Richelle Sibolboro met with German architect Jürgen Mayer H.
to discuss his urban projects and the meaning behind their design and construction.
Nowadays, public and private seems to be blurring.
We have a very kind of public presence when we are at home.
We have social media to share your thoughts your ideas with more people.
But even when you are out in the public space you are very, kind of a private person, you know, with your other forms of communication where you use social media and smart phones to communicate in a very different way.
So I think we are seeing a change of how these boundaries are mediated and negotiated in our everyday.
It’s an important project in the Belgium context because they build a lot of court houses, new courthouses all over the country. And a public building, which is a court house, you know, usually comes with fear because people, you know, there’s something, a view they have that has to be solved. So, it’s a building that usually is not considered with a positive context. But, our building, wants to be a building that actually says that speaking justice might not be the right or wrong decision but it’s actually an agreement that we have with our laws in culture. The law is part of actually, a nice way to live together that regulates the way we actually communicate and handle our everyday business basically. So the courthouse positive atmosphere is really important.
There’s no, right or wrong really. It’s a very messy process when you design. It’s trail and error. It’s a way to work with computer models to study to complex geometries, we do real physical models, we do sketches, we do everything and it goes back and forth.
There is, I think, only the intrusion in the end that says, ok now it works.
It’s something that is new, that makes us curious, and still a little something awkward about it, that asks people to have a second look, to come out and start to appropriate it by questioning, by walking around to figure out what it is happening and in the end it’s intuition, I think.
Richelle Sibolboro 