Streetworks by Amsterdam Academy of Architecture

Patterns in urbanity

Street Works

Research – Reflections – Projects 03

Amsterdam Academy of Architecture Architectura & Natura

StreetWorks

Contents Foreword Aart Oxenaar

Introduction StreetWorks: Connecting disciplines Rogier van den Berg

Street fascination: Introduction to the street theme Henk Hartzema

Meaning of the street ‘I want my street back’ Henk Hartzema

Barcelona: Retro-fitting the Ildefons Cerdà project and addressing the future Joan Busquets

Thomas Jefferson’s blueprint for an egalitarian American landscape Alex Krieger

Drawing the street The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect Noël van Dooren

Drawing the street: Sketchbook

Creating the street Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level Rogier van den Berg

From the streets Ton Schaap

StreetWorks: Projects

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Amsterdam Academy of Architecture

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Foreword Aart Oxenaar director Amsterdam Academy of Architecture

Foreword

The street is back on the agenda of the architect, the urbanist and the landscape architect. That is less obvious than it might seem. The curse put on the ‘rue corridor‘ by Le Corbusier and CIAM in the 1930s reverberated for a long time in post-war urbanism. The street as a space defined by a continuous line development disappeared and was replaced by an asymmetrical arrangement of plots lining both sides of traffic arteries in different gradations. To be sure, the street was rediscovered in the 1960s as a ‘form of living together‘ and, a little later, as an historical element that could be reused in urban and neighbourhood renewal. But it would be some decades before the traditional street would again assume a main role as a formal theme in urban design. Henk Hartzema — who took up the position of lecturer in Design in Urbanism at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture during 2009-2010 — deployed the 5

Foreword

StreetWorks project as a way of emphatically putting the street back on the agenda. In his opinion, the street is not only a social, economic and technical component in the life of the city, but also the designed backbone that supports the built fabric of the city. The street lends not only form but also meaning to public space and thus constitutes a permanent factor and represents the ‘longue durée‘ in the development of the city. That is why Hartzema‘s approach to the street involves a craftsman-like precision. It is an approach that derives its power and significance from designing profiles and buildings in the right way, in the right place and with a suitable programme. With his design research, Hartzema introduced the theme of the long line into education. After half a year of preparations, almost sixty students started to study six streets that, over time, have repeatedly played a key role 6

Foreword

in the development of their cities and in the relationship of those cities to their surrounding countryside. The research was made possible thanks to the collaboration between the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and six foreign schools in five European cities â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the Helsinki University of Technology, the Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Porto, the University of Zagreb, the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture and the Institut for Architecture of La Cambre, both in Brussels â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and the urban planning departments in all these cities. This collaboration was a project of the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE), without whom it would not have been possible. To all of them we are deeply indebted. With this publication we are pleased to share with you the results of this preliminary research, the presentations of experts and the work of the students. 7

Introduction StreetWorks: Connecting disciplines Rogier van den Berg Head of Urbanism Department

StreetWorks: Connecting disciplines

The Amsterdam Academy of Architecture appoints lecturers who give an important impulse to the masters courses by drawing our attention to a relevant theme within the spatial design disciplines. The Design in Urbanism lectureship puts the design challenge for the city on the agenda and encompasses research. Within this lectureship, Henk Hartzema focused on the street as a spatial, cultural and mental phenomenon in the city. Essential questions such as ‘how do I connect the parts of the city to one another?‘ and ‘what position do I adopt as an architect when I position a building and shape the street?‘ formed the guiding lines throughout the research and teaching programme at the academy. Hartzema clearly emphasized the significance of the theme in his inaugural address: ‘The architect, urbanist and landscape architect always relate to something. The street is the medium through which we can contemplate this relationship. The architect must relate to the neighbours along the length of the street, and to society through the section of the street.‘ ‘Connecting‘ formed the key concept in terms of both the content and structure of the lectureship. If we concentrate on the street, questions of spatial 9

StreetWorks: Connecting disciplines

design arise that touch on urbanism, architecture and landscape architecture. This is a theme that follows a pattern established by the academy. After all, the academy offers masters courses in all three of these disciplines. In addition, students work in mixed design studios for almost half of their studies, a fact that reflects the conviction that although each course has its own core domain, there is a large measure of overlap in spatial assignments. And that overlap became even more apparent through the StreetWorks theme. The lecturer too performed a connecting role. The challenge was to connect his research into the street with elements of the academy‘s teaching programme. It was on that basis that he compiled a Capita Selecta lecture series and formulated the assignment for the third-year project work. More than sixty students from all three courses took part in this project. They worked in mixed groups on streets in six cities across Europe – Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Brussels, Porto and Zagreb. The lecturer acted as the ‘linking pin‘ between the tutors who took the theme as the starting point for the project work. All the groups visited ‘their‘ city for a number of days, conducting research and taking part in a workshop. They did this together 10

