Black Spider Gives New Life To Abandoned Military Airbase
In collaboration with Studio Frank Havermans, our friends of Rietveld Landscape recently launched a new structure that gives new life to a former military airbase near the Dutch village of Soesterberg.
The designers built a mobile structure in the form of a huge black spider that functions as a traveling meeting space. The mobile room on caterpillar tracks forms a major attraction in a wider spatial strategy that aims to revitalize the abandoned airbase and enables people to experience the landscape in a new way. With this project Havermans and the Rietveld brothers exactly nail our ideas about temporary use and implementing flexibility in a useful and inspiring way.
Developed in complete silence, the mobile room, that goes under the name of The Secret Operation 610, uses caterpillar tracks to move forward. It connects a shelter (Shelter 610) with a three-kilometer long landing track. “Due to this brutal object’s constantly changing position in the serene landscape, it allows the visitor to experience the area and the history of the military airbase in new ways”, the Rietveld brothers say.
The black spider, that will remind some of a Cold War Stealth Bomber and others of Star Wars, will be rented out as a workshop space or meeting room for up to twelve people. According to the makers, the mobile sculpture and shelter 610 are perfect spaces for research, experiment and innovation for groups coming from various disciplines. The unconventional combination of nature and Cold War history offers an exciting environment for the development of knowledge about nature, technology and aviation.
In the coming years the structure will be used as working environment for researchers, which goes hand-in-hand with the plans to turn this abandoned area into a place for innovative research programs that would otherwise not be possible here. The old runway is the perfect test site for state-of-the art aviation experiments. In one of the programs students of the Delft University of Technology (Aerospace/CleanEra) will develop a program for the innovative flying of the 21st century.
