Reads
We, the people
Leest iemand in Nederland nog wel eens de Archis, ofwel Volume? Ik zou het maar eens doen; waar anders vind je deze combinatie van gitzwart doemdenken over de wereld met een reborn geloof in de rol van de architect als profeet en leider.
1 January 2007 _ article by Wouter Vanstiphout _
Sade, Fourier, van Lieshout?
SlaveCity
At least they’ve done the math. According to Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL), one human being can do seven hours of office work and seven hours of menial work, sleep for seven hours and have three hours left in which to relax, eat, or visit a prostitute. Exactly 72 human beings are accommodated in a steel and timber construction containing bunk beds and a table for computer screens behind which, wearing headsets, they work in a call centre in three shifts: office work, sleep, menial work. With 72 of these subdivisions on each floor of a nine-floor building, the total comes to 28,512 people living and working in one building, or unit. Each unit is allotted a certain amount of land on which to grow foodstuffs. Eight units create a total working populace of about 200,000 human beings. On average, one in five of them is fit to be trained and put to work. The rest can be ‘recycled’. On average, a human being is a productive member of the unit for three years before having to be recycled. One human body yields six litres of blood, an average of 2.6 organs for transplants and 35 kilos of meat for consumption by other ‘participants’.
At least they’ve done the math. According to Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL), one human being can do seven hours of office work and seven hours of menial work, sleep for seven hours and have three hours left in which to relax, eat, or visit a prostitute. Exactly 72 human beings are accommodated in a steel and timber construction containing bunk beds and a table for computer screens behind which, wearing headsets, they work in a call centre in three shifts: office work, sleep, menial work. With 72 of these subdivisions on each floor of a nine-floor building, the total comes to 28,512 people living and working in one building, or unit. Each unit is allotted a certain amount of land on which to grow foodstuffs. Eight units create a total working populace of about 200,000 human beings. On average, one in five of them is fit to be trained and put to work. The rest can be ‘recycled’. On average, a human being is a productive member of the unit for three years before having to be recycled. One human body yields six litres of blood, an average of 2.6 organs for transplants and 35 kilos of meat for consumption by other ‘participants’.
1 January 2007 _ article by Wouter Vanstiphout _
Happy Hoogvliet
Only six kilometers long, Rotterdam’s subway line was the shortest in the world when it opened in 1968. Not surprisingly, the city took great pride in having built the Netherlands’ first subway. It was yet another sign of the city’s agility in re-inventing itself after the devastating air raid that had destroyed it’s historical core in 1940. It manifested the two pillars of Rotterdam’s carefully cultivated image: modernity and progress. A new urban core dominated by buildings that meant business, and spacious new housing estates fostered the city’s self-esteem. The subway was welcomed as a gadget that strengthened the new image. Starting in the rebuilt center, the line crosses the river disclosing the old working class estates on the southern bank. It continues to the postwar housing estates that repeated endless series of identical or very similar units (which had appropriately been labeled ‘stamps’). For the time being the line ended in Slinge station, in one of the world’s most famous housing estates: Pendrecht.
23 June 2004 _ article by Michelle Provoost _
Maaskant. Architect van de vooruitgang
Hugh Maaskant (1907-1977) is best known as the architect who made the biggest mark on the post-war reconstruction of Rotterdam with such buildings as the Groothandelsgebouw, the Hilton Hotel and the Lijnbaan flats. Beginning his career in 1937 as the partner of Willem van Tijen, Maaskant embarked on his most prolific period after setting up in independent practice in 1955. He produced the lion's share of his work in the 1950s and '60s, the very period architectural critics generally regard as a time of crisis, when architects worldwide fell prey to confusion and lack of direction. The overriding factor in this criticism was the close link that had grown up since the war between architects originating with the modern movement and the economic-political leaders of that time. The upshot, according to the critics, was that the utopian quality that had originally informed the modern movement had ceded to an empty formalism.
This critical stance on post-war modernism was also directed in part at Maaskant. The year 1971 marked the point in his career when the long-smouldering dissatisfaction with the abstract, large-scale, anonymous and 'inhuman' aspects of architecture erupted. This was part of a broader cultural about-turn in the Netherlands in which '60s policy, which was largely directed at material growth, came under critical review. The openness and spatiality of modern architecture that for a decade had served as metaphors for the 'open society' fell from favour and came to be perceived as an emptiness that needed programming if existential needs for visual stimuli, security and the 'human' scale were to be met. The great scale that had invaded every terrain of social reality and had been accommodated by the architecture of practices like Groosman, Van den Broek & Bakema, Van Embden and Maaskant, was longer read as an optimistic sign of growth and advancement. Indeed, their buildings were regarded as the degrading products of antisocial architects. Add to that the widespread discontent with the quality of mass-produced housing - built by Maaskant among others in tens of thousands of units at a time - and it was inevitable that in the 1970s Maaskant would be quickly toppled from his illustrious position at the crest of Dutch architecture.