StreetWorks: Connecting disciplines

with both local schools of architecture and with local bodies such as the city planning departments and city development corporations responsible for city design. In this way, design education could connect with local practice. In addition to defining the content of the design project for third-year students, the lectureship was also the inspiration behind the first- and secondyear programmes. That is to say, a large number of the design projects undertaken in these years evolved out of the theme. Sometimes by just posing a simple question such as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;how does your intervention relate to the streetâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;? As a result, all projects emphasize the theme and the urban context. That is always important, especially in an era in which a large portion of the assignments are situated in existing urban areas. Connecting existing and new elements as well as elements at a small and large scale is the bedrock of a successful intervention. The academy positions the Design in Urbanism lectureship in a European context. The lectureship offers a way of thematically researching the agenda for the design of the European city. To achieve this, it is vital to connect the academy and professional practice. That is why the tutors 11

StreetWorks: Connecting disciplines

and students united these two worlds through workshops and debates during their visits to six European cities. The visits were followed by StreetParade, an event that involved presentations of the design projects made in the six European cities. This event brought the architecture schools and practice from the different cities together again to discuss the results. Participants debated the European city through the lens of the city in a series of ‘parallel‘ sessions. The StreetParade debate then enjoyed a more general sequel with an ‘urban brunch‘ held the next day. Discussions here focused on the challenges facing each of the six cities and how urban projects in totally different planning cultures are shaped and realized. This publication documents the results of the StreetWorks lectureship. By tossing a stone into the pond, the guest lecturer set the academy in motion with the key theme of the street. Located at the centre of the concentric ripples are his own research and the work of the third-year students in the six different cities. The ripples around that centre determined the direction of many design projects in the first- and second-year programmes, lecture series, form studies and a start-up 12

StreetWorks: Connecting disciplines

workshop in which all the students at the academy visually analyzed the streets of Amsterdam. With his study of the street, Henk Hartzema precisely sensed how a theme can serve as a connecting thread in all sorts of ways. That laid the foundation for his lectureship. With this publication, we sincerely hope that the knowledge, subject matter and didactic model that were developed will find their way both inside and outside the academy.

Street Fascination Introduction to the street theme Henk Hartzema Professor Design in Urbanism

Street fascination: Introdution to the street theme

It is never easy for me to explain in a few words why the street is such an exciting theme. All right, I can say that the street represents the city and its residents, that is true. It is also true that social relations are reflected in the street's architecture. But as soon as this claim has to be substantiated and described in detail, the narrative seems to run out of steam and not to be up to the task. Apparently, the story of the street does not emerge in a wellconstructed theoretical framework; it is less polished and more colourful. In other words, the exciting thing about the story may not be that it tells a truth, but that it reveals a perception. That it is how I see it, my way of seeing it. If that is the case, an entirely new reality opens up: the reality of perception â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the way things are perceived by us. Reality does not exist as such, it is what we make of it. Of course, this conclusion is an enormous relief. It is exactly what keeps a designer ticking: conferring meaning on the things that you make, knowing that there is a common denominator between what people expect or welcome, but that there are also large individual differences in this respect. For a designer, the function of a space is thus never confined to what it is, but is always what we find it to be. What one person finds cosy, another finds claustrophobic, but it is the same space. What one culture regards as normal is regarded by another as exotic. What used to be considered dignified may now be considered authoritarian. Whether aware of the fact or not, a designer is concerned with the impact of the design on the user. The designer twiddles the knobs of perception and can decide whether the user gets what he thinks or not, whether something looks solid or innovative, fits in with the conventions or deliberately departs from them. Customs and fashions come and go. 15

Street fascination: Introdution to the street theme

The question of meaning has always interested me enormously because it describes the dynamism of the interface of object and person. That‘s where it‘s at, that‘s why we do it. The rest – the dogmas and theories – are good intentions, or well-chosen instruments. This logic of perception is particularly true of the city. It is not just about individual preferences or points of view, but also about shared experiences and expressions. Here too there is deliberate or unconscious direction in the way the environment is experienced. Unlike an object or a building, generally speaking the city is not the result of the choice of one individual, but that of the sum total of many individuals over a longer period. The resulting complexity is comprehensive and thus intriguing. Which brings us back to the street. In spite of all differences of place and time, of economy, topography and climate, there is one constant in every village, town and city, and that is the street. The street is original, universal and belongs to everybody. Streets form a network, the sum total of all the streets forms the city. Because nothing is without meaning, the street and the network of streets express the collective intentions of a city. The collective intention can be the consequence of the actions of many individuals, or may be the result of a single person‘s intervention. As the basis of the street is always the same everywhere – a linear space bounded by two walls, a beginning and an end – it is an ideal object for study. What we shall see is that, in spite of the simple correspondences, no two streets are the same. The width of the street, how the street starts and ends, and how the buildings relate to the street are determined afresh each time. This research is about my fascination with the phenomenon of the street. I try to show what a street can tell us. They are 16

Street fascination: Introdution to the street theme

observations that are not meant to be exhaustive, but which offer clues to the many ways in which the image of the street can be influenced.

