A Narrated City
L. Shu (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
M.G.J. van Gelderen – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
L.G.A.J. Reinders – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
This is a story of Heyvaert, through the eyes of a tailor, a food trader, a resident and the kiosk owner. Employing the concept of the narrative city and theory of everydayness, the project presents a collection of the neighborhood’s lived experiences, routines and encounters. These multiple perspectives revel the city’s nonsingular identity, formed by overlapping and shifting viewpoints.
Following the traces of the local space appropriation, including abandoned furniture, informal storage, food rubbish, and patterns of movement, the project explores the southern side of Heyvaert, dedicated mainly to the food trade sector. The project plot, located in proximity to the slaughterhouse, currently holds multiple uses, including a tailor, a residential unit and grocery shops, reflecting the coexistence of diverse everyday activities within a single urban fragment.
In celebration of these overlapping conditions, the proposal introduces the idea of the kiosk as a spatial binder between the commerce, residential, and productive. The intervention revives the almost forgotten idea of the kiosk as a public catalyst, becoming the meeting ground between the functions and forming a threshold between the street, public and courtyard, private.
What already exists there remains, and the added fabric only emphasizes the layers of materials and the architecture’s evolution over time. Brick becomes one of the protagonists that records the intervention not just as a surface “dressing” but expresses the act of making, through its permanence, texture and capacity to age. It reinforces the idea of continuity and urban memory.
The resulting urban patchwork becomes an architectural celebration of Heyvaert’s heterogeneous identities formed by its users. It frame the the city not as finished object but as a material and social construct continuously produced through the lives and everyday practices of its protagonists.