This critical stance on post-war modernism was also directed in part at Maaskant. The year 1971 marked the point in his career when the long-smouldering dissatisfaction with the abstract, large-scale, anonymous and 'inhuman' aspects of architecture erupted. This was part of a broader cultural about-turn in the Netherlands in which '60s policy, which was largely directed at material growth, came under critical review. The openness and spatiality of modern architecture that for a decade had served as metaphors for the 'open society' fell from favour and came to be perceived as an emptiness that needed programming if existential needs for visual stimuli, security and the 'human' scale were to be met. The great scale that had invaded every terrain of social reality and had been accommodated by the architecture of practices like Groosman, Van den Broek & Bakema, Van Embden and Maaskant, was longer read as an optimistic sign of growth and advancement. Indeed, their buildings were regarded as the degrading products of antisocial architects. Add to that the widespread discontent with the quality of mass-produced housing - built by Maaskant among others in tens of thousands of units at a time - and it was inevitable that in the 1970s Maaskant would be quickly toppled from his illustrious position at the crest of Dutch architecture.
16 June 2003 _ article by Michelle Provoost _ English Summary
Brave New Office Building
Als een theatraal gevaarte staat het Tomadohuis aan de rand van de oude Dordtse binnenstad, met een harde minimalistische vormgeving die zich niets van zijn omgeving aantrekt. Stroken beton en glas, samengebald in een kubus, met als enige verzachting een lichtronde uitstulping van het beton en een kleurig kunstwerk. Maar ook die elementen zijn onrustbarend groot en zwaar, abstract en imponerend. Dit kantoorgebouw, ontworpen in 1958, is geconstrueerd als een 'zelfdragende autocarosserie'. De constructie moest werken als het blikken omhulsel van een auto, dat zelfstandig één geheel vormt zonder tussensteunpunten en vervolgens op het chassis en de wielen wordt gezet.
1 January 2002 _ article by Michelle Provoost _ Het Tomadohuis van Huig Maaskant
Mechanization takes command
De aanleg rond 1870 van de Nieuwe Waterweg en vijf jaar later van de spoorwegverbinding met België maakte van Rotterdam een draaischijf in de goederenstromen van noordwest Europa. Daar was de stad bestuurlijk en technisch niet of nauwelijks op ingesteld. Om ten volle van deze nieuwe ligging te profiteren werd tussen 1872 en 1879 aan de overkant van de rivier in één keer, vanuit één plan, een nieuwe 'stad' gebouwd, die geheel was ingesteld op het overslaan van goederen tussen verschillende vervoersmedia: oceaanschepen, rivierschepen, treinen en karren. Het gebied heet Feijenoord en zou later als bijnaam krijgen 'De Kop van Zuid'. gebied waarvoor stadsingenieur Willem Nicolaas Rose decennia eerder plannen hadden gemaakt, werd in enkele jaren ontwikkeld tot een infrastructureel en industrieel complex dat in Europa zijn weerga niet kende. Het waren echter geen daarvoor aangewezen ambtenaren die het voortouw namen in de stadsuitbreiding, maar een ondernemer: Lodewijk Pincoffs. Hij zou de stad haar belangrijkste uitbreiding geven sinds de bouw van de waterstad begin zeventiende eeuw.
1 January 2002 _ article by Wouter Vanstiphout _ De bouw van de Rotterdamse haven 1870-1914
What If?
1. Op 14 mei 1940 verzamelden honderden dakloze Rotterdammers zich op het land van Hoboken, de lege vlakte tegenover het Museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen. Zittend in het gras zag men de vlammen en rookwolken die opdoemden achter de bomen en de moderne witte villa's die de rand van het centrum markeerden. Niemand wist dat er duizenden mensen omkwamen; niemand kende de reikwijdte van het bombardement; niemand wist dat deze verschrikkelijke verwoesting de grootste impuls zou zijn voor de ontwikkeling van de stad sinds het doorgraven van de Nieuwe Waterweg aan het einde van de negentiende eeuw. Op 14 mei 1940 begon de geschiedenis van Rotterdam opnieuw.
