For old times' sake - can you hear the difference?

Near the banks of the river Amstel in Amsterdam, the area of an old water plant is being redeveloped. One part is dedicated to self build, that is to say, people are allowed to build their own individual house, with lesser building restrictions and with more freedom regarding the aesthetical quality and architectural relationship with their adjacent buildings. The homeowner designs and builds it or hires an architect and contractor to build. It gives the owners the opportunity to establish their own (town) house with a very personal view. It is a relative new way of building in the new development in the inner city of Amsterdam, initiated after the collapse of the more traditional developing companies because of the recession. The available development sites were unoccupied and the council is, in this way, exploring different ways to enable housing developments and allow individuals to build. Historically, it was a very traditional way of building in the old quarters in the inner city of Amsterdam.

Now I personally encourage these types of developments, although it certainly has some drawbacks. For one, every owner seems so preoccupied in creating as much individual expression as possible in the appearance of the house, that as a consequence, the whole ensemble is quickly becoming a cacophony of sound instead of a harmonious composition. Every house is screaming for attention. 

Pitch standards.

There is a way to create harmony in the ensemble, by being as minimal as possible on the outside of the house, so the house is becoming a backdrop to the inevitable standouts and to concentrate on a very individual interior, for instance with double height rooms, personal and original layouts etc.

Others don't really care about harmony and are approaching the matter more indifferent. They go for the pastiche, big time. They copy the architectural style of the 18th / 19th century neighbourhoods in Amsterdam to the millimeter, mirroring proportions and sizing of all elements in the facade and completing it with cornices at the top, fake cramp irons, mouldings and cast iron balcony fences.But they are using the most modern building techniques and construction methods.  It is confusing, to say the least.

Are they having the “homesick” blues?

Urban Geometry - no math involved

When roaming the cities with your camera, the triangular and rectangular shapes, diagonals, planes and facades fill your viewfinder. How to choose, what to incorporate in your image?

“Geometric: resembling or using the simple rectilinear or curvilinear lines used in geometry.”    -- the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa)/ New York --

For getting a good composition to work or take pictures in cramped spaces like historic city centres or interiors, it takes some geometric spatial awareness.

“A painter hoping to represent the choppy ocean surface can hardly settle for a regular array of scalloped brush strokes, but somehow must suggest waves on a multiplicity of scales. A scientist puts aside an unconscious bias toward smooth Euclidean shapes and linear calculations. An urban planner or architect learns that the best cities grow dynamically, not neatly, into complex, jagged, interwoven networks, with different kinds of housing and different kinds of economic uses all jumbled together.”

As an architect or urban planner, you don’t always have the time to allow organic growth, interventions have to be made and then understanding urban geometry is key. For instance, as streets covers around a quarter of urban areas, designing streets is a key issue in a global approach for an environmental urban design. The geometry of streets, buildings and orientation directly influence the airflow and solar access in those streets and therefore thermal comfort at pedestrian level.

Geometry, for some it was the most pointless form of math ever devised. It involves shapes, planes and lines and lots of proofs where you have to visualize and draw all of them in three dimensions, in a cube. For most it has no real use, although teachers like to say it does.

But if you want to make good architecture or even a good photograph in (old) city centres, urban geometry has to be your daily bread and butter.

Permeable space, so beautiful

The boundary of a house or property is normally the place where a wall or fence is placed to form a barrier, to keep you save, to protect you from the elements, to form a structure, to define a space.

But it also provides the architect with the opportunity to connect the inner and the outer world, by placing a door to enter the space, a window to provide a view, corridors to connect rooms, a gate to enter the enclosed garden or connect courtyards.

A permeable space, however, defines the transitional moment where inside space becomes outside space and vice versa. The boundaries are blurred, opening up spaces, inextricably connecting spaces, making movements of people fluid and unhindered

The Japanese are, for centuries, masters in using these permeable spaces in their architecture, not in the least because the climate makes it possible to live in the open.

The boundary of a building in historic Japanese architecture is not necessarily formed by walls. A structure of wooden beams and trusses makes an open plan, without outer walls, possible. A careful layout of “shoji”, paper or wooden sliding screens in several layers, are the separating elements between rooms and / or garden and courtyard. Wooden elevated walkways, around the private perimeters of the building incorporated under the roof, provide shelter from the elements, form corridors to enter the more private rooms, but are also the place to have encounters, to have a talk, to sit and read a book or to enjoy the view of the garden.

Including such spaces in western contemporary architecture is challenging, even more because of present building regulations and conventions in how spaces should be defined. 

But this “permeable” space invites, separates and connects, simultaneously and gradually. It makes this part of the house or building meaningful, interesting.

And doesn’t it look beautiful because of it!

Associations - Johannes Vermeer

The centre of Delft early winter, with some beautiful afternoon sunlight and clear skies, makes you very aware of the heritage we, Dutch, have of all the Old Masters who recognized this quality in the light.
 

Could Should Would...

I was wondering why so many resolutions fail.

Before you stop reading. No, this has nothing to do with the new year, not with smoking cessation or reducing weight. No, I'm talking about changing careers, changing profession. Not something you ponder over every new year, but just once or twice in your lifetime.

It seems a trendy topic in the newspapers, "hip" if you like; a banker becomes a carpenter, a lawyer opens a restaurant, a doctor is suddenly a bicycle-repairman We're talking here about professionals, with an high level of education and training, having worked for years with full dedication, in order to build a successful career. Overnight, they want to work with “their hands", achieve tangible results, create a product, satisfy people instantly with something beautiful, something tasty perhaps. Avid cyclists found that tinkering with their bike is more fun than running a daily clinic. Cooking for friends is so satisfying, why not ask money for this? And what gives more joy every day, then the smell of wood in the workplace?

