Illmar Hurkxkens − TU Delft, The Netherlands

Illmar Hurkxkens (Standpunkte Magazine Three, Winner; 2010 Archiprix NL, Nomination) − TU Delft, The Netherlands

Tutors: Filip Geerts, Olaf Gipser, Stefano Milani, Jelke Fokkinga

Paradise Regained-
The Watchman, The Sleeper, The Dreamer, and the City

Unlike the tall dykes that allow the Dutch polders to be urbanised without restraint, Paradise Regained offers an alternative vision for site of the coastal wall at Hondsbossche Zeewering in the Dutch village of Petten. Tracing the boundary between sea and land, dyke and city are merged to form a single artifact without a single centre. The two extremities of this linear proposal articulate the project’s technical and poetic qualities: at one end a laboratory belonging to the national water authority; on the other, a building designed around its panoramic views, celebrating the paradisiacal land-bridge that joined England to the European mainland around 11,000 BC. Between these points the project reinstates the ancient model of ‘terps’, artificial dwelling hills enabling the inhabitation of flooded lowlands, which marked the onset of the Netherlands’ struggle with the sea. Rather than a single line of defense, the project creates a protective zone, where infrastructure and architecture, means and end, coalesce.

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