Utomhusverket 2021: Studio Ossidiana

During the summer of 2021 ArkDes is a place to discover new ways of being together. Studio Ossidiana’s experimental public space invites everyone to celebrate public life.

Incorporating the architecture studio’s unique approach to the hand-built craft of concrete and terrazzo casting, this full-scale public installation imagines new forms of public assembly that highlights the symbolic action of shared experiences – with others, with nature, and with our surroundings.

Conceived as an archipelago of activities and encounters between people, plants, birds and minerals, Utomhusverket 2021 celebrates the potential of public space. A planted pond offers relief from the summer heat for both birds and people. Tall perches, designed for migratory birds, cast shadows across a ground of shells, loam, and gravels. The ground elements combine to create new soils that can be shaped by digging, walking, lying, playing, and more. A sundial marks the passing of time, while radiating the captured heat of the sun. An enclosed garden offers shade, shelter and berries to birdlife. Handcrafted terrazzo ‘rocks’ afford opportunities for play, display, and gathering.

For Alessandra Covini and Giovanni Bellotti (Studio Ossidiana), the project points towards the ways in which public space can be an arena for action – “a place to transform, cultivate, and care for.” Studio Ossidiana understands human and non-human life as more than mere users: “We are all explorers, gardeners, lovers, collectors, cartographers, and more.”