Subject

Border (E)scape

 

Objective

A place as an escape from everyday life

 

Location

Baarle-Hertog (NL/BE)

 

Course

Final thesis

 

Year

2014

de Vrijplaats A place as an escape from everyday life
The main motivation behind this project is to design a contemporary buitenplaats - a summer residence, in the 17th and 18th centuries, which served as a place outside the city for rich townspeople who could afford to escape from the hectic city life and their daily routine in search for the other- only a few meters from the border with Belgium, in the most southern part of the Netherlands. A theoretical framework prior to the design brief has given insight into our ‘desire for the other’ within the sexual sphere - and escape from our daily sex life. In this respect this project is aimed at introducing a sanctuary in the border region which facilitates activities of sexual pleasure, lust, desire and imagination in a localizable place – a heterotopia that we can define as a contemporary buitenplaats. The involvement of the borderland within this project has resulted in a search for a location that contributes to the feeling of escaping from everyday life – where the border between decency and indecency, visibility and invisibility is strengthened. Among a few options this project is located on a former military mobilization complex of Baarle-Nassau, between one of the world’s most fragmented and ambiguous border landscapes.
More specifically, the idea is to create a vrijplaats where surrounding landscape and program complement each other. For this, the most necessary and so the important criteria in the design for me was to design new conditions within the borders of the former military mobilization complex. The complex is transformed into a sanctuary that trough interventions in the existing landscape and the addition of a wide sex-oriented program provides perfect conditions for a wide spectrum of sexual desires. The design tried to answer the research question: can architecture contribute to our sexual experience? Eventually there is no conclusive answer available. The vrijplaats is a new concept which does not exist in this world - a place where many people would like to go as an escape from their everyday life and explore their own sexual boundaries- in which the cross-border program provides new insights our daily sex life’s and contributes to a new sexual experience. read full thesis online (only in Dutch)