Filed under: Rotterdam
Mid-review, Community group presentation
Studio REFUGE: Sketch models
–noun
1. shelter or protection from danger, trouble, etc.: to take refuge from a storm.
2. a place of shelter, protection, or safety.
3. anything to which one has recourse for aid, relief, or escape.
–verb (used with object)
4. Archaic. to afford refuge to.
–verb (used without object)
5. Archaic. to take refuge.
The open city provides people with the freedom to choose how to move through and participate in the city. (Rotterdam has an advantage of size and density in this sense.)
The majority of Rotterdam’s population is foreign born. Essentially, we are all refugees seeking to colonize space in the city. We have the right to public space and we have the right to refuge. To Refuge is an act and it can be used to connect or disconnect with the public.
Rotterdam-based Zus: Gallery Space
Filed under: Rotterdam | Tags: Architecture Summer School, Open City, Rotterdam
The Team: Studio REFUGE
The Site: Wijnhaveneiland
The Tutor: Harmon van der Wall (Krill Architects)
Over the course of the next two weeks our group, Studio REFUGE, has the task of proposing future development interventions/scenarios that will transform Rotterdam’s original core into a reality consistent with the Open-City philosophy – a collective, attractive (literally, serve as an attractor), and economically strong environment. We wanted to tap into a design pool familiar with the public spaces of Rotterdam. We started an archinect discussion about the future potential industries. See in-progress string here.
Our site has the potential to become the densest part of the city. We are an island of low, mid, and high-rise development, with plans to go extremely vertical. Additionally, it is a well connected piece of the city and within walking distance of all major landmarks, neighborhoods, attractions, and regional transit hubs. On my first day in Rotterdam, I found myself on the island without even realizing I was isolated. Dutch landscape architects have proposed changes to the area for years. Why haven’t any of these open space solutions been realized?
I am finding that many threads are connecting the intentions of Open City with my own interests in new cities and new pubic space typologies. My posts over the course of this program (the next 10 days) might be the stream of consciousness that flows around the nodes of structured studio time.
The concept of 3D city refers to the rethinking, or challenging, of the current urban landscape to create a multi-directional network of urban space. (Rethinking the orientation of the urban landscape)
The open city philosophy encourages new and abundant activity on the street. We challenge the traditional orientation and use of streets to activate the city center.
We reorient the city center networks of transportation, circulation, from mainly ground level and horizontal to a highly vertical and three dimensional scenario.
By building upward and outward, we blur the boundaries of building an object and link. With an image-able vision of a new city center, we explore the possibilities of an architecture of assimilation.
Rotterdam Open City attempts to be an “attractive” city. A attractor of people, events, activity, and public life. Visitors in the open city feel welcome, way-find with ease, and enjoy a dynamic set of city amenities.
The investment of two industries will help fuel the transformation. One is a technological push -to be a leader of digital networking. The other is related to Design Tourism.
Filed under: Rotterdam
I’m sitting at the cafe of the Maritime Hotel in Rotterdam with Natalia Echeverri (2008 Branner Fellow: Neoliberal Fragments). We have just arrived for Rotterdam – Open City, the 5th annual Architecture Summer School hosted by the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design. It is good to already be acclimated to the city and especially good to see another familiar face. Looking forward to the opening ceremonies and excited to meet the other students and professors we’ll be working with during the course of the next two weeks.
The workshop is structured around five themes: Collective, Community, Reciprocity, Refuge, and Squat. It will be our task as designers to produce interventions at five sites in the center of Rotterdam that address these respective themes. I am part of the Refuge group, which will be focused on the temporary withdrawl, or finding a place of retreat, within the center of the city. Specifically, we will be looking at the high-rise dwelling and grappling with issues and degrees of public and private space.
I am also interested in the agenda of the Collective group. This group is concerned with the lack of public space in the city and the “kind of urbanity that prevails in most Dutch New Towns.” This group will examine a strip of Rotterdam and propose new types of collectivism.
A [FLOATING DINNER] around the city introduced us to greater environs tonight.
Filed under: Den Haag
Nick Sowers, Taylor Medlin, and I met up for a couple days of architecture in Den Haag, Delft, and Rotterdam. The group site visit in Den Haag: WWII bunker from the Atlantic Wall Defenses, originally occupied by German forces.
Sowers gave our journey a subheading: At the edge of a new city, remotely looking at a bunker. From the beach, much construction was visible; enough to maybe count as a new city in this economic climate. Wanted to post some photos of us trekking through this rainy, sandy, thorny landscape as if we were actually part of some larger militarized network of activity. There was definitely some role playing involved.