Meaning of 18

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the street the street

‘I want my street back‘ Henk Hartzema I have become fascinated in recent years with the design of infrastructure as a leading theme in urban design: the road as both an organizing principle and a visually defining element. The street marks the start of the city, just as the house is the wellspring of architecture. The observation and analysis of streets and patterns of streets reveals clearly the nature and particular character of the city, just as a house tells the story of its occupants. The street determines our orientation to the city and guides our perception of urban reality. Just as you experience a painting by standing in front of it, a sculpture by walking around it and viewing it from different perspectives, you experience the city by moving through it. And what do we notice? Cities in the Netherlands reveal a striking measure of informality and an indirect character when it comes to the form of streets. Boulevards are almost totally absent, and buildings seldom make a street more important. Institutes of national importance, such as the house of parliament, ministries or national museums, do not line the main thoroughfares, and the residence of our royal family is invisible. There is, it would seem, a lack of interest in the organizing capacity of the street, in the way it connects the surroundings firmly to their location, and in the way the street connects the fragments of the city and draws them together. This culturally determined and roundabout attitude towards the street translates into a reduction of relations and anti-urbanity, and it has rooted itself in the subconscious of our architects and urban designers. When director Aart Oxenaar of the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture approached me to become lecturer at this school, the subject of research was quickly chosen. Together with Rogier van den Berg, head of Urbanism Department, we thought it would be an inviting prospect to use the theme of the street to make students aware of how the city functions and how buildings acquire a place in the city. That would allow the theme to become a connecting element for the three disciplines, a shared language for students of architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture. Before I discuss the theme of the street any further, I first want to outline the developments that prompted my fascination with the street. Here’s what preceded it. Leiden Bio Science Park On 28 May 2005, a symposium took place in the Kamerlingh Onnes building in Leiden to mark the departure of Joris van Bergen from Leiden University’s Board of Governors. I was asked to introduce a project for the Leiden Bio Science Park. This park is a joint development set up by Leiden University and the municipality of Leiden. The participating research institutions aim to make it one of the world’s top five institutions in the field of bio and life sciences. Our office is drawing up the urban plan for the area, and I was asked to talk about what an exciting development it is. A short while before that, we had decided to called the plan the ‘Holland Campus’, because all the components in the outdoor area of the design make

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Figure 1 and 2 Leiden Bio Science Park, the ‘Holland Campus’. Greenery and water in the project are linked to roads and paths. The resulting image is that of a spacious landscape reality.

reference to the Dutch ‘veenweide’ landscape of peat and clay soils in the lowlying western parts of the country. Streets take the form of country roads, pavements become footpaths, greenery consists of grass and indigenous trees, and ditches and reeds line the roads. We developed the concept with landscape designer Cor Geluk, and our aim was to encourage positive ideas about how people think about the Bio Science Park. (see fig. 1 and 2)

My audience, I knew, would be a varied one that afternoon in terms of background and interests. So I wanted to try and explain urban design through the eyes of someone who uses the city. I took examples from Venice, Rome, Turin and Paris to explain how streets are organized. The partly historical yet also often apocryphal stories highlighted the differences between these cities in terms of their streets and street patterns — and it had the desired effect on the visitors. In Venice, for example, the streets are narrow and short, and the pattern is so irregular that you can easily lose your way. Walking through the city, you are surprised to suddenly happen upon important churches, squares and views. The churches have the effect of making the compact street pattern feel bigger and the open spaces more valuable. For many visitors, reaching the Piazza San Marco or the Riva degli Schiavoni on the Giudecca Canal comes as a relief: suddenly they see the lagoon and can find their bearings again. the street

