The pavilion is located in the garden of the Iona Foundation in the heart of Amsterdam’s historical centre. Set against a century-old tree, the structure offers a variety of uses throughout the seasons. The transparency and materiality allow a dialogue between the interior and the exterior, offering a space connected to the trees in the heart of the courtyard. The darkened wood recalls the materiality of the brick facade of the main house with the wooden columns inspired by the morphology of the branches, rising in the historical canal gardens. Harvested from the urban mines, this structure is composed of an assembly of reused materials sourced locally and assembled on site in an efficient prefabrication mode. The collective dimension lies in the self-construction process lead by studio ACTE and the permanent dialogue with the Foundation.
Identifying and selecting the reusable elements is essential in determining the size,
materiality and implementation conditions of the project. During the design stage, the structure is first thought of as an assembly where details and fillings remain flexible and replaceable in order to adapt to the availability of resources. At the same time, the search for locally sourced reusable materials at affordable cost defines the project. A dry assembly method, based on the principle of bolting, screwing and embedding, offers a controlled life cycle of the elements. These materials, all of which are the result of deconstruction, tell the story of the urban harvesting of non-valued materials, revealing their potential within this construction. With 5083,5kg of reused and geo- sourced material placed in the project, the construction proposes to use only 2% of new material.Through this act of building, the studio aims to underline the potential of urban mining for the building sector.
At the heart of the pavilion, a semi-polished raw earth floor (reused from the Circular Pavilion) hosts a work space for the users of the Iona Foundation. The entire wooden structure and floor collected in Rotterdam’s harbour, are made from old mooring piles (basralocus), markers of the colonial past and of the exploitation of the forests of Surinam and Guyana. The acrylate panels come from de-constructed chicken farms, while the wooden form-work panels used to make the floor of a night club. The plywood comes from stocks of wood with superficial damage, the old oak wine barrel was found in a Dutch garden depot.
Team:
Architects: Studio ACTE
Structure Calculation: Bollinger Grohmann
Photographer: Stijn Bollaert
Materials used:
Facade cladding: Reused basralocus wood balks
Flooring: Reused basralocus wood planks, rammed earth from BC Materials
Doors: Plywood
Windows: Reused acrylate plates
Roofing: Reused formwork panels, Reused basralocus wood balks, Metal
corrugated plates
Interior furniture: Stools designed by Studio ACTE made out of floor planks offcuts
