It’s not really common practice in ERA21 to dedicate a part of the issue to explaining its title. But in the case of the temporary use of public spaces and buildings, it becomes essential. First, we should define transitory, temporary and tactical approaches. But with a closer look, we find out that actually everybody knows them—remember that one place not far from the town centre that hasn’t been used for years, and now a group of locals started taking care of it and built a DIY skatepark or organized outdoor screenings?

The results of the Czech Interior Award 2023 were announced at the May 14th award ceremony at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. This year’s winner was the restoration and adaptation of a house in Kutná Hora by Jan Holub and Tomáš Hanus of BYRÓ architekti. There were ten other sub-categories announced, with three short-listed and one winning project in each. Two hundred and thirty-three projects entered the competition overall and were considered by the international jury, consisting of nineteen architecture and design experts.

Built at the Faculty of Education campus at Poříčí, Brno, the new art department studios are finely sculpted, dazzling white boxes stacked on top of each other. But the volumes were arrived at only after considering many external conditions— for example the condition to maintain courtyard access on the ground floor, to keep an energy substation building on site, to provide both solar access requirements for a neighboring property and ample daylight for the studios themselves. The resulting building has three different studio types across three storeys, with three different ceiling-heights.

It all takes such a long time: dealing with building permits and regulations, securing budgets for big projects, or the slow collective struggle to imagine modern cities without cars. In different parts of the country, meanwhile, small groups of locals often volunteer their time and money to use empty buildings for transitory or temporary activities. These often have a profound effect on the surrounding environment, enriching local culture and community life. Property owners profit as well, gaining important information about a building or place’s potential, sometimes even changing owners’ minds about future uses.

A laboratory is a special place where new and practical experience is uncovered through experiment and analysis. New knowledge can then be used to change the rest of the world, including public space issues. Analyzing our common architectural or urban design processes, we can realize that temporary solutions can be much more than just emergency solutions.

Every country has its own history and cultural specifics, and in each legal environment different initiatives arise that deal with temporary use of buildings and spaces. One such initiative is the British Meanwhile Space. Emily Berwyn, director of the Meanwhile Space, discussed with us the conditions of temporary use in Britain, their long term project experiences, and the need to keep changing business models.

Last November, we were fortunate enough to meet and talk about tactical urbanism with designer and planner Mike Lydon when he attended the Walk the City conference in Prague. Now a founder of the architecture/urban design studio Street Plans, it all started for Mike when he first succeeded in closing street to car traffic. Suddenly he saw that change can happen, and it can happen fast. Street Plans now collaborates with local administration and institutions, proposes and advocates visions for the future, but it also designs and implements projects so that people can actually live them.

The Paris-based initiative, Plateau Urbain, has been working with transitory projects for a long time. In 2019 it succeeded in persuading the city to release a charter seeking to establish temporary use as a tool for developing buildings and sites. The charter defines key principles and goals of temporary or transitory planning, in particular the support of urban projects with positive social and environmental externalities in the area. Paris has become a pilot community for temporary use. Thomas Bourdaud, Plateau Urbain’s architect, discussed temporary planning and its potential with us.

In this interview Levente Polyak, Eutropian organization’s expert on urban community-led and social innovation projects, shared his experience with transitioning from a traditional urban design approach to supporting community initiatives. Eutropian stresses the importance of networking, acting as a bridge between different urban planning agents, thus providing a platform for sharing knowledge and access to ethical financing.

Free Riga is a platform connecting creative and social initiatives with the vision to transform abandoned buildings and land into experimental cultural and social innovation hotspots. It provides spaces to socially engaged projects—cultural activities, initiatives helping vulnerable or disadvantaged groups of people, or experimental and innovative projects. Free Riga was founded over ten years ago, now it’s active on several large sites at the same time, in the city center as well as on the periphery. Zane Ruģēna, co-founder of Free Riga, introduced us to the organization’s business. 

In Paris in 2017, French architect and performer Dimitri Szuter founded P.E.R.F.O.R.M!, a research and design laboratory to study the possibilities of performative transformation of neglected public spaces. How could performance, indubitably a very ephemeral instrument, assist in activating and later developing brownfield sites? This is what intrigued Slovakia-based architect-performer Viktor Fuček.

Formerly known as Fürstenhaus Luginsland, the historicist LIL (Look in Land) Villa in Mariánské Lázně was completed in 1901. As the name suggests, it stands on a steep slope above the Úšovice stream valley. Offering unique views of the (therapeutic) landscape, the main tower with a high dormer window in one corner is the most striking feature of the building. The villa and its surroundings are a UNESCO-protected heritage site. Four healing resources can be found around here: mineral waters, peat, mineral spring gas, and a healing climate. The microclimate of the surrounding woods and of the building itself are now going to become the subject of artistic research. An invited architecture, art, and design competition will be organized there based on Public Space Lab’s experience with similar projects. The competition will not evaluate the artistic work itself, but rather the ability to interpret, communicate, and critically review the results to local administration officials and other organizations.

The architecture and urban design department at the Polytechnic University of Milan has been engaged in temporary and transitory approaches in urbanism for a long time. Now it’s opening a new M-US-T postgraduate course (Master in Temporary Uses). Course directors Antonella Bruzzese and Isabella Inti, both with 30-years worth of experience in the field, share with us their vision and plans for university education in general and the Temporiuso education platform in particular. 

The FLOW temporary open-air swimming pool is really a 1:1 model—an example and a provocation, pointing to the lack of open-air swimming opportunities in Brussels. Its mission is to convince the city administration to invest in permanent solutions, while at the same time already offering a safe and inclusive space for locals to cool down during hot summer months—it's the first of its kind in Brussels in 40 years. The non-profit organization POOL IS COOL has campaigned for the reintroduction of outdoor swimming in Brussels since 2015. The temporary swimming pool was built on an abandoned site in Anderlecht, next to the Brussels Canal, in a former industrial area which is slowly becoming a residential and shopping area. Designed as a participatory project by studio Decoatelier, over fifty young people from vulnerable social backgrounds with high unemployment rates were able to work temporary jobs there—not just with their hands, but also with their voices during discussions about the privatization of public space.

Two pilot projects recently completed in Bucharest represent low-cost yet important ways of helping homeless people in large cities. Both interventions are lightweight steel shelters with built-in seating, combined with lockers for personal items. Each has the added benefit of activating empty and forgotten public spaces.

In every time period, there are places that have lost their original purpose, or have become unpopular for some reason, and they are waiting to be transformed. Until their future form and function can be decided, they wait, idle, stuck in the meantime. We accept their shapeless temporarity then. Because there is something thriving there, a different kind of life from the one we have in the stabilized world. This meantime has a magnetizing potential to many communities. Let’s feel it and respect it. It will allow us to watch, outside of the stabilized worlds, the unfinished contours of the world of the boundary. Beginnings of new forms are born underground, and similarly, new topics and discourse are born on the boundary and on the periphery.

Timber is a material of the past, but also for the future. That’s certainly something we learned in the ERA21 #02/2022 issue on carbon-neutral architecture, and we get a reminder every year at the Wood Buildings Show in Prague. This year, Do Janne Vermeulen, co-founder of the Dutch architecture studio Team V, attended the show and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk to her. The conversation naturally drifted to the recently completed HAUT building in Amsterdam, one of the tallest hybrid timber buildings in the world.