‘I want my street back‘

In discussing Turin, I told the story of the Duke of Savoy, who in the 16th century moved his residence definitively from Chambery to the other side of the Alps. The bishop settled in Turin at about the same time, and soon the two of them were battling each other, through the design of the city, to assert their primacy. Both agreed that the city should continue to develop on its old Roman foundations. Respecting the classical grid of the city called for a neutral plan, and that meant that neither nation nor church could be present in a monumental manner. The story goes that the duke, apparently with more money or ingenuity at his disposal, built a palace on each of the twelve hilltops that lay at some distance from the city: one for each month of the year. He selected the hills in such a way that they terminated the axes of the most important streets in the city. Even today, the Castle of Rivoli enjoys the same position in the city. The message for the people of Turin was clear: only one person was in charge in their city. From Turin is it just a small step to Thomas Jefferson, the American statesman, philosopher and architect. Before becoming president of the United States of America, he was stationed in Paris as the American ambassador to France. He travelled through Europe during this period and also visited Turin. This city turned out to be the opposite of the French capital in every sense. Instead of the strongly hierarchical structure that he was familiar with from his European city of residence, he discovered in Turin a democratic principle of equality. Evidently the pattern of roads determined social relationships or, conversely, it revealed social relationships. Jefferson expounded his vision of American society in his Declaration of Independence, which contains the celebrated phrase ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Every American has the right to pursue happiness. In its democratic neutrality and endlessness, the Jeffersonian grid of streets expresses the equality and unlimited possibilities for all citizens. My lecture ended with the green and watery road profiles of the Leiden Bio Science Park. The Holland Campus is designed on the basis of the view from the road, defined with great precision. The illusion of space and green emerges by linking exactly those elements of the plan to the roads. There is no excess of public space or greenery; it just looks that way. VU University Amsterdam and the Zuidas In the spring of 2006, the crucial question arose as to whether, in the future, the VU University Amsterdam could become more part of the Zuidas (‘South Axis’, a new business district under development in Amsterdam) and the city in general, or whether a more independent university was preferable. Our office was already drawing up plans for the VU, and emphasis gradually shifted to interaction with the surroundings. In this context, I started to examine the plans for the Zuidas more closely. To my utter amazement, there turned out to be no coherent design for the Zuidas as a whole and no vision for the Zuidas as part of the wider urban environment. The Zuidas appeared to stand alone, with an emphasis on roofing over the A10 motorway and well-defined development plots. Amazingly, everything that Berlage and Van Eesteren had demonstrated to us in their urban plans directly to the north and south of the Zuidas seemed no longer relevant. No urban axes, no street profiles, no street fabric, no spatial perspectives — nothing. (see fig. 3 and 4)

Meaning of

Figure 3 and 4 The Zuidas, Amsterdam. Note the contrast between the familiar picture of star architecture and the urban plan, which just indicates the parcels and does not define the street or structure.

‘I want my street back‘

Apparently we were dealing here with what by Dutch standards was a new type of urban design. A form of urban design that does not centre on public space or on the connections with the surroundings. Instead, it was a form of planning dominated by representation and land economics. This kind of planning comes with its own verbal and visual idioms. And so it came about that the most prestigious urban plan in the Netherlands broke with a tradition without, for that matter, provoking any questions or fuss. Berlage and Van Eesteren designed in a period that we now might consider innocent. Urban design that complete controls buildings and space, a Gesamtkunstwerk in which the streets and squares form an inseparable unity with the composition of building volumes. It might be the case that the new form of urban design — where roads form the basis on which development plots are sold, where there is a sharper separation between public and private, where less certainty is built into the plans, and where the financing and participants are less clearly defined — is the future, or at the very least has a future. But even so. If urban design in such places amounts to making streets and issuing plots, then those streets and the network of connections still have to be designed. That is the collective space for which the urban designer must create a vision, the street

‘I want my street back‘

because the city must benefit from it later. At least that is the assumption I still had at that time. So the question whether the VU University should be connected more with the Zuidas and with the city as a whole was not one I was able to answer easily. It was clear that the area lacked a soul that would enable it to establish a connection, and it lacked a binding agent that could bring this about. Now, years later, planners are working hard on the public space here, which involves filling the empty space. It seems as if the VU University and the VU University Medical Center can now connect with the Zuidas both programmatically and spatially. The planners are working on a network of streets and squares designed to hold everything together. Evidently the new urban design — which would be made in detail once the future appearance have been defined — requires visually distinctive streets. Indeed, perhaps even more so than in the era of Berlage and Van Eesteren on account of the different characteristics of the buildings and the indeterminate nature of the planning process. ‘Hollandse Pracht’. In early 2007, the French artist Philippe Terrier-Hermann contacted me. He was working on a book of photographs of the Randstad called Hollandse Pracht (‘Dutch Splendour’). This contains his photographs of the favourite places chosen by various people living in the Randstad, each accompanied by a short comment from each person. My proposal was a photograph of the house where my grandparents spent almost their entire lives. My grandfather was a greenhouse market gardener and had built his own house halfway between Berkel and Pijnacker, along the waterway that runs parallel to the Klapwijkseweg road that connects the villages to each other. I had not seen the house for years but it seemed to me the perfect place for a photograph, and not just for reasons of nostalgia. The house had everything that makes Zuid-Holland so beautiful. The space, the water with reeds and irises, the weeping willow, the house and garden of the owner. And all this with a mixture of vulnerability and subdued pride. And thus I instructed the photographer. It was important for him to capture precisely that combination of characteristics. To me, the cultivated landscape of Zuid-Holland was the real beauty of the Randstad. A few days later Terrier-Hermann called me. It had not worked out, because he could not find the house. ‘What do you mean?’ was my first reaction. He may have been unfamiliar with the area, and I hadn’t given him a picture but just the address of the house, but even so. One afternoon I went to have a look, and it turned out he was right. The house was there all right, but not the address. Everything had been sacrificed in the enthusiastic effort to build thousands of homes between Rotterdam and The Hague, and create the traffic capacity calculated to service the area. The straight line along the waterway between Pijnacker and Berkel had been replaced by a winding route with roundabouts. It did not even matter that a national road now cut through the back garden of my grandparents’ home. Infrastructure had blatantly orphaned this part of Zuid-Holland. Previously, the road parallel to the waterway told you where you were, but now the central part of the province, which was not blessed with a powerful foundation or recognizable landscapes in the first place, had lost its grip forever.

