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The Time Tower

Alexandra Sonnemans designed the Time Tower: a sculpture, vantage point and exhibition space in one immediately next to Sonneveld House, where ‘the layering of past, present and future becomes tangible’. As a designer, Sonnemans prefers to build in a modular way and aims to create the most meaningful gesture possible with the least amount of material. For that reason, the Time Tower is built from scaffolding material and wrapped in semi-transparent mesh fabric – a subtle reference to the city in transformation. Sonnemans: ‘The big challenge was really to make the tower both respond to the villa and be a sculpture in its own right. Here, I was greatly inspired by Sonneveld House, which is not only a shining example of Nieuwe Bouwen, but also a layered interplay of disciplines. It is a true gesamtkunstwerk.’


Gesamtkunstwerk

‘That is how I see the Time Tower as well,’ Sonnemans continues. ‘The exhibition in the tower is an integral part of the design, printed on transparent fabric that also forms the façades. The outer textile layer is coloured and patterned, based on the colours and curtains in the interior of Sonneveld House and designed in collaboration with Team Thursday. The inner layer carries the exhibition, which was curated by OMI. This expo consists of archive material with drawings, photos and texts from 1924 to 2024 that show the development of the Land of Hoboken into Museumpark. The higher you get in the tower, the more transparent the walls become. It means that you are looking through the layers of time at archival photos, with glimpses of the present behind them – in layers, like scenography.’

‘RA Month is a topical and critical event that challenges us as designers to reflect on our profession and our role in society.’ – Alexandra Sonnemans

Boundary between public and private

This year’s RA Month theme is Garden of the City. Sonnemans: ‘In the context of this theme, the tower questions the boundaries between public and private. The Land of Hoboken was a private estate that became public, but Sonneveld House is another private domain. It raises questions about how public the public space is, and how that fact changes over time.’ What is Sonnemans most looking forward to once the Time Tower is actually standing? ‘The layered transparency of the tower invites visitors to experience the surroundings more consciously. The place as it is now plays a role, but also the past that visitors learn about in the exhibition and the future that lies ahead. With the light changing throughout the day and according to weather conditions, a new layered reality unfolds in front of the visitor each time.’

Overbrug

Behind Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, there will be a temporary bridge connecting the museum to the Rose Garden. This Overbrug was designed by Daan Bakker and Catherine Visser of DaF-architecten, on the spot where a bridge once stood in the past. ‘The place is incredibly special. Over the years, a great deal has happened and different garden styles have been employed,’ Bakker and Visser explain. ‘In the 1930s, it started as very orderly, with neat rose beds, beech hedges and avenue trees flanking straight paths. In 1992, Yves Brunier redesigned Museumpark between the Nieuwe Instituut and the Kunsthal, a design that has a certain rawness to it. Both parts have since become more bland: vandal-resistant and easier to maintain – ‘city-lounge chic’.

Green abundance

‘With this temporary bridge, we want to bring the wildness of Rotterdam’s urban edges back into the museum garden,’ Bakker and Visser explain. ‘We do this by temporarily softening the landscape and letting it become a terrain vague. Simple interventions such as not mowing the grass and a plank with waterside plants against the water’s edge will transform the barrenness into green abundance. Hopefully, the grass will continue to grow further and the bridge will completely melt into the surroundings, as it were.’

The Overbrug by DaF-architecten has a sustainable timber construction and is conceived as a construction kit: a beam floor with slats on top. The handrail consists of loose slats screwed to the edge beam. In the middle, part of the handrail folds down, so that the bridge can be closed off. ‘In terms of design, the bridge refers again to another historic bridge that once stood in the park. In our practice, we like to look at what was, but we certainly also design based on the existing situation and embrace what is already there.’

Reuse

Of course, the intervention in the form of a temporary bridge is only in Museumpark for a month. ‘After that, we would like to incorporate the wood into one of our projects, probably Stadspark West. Reusing the bridge in one of Rotterdam’s outskirts is part of the concept of RA Month, which after all aims to explore the Garden of the City in all its facets and topographies,’ Bakker and Visser conclude.