This work, like in a craft, seems so attractive to some highly educated people that they want to change their careers. They have the money to organize the workshop or to buy a professional kitchen. Marketing of their products seems assured because they have a network of like-minded friends, their first customers. The "startup" for the first year is covered ..........

But that "craft"

"Craft is the hand-making of products and goods. Unlike industrial production handicraft products are each made with equipment or with hand tools. No object is exactly the same, each is unique"

Works by hand are time-consuming and costly, because they are each made individually. Since the seventeenth century there were associations of craftsmen and artisans. In those guilds new students were also trained. You learned your craft thoroughly by years of practising, eventually by acquiring the title "master". Nowadays, most crafts are taught in vocational schools, in which perhaps only two years are spent on gathering skills. Real practice stays at a distance. The craft is certainly not as attractive anymore for the 17/18-year-old, because of the required physical labour, relatively low pay and the low status of most “crafts”. The need for the craft disappears because of new and faster techniques, with the consequence that some products are no longer available or can’t be produced anymore. So the "masters" are dying out and if necessary we have to import them from abroad.

As we draw attention to seemingly self-evident products in the old built environment, as a stained glass window, a carved door, the ornate stucco ceiling or wrought iron, anyone finds these beautiful. Yet these "attractive" building products are disappearing very quickly from the everyday image and are only preserved in the restoration projects of buildings from previous centuries. These products seem forever lost for new architecture.

Many of these building components and products are unknown to and therefore unloved by the present-day architect, too expensive for the client and no longer available for the contractor.

These products and more important, the skills needed to make them, are also not "hip" enough for the new craftsman. It's not something he wants to learn by years of practising and he can't sell the products instantly to his friends. The craft is for them a full-time hobby. but will stay an occupation of which they keep dreaming of .......

Steps - how to use them

I recently published the photo-series “Lisbon”. In the reportage it shows a lot of photographs with flights of steps. And believe me if I tell you I have quite a few more.

In most parts of the old center of Lisbon, these steps are the only way of getting around. No cars, no bicycles, no trams, but a very few public lifts to be seen in these streets. Well you can’t call them streets, they are predominantly called “beco”, translated as alley, or “escada”, meaning stairs. But these names don’t do its locations justice. These flights of steps are sometimes the only available public space adjacent to buildings, they are an intricate part of the urban fabric. 

Along these stairs are entrances of apartment buildings, shops, restaurants, playgrounds, offices. They sometimes span a height difference of over 50 meters between streets or alleys, Imagine the practical problems this causes for the elderly and the disabled, for having small children, for deliveries, for getting the luggage to and from your house. But it doesn’t deter the inhabitants to live there, on the contrary! 

At the same time it also offers great opportunities for making the public space attractive, they are a playground in itself, a terrace with free seats outside your doorstep, they make shadowed area’s, they provide light in narrow parts of the neighborhood, they form a vista to the lower city-center for orientation, etc etc. In short, they make the public space interesting and captivating and in the summer months, public life outside is a given. It is something city planners in flat Holland would give an arm and a leg for.

It also partly explains why it is such a joy to walk around old Lisbon and take photographs. The viewfinder is full of geometry, triangles and diagonals. The perspectives are interesting and full of surprises.

And it keeps you healthy too!

Click for the photo-series Lisbon

Lisbon - I prefer crayons

During the Christmas holiday I visited Lisbon, Portugal.

Nothing better than taking pictures for a few days in a city filled with anecdotes of the glorious past, the dark past, the “carnation” resurrection, the economic downfall of the last two decades and the stalemate the city is in at the current moment. This history is present everywhere, in the architecture, the state of its buildings, the maintenance, or dare I say it the lack of it, of the public realm, the hustle and bustle of daily life and.......... the graffiti.

Oh the graffiti, a bless in disguise, but a curse in daylight at the same time. 

I remember the early eighties when in Amsterdam and every other European city, the inner cities were all but dilapidated and of diminishing interest to businesses. Working life was fleeing to outer cities, seeking efficiency in new buildings, direct access to highways and airports, leaving the city centers without the necessary liveliness and also income to support itself.

The old neighborhoods were taken over by angry young people (me included), with no real prospect of employment, mostly filling the day demonstrating against the establishment.

And by doing so, every subway carriage, every wall was a creative outlet. Every inch of every surface was sprayed, with the cans nicked from the local paint shop. Proletarian shopping we called it. Most graffiti was not more than a feeble attempt of "visual" shouting against everybody. Most young "creatives" were just content with their own “tag”. Only a very few were active with a creative merit, let alone trying to make something to be called “art”. Obviously Keith Haring springs to mind.

Nowadays, Lisbon seems to be exactly in the same state again as most cities were in the eighties. The renewal and redevelopment of the inner city is stalling, beautiful historic buildings are abandoned or waiting for a new future and function. The local government is seemingly not (financial) capable of keeping the public area under control and thus clean. Social life has retreated in some parts. It has become the ideal breeding ground for seedy activities and ……for graffiti.

Walls, originally rendered in nice pastel colors, are sprayed with fluorescent greens and orange paint. Thus making the, fine quality, plastering almost irreparable.  Inhabitants of nicely renovated apartment buildings are getting discouraged to repaint their freshly painted walls again and again.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely nothing against expressing yourself of your discontent with the state the city is in and the way it is run. Far from it, it is good way to change things on a local level. When walking through this magnificent city, there seems certainly a reason for a change in the way this city is run.

But I suggest that instead of using the tin cans with paint of the old days, with its irreversible consequences, we start using crayons. It has the same effect, but doesn’t it look much better on those rendered walls in pastel colors?