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Figure 6 A8 Autobahn, Germany. From the road one has the impression of an endlessly rolling Arcadia, a sense of being one with nature. Ruins, castles and rivers blend into the scene, but no towns that would give a sense of scale to the land.

Figure 5 Avenue of the Americas, New York City. The grid of streets symbolises the taming of the wilderness into an understandable entity. It also expresses the American values of democracy, freedom, and the power of the individual to make a country.

Hypothesis All this fuelled my interest in the theme of the street, and more has since become clear to me. The street tells us where we are. The street says something about a period of time, and even more about a culture. Americans do it this way, the French that way. (see fig. 5 and 6)

Germans prefer a meandering Autobahn through a green Arcadia as a foretaste of an endless empire, and the Dutch... well what exactly do they want? Could it be that if a clear (national) ideology can express itself through the pattern of roads, then the reverse would also be true? That the lack of a clear vision leads to confusing streets and a lack of clarity in general? Does the Randstad perhaps seem so full and cluttered because we refuse to organize it? Or is that simplifying matters too much? (see fig. 7) Whatever the case, in this form the problem was too general to serve as a guiding principle for my academy lectureship or to be incorporated into the curriculum. Moreover, you cannot simply harass architects with a problem of national or regional scale. That is more something for urban designers or landscape architects. Nonetheless, we chose the StreetWorks theme and formulated a feasible hypothesis that took different levels of scale into account. In other words, the hypothesis dealt with what happens with roads on a big scale and with what happens at a small scale, at the level of the building in relation to the street itself. If the street has a story to tell, then so too does the building. For even a building sets up relationships, even if they are not specified by the the street

Figure 7 The fragmented Randstad. Drawn to scale in an abstract manner, all urban units show our profusion of good plans and, at the same time, the lack of a guiding principle.

‘I want my street back‘

architect. The architect adopts a position by virtue of how he designs a building along the street. That is more or less how I first presented the StreetWorks theme when I launched the lectureship. I ended up setting myself a task. I wanted to contribute to the education of a generation of architects and urban designers that breaks with the tradition of the solitary building that was so popular around the turn of the century. A generation that, instead, would choose for ambiguity and complexity, for multiple relevance. The development of relations instead of distance, coherence instead of fragmentation, continuity instead of interruptions. Choices based on an understanding of what design deals with. Complexity During my lectureship I elucidated the approach using an analogy. The theory of complexity claims that everything should be viewed as part of a larger entity — call it an organism. The appearance of a new element influences the existing reality, just as the omission or subtraction of an element alters the properties of the whole entity. In some cases, change means a strengthening of the character of the system, while in other cases it implies a weakening of it. But in all cases, according to the ideas of the theory of complexity, a new balance establishes itself, a balance that in turn is always variable. A subsequent intervention will then cause another shift, big or small.

If we apply this approach to the city, it tells us what we already know: that every intervention — whether it be an act of confirmation or denial — results in a new balance. Not only the dynamism of urban life but also the changing form of the city are a confirmation of the culture of a place, even in cases where that culture changes as a result of an action. Culture itself is the expression of complexity. And in the case of the city, designers contribute to the expression of a complex organism. 26

Meaning of

‘I want my street back‘

In other words, nothing we do as architects, urbanists or landscape architects is without consequences. We add to the long line that our predecessors have already laid down, and we operate in advance of those who will come after us and react to what we are doing. Our work cannot be isolated in any way. Essentials As the next step in considering the street, I want to draw attention to building on content. That means studying the elements of our complex system in the knowledge that all our deeds are unique, but at the same time have been done thousands of times already. It also means that enhancing our knowledge and skill is elementary for the design profession. Knowledge and skill of the context, of materials, spatial quality, history, customs and patterns of expectation — that is where it all starts. Just as I want to apply this understanding in my everyday work as a professional, I consider it important to pass on this awareness to the next generation of designers.

