The Ambiguous Landscape

Master thesis (2018)

Authors

T.W. Anema Architecture and the Built Environment

Contributors

R.J. Nottrot (supervisor 1)
J.A. van de Voort (supervisor 1)
J.P.J.M. van de Laar (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Architecture and the Built Environment
Copyright: © 2018 Tiemen Anema
Context Storage Agriculture Farm Polder Groningen Landscape Archive Scale Laboratory Countryside Research-by-doing Eemspolder Land-art Production landscape Reed
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Published Date

01-02-2018

Language

English

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Faculty

Architecture and the Built Environment

Abstract

The countryside of Northeast Groningen (NL) is radically and silently changing. Demographic shrinkage, digitalization in agriculture and the arise of new big typologies as windturbines, datacenters and mega farms are transforming the countryside of Groningen into a desolate production landscape.

The research is concerned how the landscape of Groningen can be translated into architectural form. Thereby the thesis learns from the landscape and explores context as a generating tool. At first the sea-clay landscape of Groningen is historically and geographically defined and second, more sensitively, examined for its architectural value. The open and wide landscape of Groningen is characterized by nature and the cultivation of man, especially in the last 200 years. Through time the threshold between the natural and unnatural blurred. This current presence of the cultivated landscape is explored in material, landscape, typology and atmosphere.

Resembling these new emerging big typologies the design brief consists of an agricultural research institute of 30 000 square meter, including a laboratory, farm and crops storage. The institute is placed in a typical large scale sea polder in the most northern part of Groningen.

Scale, position and movement play an inevitable role in the relation between the buildings and its surrounding landscape. In doing so the buildings are experienced big as small simultaneously, putting its scale in relation to the wide polder landscape.

The climatized crops storages are disconnected of their direct surroundings for an optimal storage climate. The paradox of this introvert arrangement is, that the outer facade can therefore be completely devoted to its surroundings; the landscape. Made completely out of natural reed the facade gives an ambiguous feeling to the highly engineered structure. An lazy arch in the facade interrupts the horizon, a constant sharp line in the wide ad open landscape that divides the sky from the soil.

Instead of conserving the old, the proposal embraces these new changes to enrich the existing qualities of the landscape. The proposal takes existing qualities as point of departure without disregarding the technical and efficient character of the new emerging typologies. By embracing the new typologies existing qualities of the landscape are emphasized and even amplified. In radically rethinking the countryside, the identity and experience of our rural areas is developed instead of forgotten.