The Pergola

For the Rose Garden, Eileen Stornebrink and Willie Vogel of Studio Inscape have designed a temporary visitor centre. The centre looks a bit like a summer house and was named ‘Pergola’, as a reference to two rose pergolas. ‘The Pergola stands squarely in the middle of the footpath, so visitors are more or less ‘forced’ to walk through it,’ the designers tell me. ‘Besides, it is also practical: an intervention on the path cannot damage the grass.’ The visitor centre will be built entirely with sustainable or consciously sourced materials. Stornebrink and Vogel: ‘In other words: borrowed, second-hand or bio-based. We really need to start making do with things we are given or come across.’

The new gardener

In the Pergola, visitors can learn all about the soil, plants and animals in Museumpark. ‘Actually, this intervention is a great opportunity to give all our ideas and vision for gardens in the city a public platform,’ Stornebrink and Vogel continue. ‘Our vision is regenerative, biodiverse and bio-based. ‘The new gardener’ works in line with permaculture principles, for example – you first observe what is present in a garden, learn from it, and disrupt this life as little as possible. In our view, the Garden of the City is wild, not organised or neat and tidy. In addition, our ideas are strongly influenced by various ecophilosophers, including Bruno Latour. Here, we see the landscape consisting of different perspectives and participants, human and non-human. The plants, creatures and fungi, but also the skaters and homeless people, all use and maintain the park. In the Pergola, we give visitors an assignment and want them to empathise with one of these participants.’

‘We hope to spark the imagination of visitors with a different perspective on green living that they can translate to their own gardens.’ – Eileen Stornebrink and Willie Vogel (Studio Inscape)

Broad public programme

Every Sunday, the visitor centre will be the centrepiece of the Rotterdam Days with a broad public programme for young and old. Stornebrink and Vogel: ‘There are a large number of workshops planned. On how to build and maintain a worm hotel, for instance, how to make a planting plan and how to incorporate wild plants into dishes. Ultimately, we hope that in part through our intervention, the conversation about urban ecology will be triggered among professionals and the wider public. And that visitors are stimulated with a different perspective on the green living environment they can then translate to their own façade garden or back garden.’

Exhibiton ‘Garden of the City’

In the passageway between Erasmus MC and Museumpark, Chantal Schoenmakers and Tomas Dirrix (Atelier Tomas Dirrix) have designed a modular scenography for an exhibition about the green future of the city. This exhibition was put together by AIR and OMI in response to an open call, and consists of work by some 20 different designers. It explores the theme of this RA Month – Garden of the City – in four sub-themes: How public is public space?, The voice of the park, The healthy city of the future and The everyday garden.
‘The passageway is a very defining space,’ say Schoenmakers and Dirrix. ‘It is a corridor almost 100 metres long and 4 metres wide that gives on one side a panoramic view of Museumpark and is actually a kind of dividing line between nature and city.’

Modular design

Before starting work on the exhibition, they thought hard about the impact of the design. Shoemakers and Dirrix: ‘How do you deal with all the material needed to make an exhibition like this? What is the ‘afterlife’ after four weeks? With this in mind, we came up with a design of stacks, which can be detached and used as a bench, chair, stool and table. For each sub-theme, we use those modules to build different frames on which to display the exhibition’s models, photos and drawings. On the one hand, the frames are architectural, almost buildings in themselves, but together they also create an entire landscape setting. And only if you look very closely can you recognise that they are built up from of individual benches, chairs, stools and tables.’

Life after the exhibition

‘Given the time and budget, we had to design something that could be built efficiently,’ Schoenmakers and Dirrix continue. ‘That was a really fun puzzle to solve, involving clear principles – with minimal sawing, we created a bench. In total, the design consists of some 200 modules.’ And what about the afterlife? ‘We want to give away the benches, chairs, tables and stools to Rotterdammers so that they get a function in the public space. For RA Month, what we designed and produced was done very intentionally. How we interact with nature, public spaces and materials in the future is very important to us as designers.’