Exhibition

MMMechelen invited the Berlage Institute and the Flemish Architecture Institute to curate an architecture program as part of Stadsvisioenen 2009. It is as a part of this architecture program that the first public event of the City Visions Europe program will be organized, namely the international conference (draft title: ‘Vocabularies for the European City’), as well as the first local workshop (closed session). These events will be paralleled and complemented by an exhibition and a series of donderdag-debatten (weekly debates on Thursday). This exhibition and debates will equally focus on positioning Mechelen in the European context of the City Visions Europe program, and will incorporate the first traces of the collaboration agreement for European Capital of Culture 2015 that Mechelen (BE) has signed with Mons.

The aims of this exhibition is (1) to define and situate the challenges that the city and the citizens of Mechelen are facing within a European context, and to (2) use the urban histories of the five subject-cities (Bordeaux, Kosice, Mechelen, Mons and Pilzen) as the concrete proof of the fact that cities develop as a consequence of decisions and (often unrealized) projects and visions (contrary to the idea of a linear historical evolution or growth). As a third (3) element and conclusion of the preliminary urban study, the exhibition will present the selection of transversal challenges and projects that will define the framework and sites for City Visions Europe. As a trilogy, this part of the exhibition will render intelligible the fact that the architecture of cities is (to a large extent) the product of decision and of a project, and will hence prepare the field for the design research under City Visions Europe, while simultaneously framing the visitor’s perception for the two subsequent parts of the exhibition.

These two remaining parts of the exhibition present the actual context and the recent projects that have been realized. A selection of (4) recent architectural realisations, ongoing developments and designs for the future, will demonstrate the expertise and ambition of each of the five cities, while allowing to compare between the strategies, projects and visions developed for the five cities. As a last and complementary element, the Dutch photographer Dieuwertje Komen, engaged in the project to photograph each of the subject-cities of City Visions Europe, will present the first two series of photographs, portraying Mechelen and Mons. Her photographs will provide a coherent, and simultaneously tactile and abstracted, reading of the contemporary urban condition of this two mid-scale Belgian cities.

The exhibition will be located in the pedestrian tunnel that passes underneath the roundabout in front of Mechelen’s railway station. This tunnel – connected to a forgotten sunken public space in the middle of the traffic roundabout was in disuse since years and will disappear completely when a new station building will be constructed within the next 5 years. Exhibition architects Tom Cortoos and Bart Hollanders (1:1 architecture, Antwerp) will transform this uncommon semi-open-air passage into an exhibition space – in close collaboration with the Dutch graphic designers Catalogtree (Arnhem, NL).