Making Through Love
Tower of Love, Rotterdam Airport/Overschie NL, 2019-2020
Graduation project in Explore Lab TU Delft
supervisors: Alberto Altes, Stavros Kousoulas, Pierre Jennen
built with the help of over 50 friends
[documents]


'Making through love' focuses less on what a building is, or becomes, and more on how we build things. This simultaneously rejects proposing a specific methodology for how things should be built, but rather embraces a ‘mode’ of making through the fluctuating and volatile field of relationships and bonds we live. This mode of love, a ‘third way’, is neither a standard contractural relationship, nor a defined collective, but a working on, by working through, our never stable projects of friendship. A reality which we already find ourselves inescapably a part, and an urgency we need to keep practicing and thinking from within, as uncertain and anxiety-giving as that is— precisely because it forms the basis for nearly all ‘projects’ standard or not— for designers in the discipline, activists in collectives and distant friends alike.

Initiated as part of a graduation project at TU Delft, the Tower of Love arose from a shared desire for refuge from the individualist/anxiety-inducing graduation studio structures and a shared refusal towards the directive to make fixed plans, produce visual contracts and determine the event before its unfolding through ‘a projection’; which is almost always the path and call to order enforced by the discipline of architecture.

Instead, this collective process aggregated a series of close and loose friendships enduring together in the muddy peat fields beneath the runway of the Rotterdam airport, with wood scavenged through self disciplined durations across abandoned industrial terrains, building without application for permission an assemblage of beams and platforms.