Filed under: Amsterdam
To me, the Dutch province, FLEVOLAND, sounds like an alternate reality. It’s either the hidden world within the final level of an action-adventure video game, or the music video setting, record label, and debut album title of the next indie hip-hop superstar.
In this reality, it is a part of the Polder Landscape, land that was reclaimed from the sea around the beginning of the twentieth century (Flevoland was reclaimed around the 1950s and 60s). Since then, it has become a home to several new cities. Specifically, I’m interested in Almere. The question this new city has been facing since it’s inception is: Is it possible to create an identity without a history? The town created a competition (invites only) for a new town center in which innovation and experimentation were deliberately sought out/after. After nearly a decade of meetings/briefs/revisions, Rem Koolhaas and OMA were declared the official master planners. Their scheme called for an extremely image-able break with surrounding fabric, yet connections, links, and a rerouting of existing infrastructure and roads. The scale of the new city center is substantially larger than the surrounding, existing urban fabric and it skews and twists the fine-grain grid of older Almere. In comparison and most notably, the design separates pedestrian, bike, and automobile traffic and consists of a radically different (maybe even innovative) building stock.
I’m out to test the edges of the new city center and to face what skeptics and critics have deemed the faults: low levels of ground-level activity at some residential building sites, lack of open space planning, and an overall suburban retail-mall quality of life and feel. I have seen the you tube home-videos of suburban teenage gangster rap wannabes ambling around the city center’s large plazas and the bright, people-free photographs of the new colorful housing typologies. I wonder whether this place will be similar to Copenhagen’s Orestad or if it will “fail better” (as Zadie Smith says) because construction was completed before any economic crisis reared its ugly head.
I am anticipating a fruitful study in this ripe, new city atmosphere. I am in contact with the International New Town Institute (based in Almere), but first, I’m going it alone. I wonder which city – Amsterdam or Almere – will entertain a greater feeling of alternative reality.
The photos are from my initial, Saturday afternoon derive.
Filed under: Amsterdam
Singel-canal opposite Flowermarket (Bloemenmarkt)
Because of the Polder landscape and building on reclaimed land, and all the canals and water, and everything else that makes one’s experience in Amsterdam rather levitational, the theme for this month of Dutch water cities is [FLOATING].
Ex. 1
Ex. 2
Floating cities: often the only way to build them new.
Floating public spaces: new and informal appropriations every day.
Jan Gehl called Copenhagen’s watery public spaces “Aquatic City Space” and “Waterfront City Space” and described a number of activities that might occur in each place. In comparison, Amsterdam seems rougher around the edges, more spontaneous, sporadic, condensed, overlapping, and unexpected. Like Yes Duffy’s thesis card game, pick an activity, a location, and a group of people and mix-up this city. Yesterday, I drew the haircut, on a boat, with 2 Australian nomads cards. [FLOATING HAIRCUT]!
The act of float cut generated instant business (recruited boating tourists) by making a typically semi-private/private activity public. It doesn’t hurt that it was refreshing (being doused in water in the heat of the summer) and at the peak of tourist season.
Copenhagen is modeling parts of its new development on Amsterdam, can it capture the true spirit of this place? In more words, Serban said no. I [insert photo with new haircut] tend to agree.
Filed under: Amsterdam
I arrived in Amsterdam via an easy and comfortable train ride. It’s nice to capitalize on the convenient geography of central Europe. Entry into the Netherlands marks the beginning of nearly a month of research (some of you are laughing) in Holland. The major events planned for these next few weeks are 1. finally meeting up with my two fellow fellows and 2. participating in Rotterdam – Open City: the 5th International Architecture Summer School hosted by the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design.
