Tomas Dirrix

This page features two temporary structures executed by a Rotterdam based architecture practice named Atelier Tomas Dirrix. The first project we elaborate on is a temporay exhibition space for Unfair Amsterdam. The second structure is a pavillion done for the Horst Arts & Music Festival.

The Temporary Museum is an intimate pavilion for art in the public domain. Built in one of the most visited parks in Amsterdam, the museum conceals a space for a secluded, personal experience of the work on display. Developed at a time of drastic measures and renewed physical relationships to the people and spaces around us, The Temporary Museum explores the significance of an exhibition space in the public sphere. 

Informed by a variety of architectural references outside the realm of the public building, it explores how to deal with the relationship between inside and outside, between openness and closeness; searching for an intimacy and sensitivity in experience. More like a hut or a chapel, the pavilion departs from the conventional spaces of the contemporary art museum, exploring the possibility of a human and specific 'white cube’. A place of solitude and contemplation rather than a big spectacle, the Temporary Museum encourages close interaction between visitor, artworks, and architecture. 

Inspired by the ultimate temporary structure – the tent – the building is simultaneously mysterious and primitive. Hidden within the black exterior, four white walls seem to hang from the sky; forming an atrium at once compressed and monumental. Around it, the wooden A-frame structure is exposed, creating small niches. A glazed annex and two small windows frame views to the outside, or let park visitors sneak a glance of the exhibition inside.

Materiality, expression and representation derive from a research-based approach where standard building materials merge with experimentation. The outer layer is made from recycled cotton canvas, stitched together and coated with tar. The coating protects the wooden structure, much like a gigantic raincoat, while also recalling the history of the site as a former coal gas factory, where tar was a residual product. Conscious of the temporary nature of the project, the entire structure can be dismantled and used elsewhere.


*Images above are from the Project: Temporary Museum

The Ceiling for a Crater, as Atelier Tomas Dirrix names the project is designed by taking inspiration from the ancient architecture of festivals, celebrations and large rituals. A single gesture of a large floating roof transforms a concrete square cut in the terrain as found to a dance floor and central stage. The low hanging and voluminous presence of the architecture above the visitors manifests reminiscent of the history of the place as a former military site and as a rapprochement of two landscape motifs.

Working from an economy of means with various ways of a holding up, a minimum of material and air-pressure as a constructive principle the structure plays with its seemingly contradictory appearance of both thinness and thickness, weightlessness and an image of great weightines.

*Images above are from the Project: Ceiling for a Crater

Type: Temporary Structures
Office: Atelier Tomas Dirrix
Textile Ceiling for a Crater: Levtec
Structural engineering: Util
Location: Amsterdam Westerpark & Horst Arts and Music festival Vilvoorde
Team: Tomas Dirrix, Léa Alapini, Ada Finci Terseglav, Stefan Hutterer, Julia Strömland
Photography: Olmo Peeters, Illias Teirlinck, Maxim Verbueken, Jeroen Verrecht, Max Hart Nibbrig 
Built: 2021 & 2019

Visit the webpage of Atelier Tomas Dirrix here.

Published: November 2024
Category: Architecture