Interview met Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen

The site for the City Visions-project in Kosice lies along the embankments of Horvath river. What are your first thoughts about this site?

Kersten Geers: It's very big and very interesting.

David van Severen: It's also strange, because it's like a piece that's cut out of the city tissue.

Kersten: But I guess for us this site is also an opportunity to find out more about eastern European city development. We only knew panel housing estates from Berlin until now. But they're quite different from the ones we saw here. There's a certain beauty, but also an absurdity about them.

David: Yes, somehow all our prejudices about communist architecture have proven to be true, but in a good way! For us it's a new discovery that not only poor people live in the estates, but even the city architect. It's not a ghetto. What's also striking is that the time of panel housing estates only lasted for 40 years, but has had such a big spatial impact. And now the country is open to architectural influences from all over the world again. It's intriguing to see this change.

You're clearly very charmed by the panel housing estates beyond the river. For the locals, however, they're a reality and not very exciting. Quite a few would like to get rid of them. We've been shown a project by the architect Peter Pasztor, who wants to create the exact opposite of panel housing on the riverfront: a housing area with closed block structures.

Kersten: I don't believe in this opposition between slabs and blocks. I'm not so sure if people here are so one-directional. Maybe I'm naive, but I think that we're all smart enough to know that a contemporary solution has to be a mixture of many things.

David: It's anyway an issue that only comes up when you talk about housing. There's more to this task than just housing. After all, it's a huge area, measuring 7 kilometres in length. In this sense, it's important to also talk about aspects like water management, landscape and so on.

Do you think that this site really needs a re-development? Is it important for the city of Kosice?

Kersten: Yes, I think so. At least there has to be a vision or a plan. It doesn't mean that it has to be implemented very quickly.

David: And it also doesn't mean that the site has to change dramatically. It's not unpleasant to walk there now. It's being used in a very informal way and many of the green areas are undefined. But we wouldn't want to colonize them with a perfect architectural plan. We quite like this natural artificial landscape.

Kersten: There's an interesting scale present on the site, which hovers in-between architecture and infrastructure and which means that you can allow yourself to make a big gesture. At the moment, this in-between scale is only visible in a rather dirty, decaying state. But you can also look at this as a potential quality of the site.

Do you already know whether you want to approach the project on an urban or on an architectural level?

Kersten: We will probably deal with the whole site, but that doesn't mean that we'll make a simple scheme which covers the entire area. We're very interested in this dubious aspect of scale.

David: There's a clash between architecture and infrastructure, but at some point you can also see them as an entity, and then scale isn't such a big issue anymore. Of course the river is a huge element, and if you just place a housing block next to it, it gets dwarfed. But if you create roads or bridges, there's a different relationship. That's something that interests us in general. We're doing similar projects at the moment in Kortrijk and Turnhout: both are infrastructural projects, but at the same time they're very architectonic. They create spaces, they create a certain quality for the area.

The other city which you deal with for City Visions is Mechelen. Do you think that there are parallels with Kosice?

Kersten: Yes, definitely. Well, of course there are a million differences, and of course we have a different approach to Mechelen because we're from Belgium. In Kosice we walked around and tried to understand a little bit what's going on. In Mechelen we tried not to walk around in order not to find out too much, because we already knew so much about it. In an abstract sense, though, we think that both sites, however different they may be, have a lot in common. It has to do with abandoned infrastructure, closeness to the old city centre, and there's also a linear element, represented by the canal or river and the railroad tracks.

David: We're actually considering to make two identical designs. It's a challenge, an experiment. And it might be an interesting way of comparing the two cities.

Kersten: It's a way of doing project-based research. You introduce a measuring device, a kind of ruler, to the two cities, which shows up parallels and differences. It might work or it might not. But in both cases, the result should be interesting.