A station platform built with scaffolding and purple carpeting, with three wooden sleeping cabins, on Hofplein Station. The platform rises in steps to a height of 13 metres. Location for a popular music festival, debate, overnight stays, breakfast and a view of an incomplete city.
A SCULPTURE IS IDEALLY THREE THINGS
A sculpture is ideally three things: a work of imagination, a reflection on the surroundings and a foundation of communality. It is there to be accepted and experienced, it discloses the nature of the context and motivates action.
The platform of Perron Mozaïque rose like a ski jump from the elevated railway of Hofplein Station, soaring high above the surrounding infrastructure and marking the point of arrival in the city. The elevated platform offered a magnificently central view of the reconstruction works going on in Rotterdam. It was a temporary piece of "wild" urban design for a city that is never finished. The platform, the space where people take their first steps in the city, was a monument of hospitality, linking the space of arrival with the space of the city. The ideal of a sculpture that simultaneously had a public use and was a pragmatic item in the city environment, was a reality for the period of three days. It was a valued contribution to Rotterdam's self-image as a city of festivals. Quays, streets and squares in the inner city are cleared of traffic dozens of times a year to make room for tents, generators, loudspeakers, stalls and crowds of pedestrians. Rotterdam has ample ill-defined or neglected space which can play host to spectacles and urban promotion.
Activities
Rotterdam declared itself a City of Architecture in 2007. Forty of its prominent postwar buildings were draped in purple ribbons and opened to the public. To emphasize the status of Perron Mozaïque as a proposal in built form, the temporary platform was entirely clad in purple carpet and was officially declared the 41st building of the city's architecture route. Its central location made it attractive to numerous visitors, but the aim was for it to be used as diversely and intensively as possible. It was therefore furnished as a bed and breakfast facility, as a lookout point and as a venue for debates and music. At breakfast, the overnight guests would receive a questionnaire to complete. Several leading lights of the Rotterdam hip hop scene put in an appearance at Perron Mozaique: DuvelDuvel, the rapper Bolle Tim and Mike Redman. The programme also included graffiti art by Lastplak, rap workshops by Bolle Tim, break dancing by Hiphophuis and Breakers Anonymous and performances by the dance group Bond van Wilde Dansers.
Sunday was a day of intellectual activities, with a guest lecture on philosophy by Jacob Voorthuis, a course on Rotterdam's urban planning by Patrick van der Klooster, and the performance of a poem, compiled from answers to the questionnaire, by the Belgian cultural diva Claire Beke.
Collaboration
A hotel for 200 guests, entertainments, workshops and guided tours of the Hofplein Station could not be organized by three artists alone. Observatorium developed Perron Mozaïque together with the TENT. gallery, Rotterdam 2007 City of Architecture, RET/Randstadrail (owners of the station), Hofbogen BV (the future owners), the World Trade Center Club, the art producers Mothership, and the music festival Motel Mozaïque. The illusion of ad hoc, instant urbanism, was wholly dependent on a down-to-earth collaborative structure. The elevated platform was itself made of scaffolding furnished with theatrical lighting and carpeting.
location: Station Hofplein Rotterdam
year:2007
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