A design changes the space, it chooses its material and appearance, it nestles into its surroundings and thus places itself in the line of history. A design never stands alone. Its positioning is a conscious choice by the designer. But the observer too has expectations and makes connections. In that way, design touches on research. Choices and skills that lead to a design are informed by knowledge. Our knowledge of the physical and mental context of a design enables the designer to connect with that context or distance himself from it. Knowledge of the expectations of the observer makes it possible to answer this — or not. Knowledge makes it possible to choose the rule sometimes and the exception at other times. Knowledge enhances awareness, and a greater awareness allows the choices and skills of the designer to excel. The choice in StreetWorks to make the playing surface very small is a form of concentration that allows the essentials to come to the fore. Cons I believe there are two things working against us when we search for the complex design. First there is the absolute appeal of the independent object. This is true for both professionals and the public alike. Modernism has taught us that architectural and urban interventions can be disconnected functionally, spatially and historically. Or, put better, we are convinced that it is even preferable to make the architectural object independent both functionally and spatially. The architecture of solitary objects experienced its rebirth in modernism to the pleasure of many people. And rightly so, because we can thank it for many architectural icons. And now that the last drops of juice are being squeezed out of modernism by the third generation of modernists, we are ready to continue. How difficult it will be to take leave of our old comrade. Second, there is the widely supported Dutch tendency to focus on individual development and artistic freedom. One of the most important motives seems to be encouraging independence, in the sense of developing an opinion rather than developing any knowledge or skill. Generation after generation, we have slowly lost touch with the cultural automatisms of building on buildings and with the natural growth of the city. And perhaps it is not only the buildings and the neighbourhoods but also the architects that have gradually become more solitary. Each tendency will almost certainly spark a counter-movement. It was my

the street

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ambition to enable the lectureship to play a role in this area. In other words, rather than seeing the lectureship as the icing on some cake, I wanted to use it as a way of supplying the ingredients for the cake in measured doses. I would not ask the students about their fascinations or emphasize the creation of freedom; instead, I would allow them to dig deep to find the essentials of the complex design. StreetWorks That was the idea behind StreetWorks: focus and concentration on one of the essentials, namely context. We have chosen the street as our guide through the realm of context. The streets are our addresses, our transport, our representation, and they are the arteries of the city. Streets tie the buildings together, and the network of streets forms our city. It is essentially that simple. The longitudinal section of the street shows the buildings in a row and speaks about the relationship between buildings, which can be affective, competitive, equal, harmonious or indifferent. The cross section of the street speaks about the relationship between the building and the collective, the public space. That can be open, formal, arrogant, aloof or accessible. All those choices together, made by architects over the course of time, produce a street that differs from all other streets in the world.

Figure 8 The Overtoom in Amsterdam is on of those very ordinary streets in our country. It reveals the norms according to which our culture establishes links between people, and which forms of living, working and moving can be brought together.

No could ever claim that an ordinary Dutch street, like the Overtoom in Amsterdam, for example, is a street in Rome or Barcelona. (see fig. 8)

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Figure 9 StreetWorks Opening Workshop ‘Approaching Amsterdam’ on 28 August 2009.

Evidently the image of this street conveys so many features that any confusion is eliminated from the outset. And the world boasts millions of streets, no two of which are the same, even if all streets are similar in essence — a long axis with two walls, a beginning and an end. The laws of the street are the laws of the relation between the individual and the collective and the relation among the individuals. That ‘conscious view’ is what we were looking for during the StreetWorks kick-off event, when students walked the length of the long lines of Amsterdam. For example, by literally looking in another way, through the eyes of the tourist, as Jeroen Timmer showed us by using route descriptions of by locals to find the way back to the academy as a way of reconstructing the complete route. Or blindfolded, which was how Cilia Erens made us listen, so that we saw nothing and the sounds of the city forced themselves on us as a totally new and unfamiliar world. (see fig. 9)

After that we got down to work in six different European cities, all of them roughly the size of Amsterdam. We selected a road in each of these cities that extends from the centre to the edge of the city. Selecting similar streets meant that the differences would stand out all the more clearly. I also believed that the European context could contribute to an increasing awareness of the culture of the street — that everything we do is a choice, and that much of what we do is almost a casual or subconscious, culturally-determined custom. But more importantly, that all our designs contribute to culture. As already stated, every the street

