Leaving The Comfort Zone With Ton Matton

On the next pages, some important work from the workshop with artist and urban planner Ton Matton will be shown. The workshop was dedicated to carrying out and realizing a central element of the Hotel in a 1:1 scale. And the goal was the construction of an individual cell, as the prototype of a hotel room. But it turned out differently and became much more than this. We created a socio-environmental critical model of the whole Hotel in a 1:1 scale. At the end we performed the movie “The Broad Welfare Hotel” where all the work of the workshop played a role and the model became the stage.

After his city planning study at the Delft Technical University (1991) Ton Matton started the Schie 2.0 office in Rotterdam, focussing on urban and environmental design, looking for transformations of autarkic architectural moments. Schie 2.0 was part of the Dutch design group of the nineties, which worked on amnesty themes for the built reality, experimentally, emphatically explaining planning and city-design problems. The most robust projects are those where Matton, by changing the point of view on a situation, also altered how you look towards this situation; de facto, you have to consider this as a design... ¹

“Be aware, he is always hijacking when he comes...”

Having Ton Matton in a workshop means, it is unclear what will happen until Ton is there. We never thought we would end up acting in a movie about the “Guilt-Free Hotel”, or as he called it the “Broad Welfare Hotel “. As we struggled a little bit by explaining our idea of a High-Class-Low-Budged-Hotel, he changed our perspective and invented the “Broad Welfare Hotel “. Several projects have been developed from this point, where students try to find concrete solutions for the Wilhelmsburg Hotel. Actually, everything works; important didn't have to be the idea behind it. Because it was the first of four workshops which supported the project. At each workshop, new people joined. New people = new ideas! To focus on the hotel's development and not always to start from scratch, Ton said the ideas must survive. And the more robust the idea, the more likely they would be picked up and developed by others. Some of the developed ideas were strong enough to be taken over by other participants in the project's process in the next workshops. An example is Ana Rosa and Valeria's storyteller who interviewed people in the neighborhood for stories. These stories inspired the next workshop participants, who tried to transfer them into architecture (see on the next pages).