7 islands - 1 sea
The city center of Heerlen, Netherlands, boasts a dense and varied urban rooftop landscape, with large, grey, and uninviting surfaces dominating the view from the upper floors of the local museum, SCHUNCK Glaspaleis.
In 2019, SCHUNCK and the city of Heerlen aimed to unlock the untapped potential of these rooftop spaces in an open competition.
Along with collaborators Marco Cagnoni, Nazar Gresko and Oleg Asoiev, our proposal, THAIR (The Heerlen Archipelago of Island Roofs), envisioned a situation where the water levels of the world had raised 20m and the rooftops were seen as uncharted territories.
THAIR presented an opportunity to explore, investigate, asses and activate the new landscapes with a mentality counter to the attitude of previous frontier explorers: to integrate concepts of diversity and dispersity as opposed to past-era colonialism. Where once there was anthropocentric exploitation of nature and resources, we sought for a sustainable multi-species ecosystem.
We proposed to define a programmatic mission for the exploration of this terra incognita. Our vision would materialise itself in the form of a one-year-long program consisting of an ongoing tide of public workshops, lectures, exploratory and participatory developments held by prominent scholars, professionals, artists and designers. In parallel to these events, a group of temporary residents would live in the archipelago to illustrate the phases of the program, while being responsible for activating and communicating the ongoing processes. Every event in the program would be a derivative of previous encounters, each phase informing the next.
