Practice Place: Living / Grounds

How do we create conditions for a sustainable and hopeful design practice? IABR 2024 introduces a Practice Place, a meeting space in the exhibition, where we call on the architecture community in the broadest sense to come together around the transformation of practice.

The first meeting starts with the soil. Historically, the soil of our country has determined how we live and build together. With the development of modernist solutions, spatial interventions have become increasingly independent of the natural subsurface. In recent decades, and recently with the Soil and Water and Steering policy line, there has been a movement in the other direction – one that moves with natural processes. This raises technical, but also cultural questions. How do we – in the realization that the soil is currently all too often over-demanded, exhausted or forgotten – root what happens above ground in the subsurface without nostalgia? And what knowledge, experiences, and design attitudes do we need for this?

This meeting invites active participation and the creation of connections between people who jointly hold a key to social change. Theatre collective Walden stimulates the imagination, Debra Solomon shares practical methods and techniques, and Lot Locher introduces the meeting. Curator Catherine Koekoek moderates.

Bodem/Leven is part one of a series of seven full-day workshops. The meeting is documented in a living archive in the exhibition, inspires a podcast series in collaboration with De Architect, and ultimately leads to a New Narrative for Architecture and Urbanism (NNAU) that will be festively presented during the closing weekend of the biennale.

The spoken language is Dutch.

The event is free, but registration is required

Practice Place logo. Image: Studio Le Roy Cleeremans