Design: Ramon Cordova Gonzalez and Signe Pērkone

Construction: Edijs Matulis and Niklāvs Krievs

The practice of architecture largely understands the territory as a receptacle for spatial interventions, considering it almost exclusively from a quantitative point of view. In other words, the main aspects considered about a given territory are its area and proportions, possible square meters to build and cost of the land, just to name a few. The reduction of the territory to its purely measurable aspects, leads to visualize it as a tabula rasa, a blank canvas.

But are those measurable aspects all what constitutes a territory? How does one consider the non-measurable/non-quantitative aspects of a territory? How does one consider the potentials of a territory, what it can do? Moreover, if a territory is not a passive receiver, how does one work together with what already exists there?

Beyond the purely quantitative, a territory is a set of relations. It is formed by countless number of interactions that occur at a particular time. This set of relations become a whole that cannot be reduced to the parts that conform it. These relations are qualitative ones, not quantitative. They affect qualitatively the territory and constitute it as an ever-moving process. To make all this clearer, it is necessary to observe specific situations like the one from which this proposal departed.

This territory was a semi-abandoned place next to lake Kisezers, in Riga. It has witnessed different uses through the years: military facility, university, real estate development, dumpster. All these have left a footprint, a set of layers still visible nowadays in the form of modern ruins. However, for years now it has been partially abandoned. One the one hand, the lake front, its proximity to the city center, the presence of different kinds of institutions and a couple of isolated, yet fully inhabited buildings in the area, make the human presence still palpable. On the other hand, its unclear connection to the city, the known military and police presence, the impossibility to read it as an entirely public or private place and the lack of knowledge of its existence, tend to make it largely undisturbed. The combination of both conditions is the reason why very specific and unique ways to inhabit this place can occur. That is how animals appropriate construction debris to make burrows, or how an ex-parking lot for war tanks becomes an improvised drifting track, or how the ramp to access the water for military amphibian vehicles can serve as a place to observe art performances that use the lake as a stage. In other words, these unexpected interactions change qualitatively the condition of the territory constantly.

The premise of this project is that in order to speculate what the territory can do, it is necessary to experiment within. If these qualitative changes are the product of novel interactions, it follows that by introducing certain elements one might be able to observe how the territory absorbs them in time and potentially reveal something about itself.

The elements used for the first round of experimentation were a set of modular structures comprised of a robust timber frame with a roof and a horizontal surface that can be manually positioned in three different heights to broaden the scope of the structure’s use, especially when several modules are combined. The structure is designed to be introduced into the territory as a disruptor that triggers new relations and offers indeterminate yet discernible ways of engaging with the environment. While to the human it offers such affordances as sitting, leaning, placing objects, sheltering, and others, which are then imbued with social meanings such as ‘bench’, ‘picnic table’, ‘market stall’, etc., to an animal the structure offers completely different affordances responding to their specific way of being in the world, while to non-living beings it represents matter and surface. These interventions must be seen as a parameter and its significance at this stage lies not in its form as a final object but in what happens to it in the territory, how it is engaged with and what potentials it enables. Referring to an intervention as a parameter points to the fact that it is meant to be manipulated and later on updated according to the discoveries made throughout its relation to the physical aspects of the territory. It is a way to ‘palpate’ the territory lightly in order to reveal its capacities and activate different areas. The palpation process differs from aimless and random experimentation by being an active and reciprocal engagement with the specificity of the places where these elements are introduced.

This way of working allows the territory to express itself, as opposed to predetermining what should be done there based on preestablished values that inhibit its agency; instead, it is setting out on a path of discovering what it might be capable of.