Community Art School

Abstract

The city of Nijmegen transformed drastically during the last century during its reconstruction period after the war. The city we know now is characterised by the commodification of city centre. With the proliferation of shopping in the city, the community and neighbourhood became overlooked. However, the people's mentality is still very much rooted in the social activism that identified the city of Nijmegen during the 80s. The need for commons stems from a global socio-economic crisis on the inability of market and state to govern the city. Commons is about building working systems for the subsistence of households outside of the market and state. It is also about the political dimension of approaching the space for non market functions in our neoliberal society, instead focusing on local industries, initiatives and communities. Increasingly there is an idea that architectural projects are not single-authored ventures, but rather complex and layered processes that depend upon multiple agencies that establish a commonality. Commons are constructed in the sense that their creation, existence, operation and persistence are matters of not pure accident or random chance, but instead of social practices and institutional design. An architecture of the commons should be understood as an intervention in these commons resources and in the collection of people, skills and knowledge that are part of them. The process of making architecture is strongly rooted with the notion of constructing commons and sharing between different people, skills and materials. Engaging in local material industries is not only important for the material itself, but also holds knowledge on the processing and construction techniques of the specific context. Memories, secrets and craftsmanship are part the network that commonalities of architecture are focussed on. It consists of different people with different knowledge, skills, materials and construction techniques. The artist community in Nijmegen has been pushed to the margins of society and the city due to exponentially rising market prices in the past decades. Whil Nijmegen promotes itself as an artistic city, it does little to actual facilitate the community. On the other side, while there are many artists and creative organisations present in the city, they rarely communicate or interact with each other. The program and location of the art school thus tries to address these two problems by providing an institution in the city centre. Being part of a collective urban plan, the art school presents, together with a public library and collective housing, a new urban proposal for the city of Nijmegen at the site of the Molenpoort. The urban plan fragments the bigness of the site into smaller pieces and changes the focus of the current program from shopping to more community oriented and driven functions, a more sustainable and habitable future for the city of Nijmegen. The thesis proposes an alternative look at how architecture can be part of the rise in bottom up iniatives in urban settings. As practice of architecture takes a turn towards the community and the local, architecture can provide a spatial foundation to bring different agencies to assemble a new network of commonality in the city. The shared knowledge of people and local industries can come together. It is about reconnecting the pieces of today's disconnected society.