1 January 1999 _ exhibition by crimson _
org-wars
To do:
1. Negotiate.Near total exasperation about the state of the profession has given way to one of the most important new urbanistic concepts in a decade: an urbanism of negotiation. Dutch city planners complain that 99% of their time is spent meeting people: trying to get the highway people to talk with the sports centre people; trying to get the railway people to stop their vendetta against the vegetable-garden people; trying to convince the Shell refinery people that they should stop protesting against the McDonald’s drive in being built in front of their installations; convincing the Telecom corporation to get a really good architect to build something spectacular in the middle of the city, etc. Picture the urbanist, rushing breathlessly from meeting to meeting, having to beg for favours from roughnecked specialists, corporate suits, whining environ-mentalists, racist neighbourhood-committees, cold-blooded politicians and leering developers. All the while he is dreaming about devising a beautiful urban plan, that would be usable for at least twenty or thirty years. It would give the city a foundation to accommodate both change and continuity. The public, civic, collective city would be transubstantiated in this plan, while the short term, private interests would come to the fore in its architectural in-fill. This view of urbanism is imbued with the ideology of one coherent democratic civic authority versus a great many incidental private corporate bodies.
1 January 1998 _ exhibition by crimson _
Rockbottom
'...une condition très.....ahunh, ahunh, ahunh..... intéressante...', the voice booms in a great big old brick warehouse, between broken bodies swinging suspended from the rafters and immense steel spiders loitering around children's bedrooms. Above in the galleries surrounding the big space are tight phalanges of youth concentrating on television sets, themselves being watched over by severely dressed art femmes. This is not the new Metallica video. Rem Koolhaas is giving a lecture at the opening of the OMA exhibition 'Living', in the Centre d'Architecture Arc en Rêve. The centre shares a building with the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, which is currently running a show by Louise Bourgeois, the French artist living in New York responsible for some of the most unsettling images in contemporary art. A thousand people have shown up. A hundred are sitting in the actual lecture hall, the rest have to make do with televised Koolhaas. The exhibition features four villas and an apartment project, all of which have been built and are lived in. The main feature, the reason that the place is teeming with foreign critics and curators and French politicians, is to be found somewhere else. For that you have to leave the building, take a left, follow the heavy traffic to the north over the quay, where the cars, trucks, gas stations and discotheques are incoherently juxtaposed against the elegant Louis XV sandstone riverfront. Then take the bridge over the river; follow it for a couple of kilometres, drive inland through a sprawl of identical suburban houses and industrial buildings; take a writhing road up the leafy hill until you reach a private dirt road which brings you further up. To your left lies a pasture with a ruin of an 18th-century tempietto, behind it an elegant neoclassical mansion, and in front of you the top of the hill, with a reddish-brown box punctured with holes hovering just above it. On top of the box lies an I-beam that sticks out on one side and is connected to the hill by a spidery steel rod. What can this be except a measure to keep the box from drifting away on the wind? As you come closer, the box appears to hover over a cut stone perimeter wall. The dirt road is carved into the hill and burrows its way underneath the wall into the courtyard.
1 January 1998 _ article by Wouter Vanstiphout _ OMA builds house in Bordeaux
City of Industry
De goede reputatie die de Nederlandse stedebouw geniet heeft zij te danken aan de beroemde ontwerpen voor woonwijken en stadscentra van ontwerpers als Berlage, Van Eesteren en Van Traa. Het zijn ontwerpen die gecommissioneerd werden door de overheid, en ook de uitvoering ervan werd door uitgebreide bureaucratische en financiële constructies begeleid. Het zijn daarmee Gesamtkunstwerke van de stedebouw en de politiek. In de historiografie gaat deze vorm van stedebouw door voor dé stedebouw. Industriegebieden komen dan ook niet vaak in de geschiedenisboeken voor.
De stedebouw die een industriewijk voortbrengt voldoet aan geheel andere regels dan het ontwerp van een woonwijk. De ecologie van de industrie bestaat uit een systeem van machines, draaicirkels, raccordementen, vrachtauto's, kantines, treinen. De overwegingen die ten grondslag liggen aan het stedebouwkundige plan zijn letterlijk onmenselijk, want ze hebben te maken met transport en vervoer, locatiekeuze, aansluiting op weg en spoor, bedrijfsvoering, daglichttoetreding.
De planning gaat volgens een principe dat verder alleen in kantoorparken en in restzones langs de snelweg en in andere vergeten perifere gebieden voorkomt. Aan de basis ervan ligt een efficiënte verkaveling en infrastructuur, waarbinnen bedrijven hun gebouw plannen. Deze stedebouw lijkt nog het meest op die uit de negentiende eeuw, toen eigenbouwers binnen de door de overheid uitgezette verkaveling ieder hun huizenblokje neerzetten.
1 January 1998 _ article by Michelle Provoost _ Een architectuurgeschiedenis van de Spaanse Polder Rotterdam