‘I want my street back‘

architectural design changes space. It nestles in its surroundings and in the line of history. It selects its material and appearance. A design, therefore, never stands alone, whether you want it to or not. If it is not the designer who does that deliberately, then it is the observer who has expectations and, consequently, establishes his own connections. Meanwhile in the Randstad Our office had already been examining the infrastructure of the Randstad for a few years when in July 2008 Ronald Plasterk (the then Minister of Education, Culture and Science) and Jacqueline Cramer (the then Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment) presented the government policy paper entitled A culture of designing. The paper opens with, as the ministers argue, a remarkable paradox. ‘Dutch architects, urban designers and landscape architects enjoy an excellent reputation internationally. Design is an export product. With commissions all over the world, designers are of increasing economic importance. At the same time, there is growing discontent about the current appearance of the Netherlands itself. There is a widespread belief, among both the general public and the professional and political community, that the country is becoming increasingly cluttered.‘ What is going on here? The answer to that question has two parts. The first part of the answer can perhaps best be given with the following comparison. If you have a big collection of books and you are moving house, you are always amazed at the huge number of removal boxes you need to transport a few bookcases. Suddenly the whole house is full of boxes, while previously it was just that bookcase against the wall. The same is true of the rest of your belongings at home. ‘Does all this fit in my home?‘ Sure enough, they all fit somewhere and will fit again in your new home again once they are unpacked. The same is true of spatial planning. If you stack all the separate elements on top of one another, without any structure or order, they seem like a lot. The entire country is full, and more and more must be added, and it seems as if there will soon be no space left. But there is essentially one cause: there is no structure, no order, no organization. No bookcase in fact. And it does indeed seem to be quite a lot. And full.

Figure 10 Jacob van Ruysdael, View of Naarden, 1647.

Moreover, an image of perfection has ingrained itself on our collective memory that tells us how we view the world. Or more precisely, how we prefer to view the Netherlands. The open field, the church spires, the windmills and the towns, just like they were depicted in the work of the 17th-century landscape painter Jacob van Ruysdael. (see fig. 10)

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This is the way in which we understand the world and how we have organized our society for generations: the idyll of autonomy, peace and independence. But besides that idyll there is also an illusion, for reality has changed. Towns are no longer isolated. The distances have been reduced, and the relations made more intense.

Figure 11 Pendrecht, Rotterdam

Separation For decades, therefore, planners, urban designers and landscape architects have not endeavoured to create coherence and connections but, on the contrary, separation. Their expertise and energy has benefited a lower level of scale. Our country’s urban developments, particularly in the Randstad, reveal that we excel in devising and developing carefully defined areas. These areas are developed at a swift pace according to a concrete planning horizon, and the responsibilities of all parties involved are carefully defined. A perfect execution of the experiment in which the possibilities of technology and regulations, fuelled by prevailing social opinions, have resulted in an unprecedented wealth and diversity of plans. It is for good reason that our ability in this area is praised throughout the world. What is striking is that infrastructure is deployed as a way of making every development possible, and at the same time setting its limits. For every development is more or less an independent entity. To be sure, our neighbourhood may look very different ten years from now, but the principle remains the same. In the 1950s and 1960s neighbourhoods were designed with a clearly hierarchical system of roads. (see fig. 11)

In the 1970s we had the familiar ‘cauliflower‘ neighbourhoods, referred to as such because their structure resembles the vegetable. (see fig. 12) After that, in the 1980s, geometrical shapes formed the basis for design, and finally the Vinex developments brought us the rational street patterns. (see fig. 13) The ingenuity and the inventiveness to respond every time to the dynamics of society is unprecedented. What remains is the culturally constant fact that neighbourhoods and districts are independent and that time and again, growth is limited. With this observation in mind, and remembering the lack of a network of provincial roads in the Randstad and the cramped appearance of our motorways, we can conclude that the solution to the paradox of Dutch planning lies in the question of scale. Evidently our identity does not primarily lie in visions the street

Figure 13 Kattenbroek, Amersfoort

Figure 12 Buytenwegh De Leyens, Zoetermeer

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I want my street backâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;

at the scale of the country. Instead, the smaller scale predominates, as does participation in the collective, in the group. Viewed in that way, the ideals of the Netherlands are captured in communities of shared interests that find their expression in domains such as districts, neighbourhoods and industrial parks. A consequence of this is that slowly but surely we come to realize that this tradition of optimized plans lacks a coherent spatial concept. One could argue that the fragmentation is getting too much for us. The suggestion of an ideal Ruysdael scene in which each district is a hamlet, preferably well-organized and calm, and if possible overlooking the landscape, has been destroyed. There is little order and cohesion in a landscape that seems to be disappearing quickly. The complex design There is evidently something that drives us to separate, divide and isolate. And it is precisely here that the designerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s task lies: to resist this tendency. What we need to do instead is to unite, to connect and to bring together. And the role of the designer illustrates just how difficult this is can be: every time there is a problem, he is brought in to solve it. That is what designers are for: they are the connecting factor. A new generation of designers, architects and urbanists is therefore needed, a generation that does not primarily think about simplifying objects or domains

