SPACIOUS CO-CREATION
Spacious Co-Creation a collection of projects and events highlighting Spacious’ approach to co-creation through collective, spatial and performative experimentation. This approach is inspired by our experience with participatory urban design projects in the Netherlands, as well as our cross-cultural and transdisciplinary collaborations in academia.
At heart our practice is organized in recurring open ateliers. To foster cross-cultural and transdisciplinary collaboration, we invite both professional and local communities to our creative process. Together, we envision equitable ways of space-making that bring people into solidarity with each other and their environments.
We value a radically situated process characterized by sensorial fieldwork and hands-on experimentation. This immersive approach to co-creation builds a diverse community of practice and encourages lasting engagement from local participants. It marks a vital shift from the architect as a solitary creative genius to a generous practitioner who navigates complexity with empathy and fosters responsible citizenship.
Participatory Urban Lab, Loosduinen The Hague (NL)
KEY VALUES
Full-Body Immersion: Beyond the Design Presentation
We believe in co-creation beyond conventional design meetings. Participants engage in sensorial walks, performative experiments, and the creation of temporary spatial interventions or full-scale mock-ups. By activating collective body intelligence, we awaken awareness and catalyse meaningful change.
Mixing Professional and Local Communities: Beyond the Usual Suspects
We cultivate non-hierarchical spaces of experimentation where professional expertise meets local, lived experience. Through play, shared curiosity, and dialogue, we build connections between participants from diverse backgrounds, from neighbours to artists to researchers, ensuring that a diversity of voices shapes the outcome.
Embracing the Unknown: Beyond Design Solutions
Our creative methods invite exploration of the social, political, and environmental dimensions of space. By welcoming uncertainty, we expand architecture’s role from producing fixed design solutions to envisioning and co-creating resilient possibilities.
KEY RESULTS
Resilient Communities: Co-ownership and Care
Our artistic, spatial and performative methods help communities form deeper emotional bonds with each other and their environments. These processes refine design briefs, strengthen trust, and inspire shared responsibility. In this way co-creation nurtures belonging, co-ownership, and long-term stewardship.
Adaptive Design: Collective Intelligence in Practice
While our open ateliers focus on exploration rather than fixed deliverables, they do generate crucial insights for future design work. Architects retain creative agency, yet their practice becomes more adaptive and responsive, enriched by local perspectives and lived experience. The result is adaptive design that evolves with and for its changing context.
Sensorial and Experimental Fieldwork, Amare The Hague (NL)
PORTFOLIO
Hugging Architecture
Hugging Architecture is a co-creative project activating radical care and affection for the built environment through spatial and performative interventions. Situated in Amare, a cultural centre in The Hague (NL), the project draws on Spacious’ ongoing research into creating compassionate spaces through bodily engagement and collective play. The project begins with a sensorial and participatory investigation of the building complex. Together with users of the building complex, the act of hugging is explored as a spatial tactic to foster shared ownership and responsibility in the public realm. The final exhibition presents ten spatial and performative artworks that cultivate intimate relationships within and with the interior public spaces of Amare. The project was initiated by Spacious and carried out in in collaboration with students from the University of the Arts in The Hague and the Amare Foundation.
PORTFOLIO
Space for the City:
Urban Agenda The Hague 2040
Space for the City is a participatory urban design project commissioned by the Municipality of The Hague (NL). In preparation for the city’s 2040 urban agenda, multiple design teams were each assigned a district to lead a participatory design process. Our team focused on the district of Loosduinen, where we conducted spatial fieldwork to identify local potentials and challenges. This included organizing neighbourhood sessions and participating in a local festival to engage children in co-creating their future environment. The project culminated in a design proposal for Loosduinen 2040. Situated near the dunes and the North Sea, the proposal envisions a stronger integration between social housing developments and the surrounding natural landscape. The project was carried out as part of Agenda Ruimte voor de Stad 2040, in collaboration with project developer Wessel Tiessens, anthropologist Renée Rooijmans, and psychologist Marjolein Rijskamp.
PORTFOLIO
Forgotten Courtyard:
Community Gardening
Forgotten Courtyard is a participatory neighborhood project initiated by Spacious. Hidden within a housing block in The Hague’s Schilderswijk lies a forgotten 780 m² courtyard, overgrown and closed off for nearly twenty years. This initiative aims to transform the neglected site into a garden created for and by the local community. The project not only revitalizes a physical space but also challenges the stigmatized image of the Schilderswijk by documenting and sharing its transformation process. By bringing together spatial designers, a visual anthropologist, an urban sociologist, and neighbourhood residents, we explore how storytelling can generate social value beyond functional design. The project culminated in a collective cleaning of the courtyard, after which a local foundation took on the role of guardian for the garden’s future development and use.
PORTFOLIO
Co-Creation for Change
Inspired by the performative approach to co-creation by Canadian research collective SenseLab (Brian Massumi and Erin Manning), we have organized an array of workshops, lectures and symposia with a focus on cross-cultural and transdisciplinary co-creation. In architecture studios, we facilitate performative design workshops where spatial thinking is expanded through embodied practices and participatory exploration. Within academic and educational settings, our sessions invite students and researchers to rethink collaboration as a dynamic process of becoming, challenging conventional hierarchies of knowledge. In professional and research environments, we develop tailored programs that use creative methodologies to foster systemic change.
PORTFOLIO
Open Atelier: Matching & Meshing
Matching & Meshing is a spatial installation exploring our dynamic relationship with the sun. This project is exemplary for our approach to co-creation. Over the period of a month, we invited a transdisciplinary group of performers, artists, architects, and researchers into our creative process. In multiple open ateliers we explored the project through philosophical, performative and spatial lenses. The final installation is a site-specific, spatial choreography composed of nine wooden frames, each with a distinct movement pattern in relation to the sun. The installation, as well as the collaborative, sensorial, and participatory process shows how spatial practitioners can operate in full attunement with their surroundings towards an architecture that enhances ecological belonging.