As a society, we have an overall reliance on finite resources, whilst at the same time urban environments are producing a growing amount of waste. Cities today are powered by processes taking place thousands of kilometers away. From the 70s onwards many cities went through a process of deindustrialization, and were left without productive facilities necessary to meet their needs. In order to promote carbon neutrality, raw materials used to sustain our cities must be sourced from these very cities. While technological developments are transforming our industries, this offers new possibilities for urban production to take place. In order to create a durable and circular solution, production processes need to reclaim their place in the city.

Bank of Maas is a project which aims to provide Rotterdam with productive resources necessary to the functioning of a modern-day city. Along with the growth of the sharing and on-demand economy, in line with the ongoing ownership-to-access shift, the Bank of Maas is an urban typology made to accommodate the maker of the future. The building is both a storage and production space. The storage contains a distribution area, data center and an automated storage for raw materials. The production area contains equipped working spaces and tools for handling raw materials and data. The manufacturing tools are both digital (3D printers, CNC machines etc.) as well as manual. Furthermore, the Bank contains high capacity computer hardware which can be used for the making of video games, computer generated images, mobile applications, etc. The production space operates as an interface, mediating between stored resources and the city. __IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES FOSTERING CHANGE__The building itself acts as a screen, showcasing resources and production processes sustaining our cities, habits and practices. Whilst the facade is closed off, optimizing energy consumption and safety, parts of the interior are opening up. A public pathway is leading through the data center and storage, towards a viewing platform on the 5th floor. The pathway offers a view into the storage while also projecting videos of production processes onto the walls and ceiling of the escalators. In this way a specific experiential and educational quality is achieved, aiming to inform the potential users and motivate them to engage with the building. By being present in the inner city, the Bank of Maas aims to raise awareness about hidden production processes and in that way challenge established models of production and consumption. The project is an experiment, imagining a future in which all cities exist as circular, productive, well connected bodies, facilitated with a network of productive resource banks.

Poster

Details

Team members : Danica Mijonic

Supervisor : Jelmer van Zalingen

Institution : TU Delft

Descriptions

Credits

Danica Mijonic

Danica Mijonic

Danica Mijonic

Danica Mijonic

Danica Mijonic

Danica Mijonic

Danica Mijonic