City-Connecting Spatial Intervention: The Gropius Room Pavilion Reaches Finland
"It offers an opportunity to discuss future issues of unfinished modernism in public space and temporarily connects Weimar with its partner cities Trier, Sienna, Blois, Zamosc and Hämeenlinna via a symbolic microarchitecture. It builds a virtual and physical bridge between the places and urban societies."
A spatial installation as a creative space of possibility in the recreational park of the city of Hämeenlinna. Date: [15.6.2023]
With its opening in Hämeenlinna, the Gropius Room Pavilion has reached its last and most challenging location on its city partner tour through Europe. There, since last week, it has defined the corner of a leisure area with basketball courts. The concept of "space within space" that he embodies can be extended to the leisure and recreation park. The director's room thus has an impact on the recreational space of the people in Hämeenlinna. During the five-day construction phase, we had the opportunity to familiarise ourselves with the dynamics of the space on site. It was beautiful to observe how young and old people, locals and emigrants, professionals and amateurs came together quite naturally and without many words, either to play for themselves or with others, only to leave the pitch again after a short or long time.
The interpretation of this playing field as an extended director's room opened up a very unique view of society. The accompanying social rules of the game were lived there in a completely different way than we had expected, for example. Hierarchies and high positions do not seem to make a special impression, but rather it is the way of playing that counts. After the short opening ceremony on Saturday 10 June with performance, singing and speeches, the mayors fixed the Finnish explanatory plaque and those present spent the afternoon in informal conversation over coffee and games. It was a casual, convivial afternoon reminiscent of a family gathering.
It was amazing to experience how differently the pavilion appears in the different countries at the different locations and how the meaning of the shaped urban spaces merges with the art space of the spatial installation to create something completely new both in the perception of the space and in the interpretation it evokes. An interesting mixture of the familiar and the foreign emerges, where one learns something about the other as well as about oneself. When you engage with the place and the dynamics of the merging spaces, you become part of an art space in which your own role can be reinvented. Unexpected encounters with strangers or the unknown within oneself, in turn, create new spaces of thought.It was an extraordinary journey with a new perspective on the familiar from both sides.
We would like to thank all those involved, those who made it possible and those who accompanied the project with their presence in an appreciative and supportive way. We are curious to see what other suggestions the pavilion will provide and look forward to new spaces of possibility. Maybe in the future politics will no longer be made behind closed doors, but in open spaces. And maybe in the future it will be more about fair play than about gaining positions of power.
We thank Lord Mayor Peter Kleine for making this project possible and for testing new forms and spaces of town-twinning relations together with the Bauhaus University Weimar and the Thuringian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.