Bricolage of Society

Abstract

The notion of bricolage has become an important point of view and enabling approach to the project in which the focus is placed on building a deep understanding and knowledge to develop greater sensitivity towards the existing – existing in terms of both the physical realm around us but also the people themselves that bring the animate into the built environment. The project site, where currently the shopping mall of Molenpoort in the city of Nijmegen, has a long history of transformations with different buildings emerging over the centuries and tangible traces of events embedded in the materiality of the surroundings. Together they compose an urban collage with distinctive fragments and historic layers. The resulting mixture of functions that usually do not appear in close relation: the church of Petrus Canisiuskerk, the shopping mall with the parking roof, the coffee shop street, and the surrounding housing, offered a great set of tools for us as architects bricoleurs. Therefore, accepting the existing collage in Molenpoort has led to a concept of the interweaving of the shopping mall, the church, the new intervention, and fragments of the surroundings into a complex urban entity so as to create a civic centre for the diverse subcultures present in Nijmegen. As a result, the project is symbolized by a circular path that ties together the different typologies, functions, and users and provides a full circular walk around. It is, as well, a gradual walk through the history and the present day of the site that gives the possibility to experience at close hand the bricolaged fragments. The selected program is questioning the role of the church and the shopping mall as truly social spaces in today’s society by introducing primary social activities. Such primary activities will happen in a dinning room, a community centre, a student housing, a learning centre, and a stage, all with the aim to stimulate social interaction between people with different backgrounds, social status, or religion. The project, that stems from a careful observation and appreciation of the context of Nijmegen – in terms of not only its urban collage with the available at hand materials but also of its colourful palette of inhabitants, aims at creating an architectural intervention in which the existing people of the city and the existing material structures could come together in order to generate a new public ground for the bricolage of society.