This book consists of two parts:

Part I, Surfing on a Sea of Vacancy, presents a vision of the potential offered by vacancy and a new way of analyzing and designing known as ‘strategic interventions’. Some radical experiments for knowledge development are presented in this part;

Part II, Parachuting above Vacant NL deals with experimentation in art & architectural design education and in real life.

RAAAF (Ronald Rietveld, Erik Rietveld & Arna Mackic) wrote this book together with Jurgen Bey, Barbara Visser, Ester van de Wiel en Martine Zoeteman. Ronald & Erik Rietveld are the editors-in-chief. The book is available in English and Dutch. Graphic Design by Studio Joost Grootens.