Park piushaven Tilburg

The Pius harbour in Tilburg is a long stretched urban zone that was formally unknown to its citizens. It now forms a blue development axis of different neighbourhoods and its surroundings. Civic, together with other members of the Cloud Collective, drew up a vision for the flexible development of the south bank for the municipality of Tilburg.

The core idea of the plan reinterprets the role of traditional, small-scale, temporary interventions. Temporary installations are often used to reanimate an area, once this is achieved, they are demolished, and new plan is drawn up. For the Pius Harbour plan we used small-scale architectural interventions (like a podium or a sail-in cinema) as a grounding for permanent development. The architectural interventions form nuclei of activity that charge the surroundings. Their black steel structures and light wooden infills refer to the history of the harbor and blend in with the unpolished green landscape.

The budget for construction and maintenance was spend smart -no expensive new materials and costly maintenance plans- but pragmatic functionality. The ruggedness of the new landscape design saves money, but more importantly bestows the area its distinctive character. The potential of the existing water and landscape is put to full use: the accessibility of the water is enlarged by lowering the harbor embankments, enabling people to swim or go canoeing and, the urban water zone of the Pius Harbour, once an unknown destination, offers yet another piece of evidence of Tilburg’s rebirth.