INFO

Location
Z33 Hasselt

Client
Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture

Curator
BC architects & studies & materials

Design & Build BBB room
Building Beyond Borders postgraduate certificate 2021-2022, UHasselt

This year the BBB postgraduate program focuses on the local urban environment. The research group establishes its
intentions into a 10 points Manifesto, develops its research in a prototyping lab in Z33 art centre, and shapes its
actions into a one month Agenda for the Construction Festival in ParckFarm, Brussels.

What is BBB?
Building beyond borders is a cross-border learning platform to enhance knowledge and push action towards
regenerative and distributive building processes. Its postgraduate certificate offers a learn-and-act programme to
graduates and professionals to become change-makers in the built environment.
This year’s programme explored the regenerative and distributive potential of urban harvesting.

What is urban harvesting?
Our consumptive society cannot be sustained over the years to come: scarce and expensive resources, climate change, pollution, social inequalities, require a new approach to secure the functioning of the urban and non urban environment.
It will be necessary to change the traditional look at a city seen as a place where people only live and consume
resources, to a city where people or activities produce resources themselves.
Investigating urban harvesting means investigating all the possible options for re-using the full output of a city and
all the potential resources within the city itself, including the social resources and understanding how an urban
organism can reorganise itself to the maximum use of its own possibilities. This has to be seen as a positive
contribution to the city needs, complementary to reducing negative impacts of consumption, or limiting inflows. It will require high levels of organisation, which are themselves available, but unexplored.

Who is BBB 2022?
We are a research group of architecture and design enthusiasts who believe that construction can be done differently.
We are a collective who explores new possible paths to challenge the constraints of our professions.
We believe in architecture as a social and political act;
In its effects on society as a fundamental part of the process and in the act of building as a tool for innovation and resistance.
We dream of building beyond the limits of conventions,
We dream of building beyond humans, a future for all.
We are building beyond borders.

The prototyping LAB in the exhibition ‘Same, Same but different’ by BC-Architects – Materials in
Z33, Hasselt (BE)
A selected collective library frames the exhibition room and contextualises the contemporary social, economical and
environmental crisis to the construction sector . From depletion of resources and environmental degradation to social inequality resulting from policies or established patterns, the impacts of construction on the environment are
at the centre of a vital and vibrant debate between contemporary architectural and design practices which is presented in the library.

Creating this general framework allows a better understanding of one specific story that unfolds on a grid of brick
socles throughout the exhibition room : the ParckFarm project .
ParckFarm project is the hands-on experiment of the BBB group, raised from different ambitions. On one hand, it wants to generate an added value within the city of Brussels, and more specifically within the community of
Molenbeek. By using regenerative and inclusive design practices as tools able to pry collective intelligence and
strengthen social cohesion.
On the other hand, it is a tool for BBB researchers to investigate and test the potentials of regenerative architecture
and design. It tells the story of the hyperlocal harvesting of materials and regenerated resources: about bio-based, geo-based and re-used solutions.

On top of the socles some prototypes, models, sources, samples, mappings of the sources, books and infographics
compose the storylines subtended in the ParckFarm project.
The final stage of the exhibition is an invitation. Three films, positioned in a half circle, present the collective and
invite the visitor to join the action during the Participatory Construction Festival, taking place at Parckfarm from
12th of May till 18th of June 2022.