I am fortunate enough to be able to meet up with the two other 2009 Branner Traveling Fellows, Nick Sowers “Military Atmospheres” and Taylor Medlin “RE:mote Controlled” while in Amsterdam and Den Haag. Nick is studying the interface between military and civilian spaces and Taylor is investigating construction techniques used in sites of remote location.. While we are still finalizing plans and site visits, we are continuously discovering overlaps among our research and interests. For example, I am discovering many new cities and public spaces are the sites of former military occupation and, of course, many bases and new cities are located in remote areas. We were discussing the possibility of going to Sealand or other similar new city/military base propped on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean. Slavecity, outside Rotterdam, might be another possibility. Anyway, to hit this point home – the continuously overlapping Branner topics, see the point made by Jaap van Veen pre arrival into Noord Holland. Let’s just say that he has been living and sailing in the Netherlands for a long time:
While I hardly know what Oerestad is about ,I wonder whether you are aware of historic dimensions. I wondered about this rather empty plain so close to Kopenhagen, until I learned it used to be a practicing area for Danish army artillery until I suppose somewhere in the 1930’s. (Amager Faelled). I hope you visited Christiana, also a former defense structure (army connected to nearby ex-naval base Holmene). These structures seem to have liberated themselves by the help of a mix of entrepreneurs and squatters without assistance of official city planners. Amager Faelled lacked buildings to squat So it has decades later been commissioned to official architects, of which you are in danger of becoming one. While in London ,Copenhagen and Stockholm, 17th century navy sites long have left governmental wings, in Amsterdam we still have this curious “Marine Etablissement” that has no naval function, but is used by central government to house riot police, provide helicopters with unpopular foreign heads of state with a discrete landing place; well beyond the jurisdiction of the city council. It would be nice if someone like you noted these anomalies – the place could be better used, relieve inner city Amsterdam from some problems, etc. For example, it would be an ideal international bus station to ship passengers into roundtrip-boats.
Filed under: Paris
I’m facing backward on the train to Holland. Looking back/reflecting on the places I’ve just recently been….
Public space in Paris
Mireille helped me understand the city through its amenities. The public, Parisian or Foreign, live in the public space of the city. Most activity, esp. in the summer months, centers around the meandering embankments, ramps and bridges of the Seine. Cramped living quarters (small apartments) in central Paris produce surrogate urban living rooms….outside. Picnics on the Seine are a daily phenomenon and the gathering and condensing of people and activities lasts well into the night. The best part about living in the city is that you don’t have to clean up after the party. If you get up early enough to run, you beat the city sanitation crews and splash through puddles of pee and shards of broken glass bottles.
Paris reeks of urine in the heat….but this is what happens when wine is so available, delicious, and cheap. In Paris, the homeless population drinks champagne. The recycling bins are overflowing with empty wine bottles and there isn’t an outdoor cafe not filled with people imbibing something.
The French will sit anywhere. Witness the cobblestone clearing (covered in Pigeon shit) outside the Centre Pompidou. Filled with families, couples, loaners. At Eurolille, people were sitting in the most bland, horribly designed spaces I’ve seen. Just because people will sit anywhere doesn’t mean they should have to. My favorite spots to sit and to see sitters is at the unobstructed, unrailed edges of the Seine. This type of freedom is rarely possible in the states. I’m painting maybe a dirty picture of Paris, but it is in fact really beautiful and nice. It ranks high on the favorite places I’ve been list.
Really interesting to see was the Viaduct of the Arts – the precedent that originally appeared in the competition brief for NYC High Line. See Photos.
After taking in much of the city for the week, and seeing the influence of Haussmann from above (via de la Tour Eiffel), Manuela Koelke (SOM 2005) and I spent the day at Le Grand Paris exhibit, familiarizing ourselves with the design proposals for 2030.
Make no mistake, Paris is anti new cities:
The ten multidisciplinary teams, headed by architects and urban planners, have each explored a new type of urban planning, which excludes any notion of creating cities from scratch. The days of untrammeled development – such as the new towns that emerged in the post-war years – are over. Today it is time to remodel our capital region.
It’s not hard to understand why the negative reaction is portrayed after you’ve been to some unsatisfying French solutions to new cities including La Defense (1964-ish Financial District on the periphery), Cergy Pontoise (one of several new towns built in the suburbs of Paris, this one more garden city like, 1960s), Euralille (Transit/convention/exhibition hub and parasite to Lille, master planned by Koolhaas, 1990s), and the new neighborhood development around La Bibliothèque nationale (began in 1985).
It was hard to find any physical, concrete design solutions at the exhibit. Most proposals for Paris 2030 were violently against the concept of the master plan (which is respectable but questionable, what then?). Nothing like Corbusier’s Plan Voisin….except maybe the blue foam concept animation from MDRVD. See the you tube post on the latest blog comment section. Then, kindly post a comment yourself.
The Axe majeur of Cergy-Pontoise belongs to the historical tradition of great urban layout. Its three kilometers length is marked out by 12 stations. Twelve is the number of time, year day and night. The number which rythms (I’m quoting the placard with exact precision) the life of man.