Meaning of

‘I want my street back‘

but about relations, about integration, about the way in which things come together: the complex design. And the time is ripe for it, although it won’t be easy. The street in StreetWorks is an example of that. It can be a vital key in that respect, since absolutely everybody is involved with the street. And in a country like the Netherlands, with its excessive culture of participation and consultation in every project, it is not easy to take difficult decisions and make a street important. Nonetheless — or perhaps for this very reason — we as designers must continually rediscover ways in which we can bring together all the different elements of the street, including the conflicts among them. The street in which the complexity is reduced to a seemingly simple form — that is the street I want back.

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Barcelona Retro-fitting the Ildefons Cerdà project and addressing the future Joan Busquets Ildefons Cerdà, the founder of a modern city The 18th century witnessed radical changes in city layouts, which urban historians argue mark the emergence of the modern city. It was not until the 19th century, however, that urban planning was revamped to address the needs of the period‘s new social and economic dynamics. German authors, in particular, had a major influence on new urban planning developments by virtue of their works‘ widespread distribution. Examples of such authors include Reinhard Baumeister, Joseph Stübben and Rudolph Eberstadt. Nevertheless, it would be no exaggeration to state the Ildefons Cerdà, in light of his important theoretical contributions and the impact of his work, is one of the inventors of modern urban planning, which he liked to call a science. Cerdà may well have been the one to open the door to the scientific consolidation of urban planning by introducing what Michel Foucault, in his 1988 book The Care of the Self, referred to as ‘practical know-how‘, a notion derived from the ancient Greek word techne-. This approach strives to enrich pragmatic knowledge with a more creative and more mature understanding. Cerdà had a penchant for practical knowledge that was based on the training he received, which included conducting an empirical study of concrete facts in order to measure and justify them. Part of this technical training entailed using a pragmatic, positivist method. This is reflected in the greater part of his writing in the form of guided and measured analyses of a system‘s elements, subjected to the logic of the data. Nevertheless, he preferred to combine this approach with a more all-encompassing, holistic one that takes into account a system as a whole and not just its independent and constituent elements.

Cerdà also sought to understand the issues of quality that a project may generate. In order to develop this innovative and creative approach, he was obliged to coin new theoretical terms, such as urbanización (urbanization) and rurización (ruralization), which he explained in detail in his Teoría General de la Urbanización. These terms have for the most part become basic concepts in modern urban planning. The former, for example, is a completely commonplace and accepted term in today‘s urban culture. Though less common today, the latter idea – ‘ruralizing‘ the city – led him to plan new urban layouts in city blocks. He wanted open space – street, inner court and public space – to be an integral part of urban development by introducing the quality of ‘exterior‘ space, the space of the countryside, into the ‘interior‘ of the city. (see fig. 1) But it is also worth mentioning his desire to make the transition from a ‘metric‘ space to a ‘visionary‘ space of coherent systems, in order to generate more 34

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Figure 1 Map of crossing streets in plan Cerdà, 1859

Barcelona: Retro-fitting the Ildefons Cerdà project and addressing the future

ambitious, albeit unknown realities. He thus based his work on regular forms and a discourse of mobility that enabled him to introduce proposals capable of channelling Barcelona‘s ‘formation and transformation‘. The qualitative values of this process are expressed through the use of ‘the morphology of the grid‘, a concept he used to synthesize his functional concerns about the movement of people and goods. The coherence of this process was used in the spatial planning of public and private activities in blocks. Analogies and references to other cities turned out to be of great assistance to him in this respect. Thus, he showed that the two approaches, the analytic and the synthetic, are not necessarily opposites, and that both are needed to design a good city and develop the whole body of urban planning knowledge as practical ‘know-how‘.

Figure 2 Cerdà‘s expansion plan for Barcelona, 1859

(see fig. 2)

The project and reality Highly detailed and ambitious projects have the power to create their own reality, one may argue. It is not clear whether a given urban planning project conducted on a major scale can be carried out exactly as it is originally envisioned. Can such a project ever do justice to the ideas behind it? That is certainly a legitimate question, but could anyone have ever imagined that Cerdà‘s expansion plan for Barcelona approved in 1859 was to announce a vision of the future? This is the trap that some proponents of the modernist movement in the 20th century fell into, thinking, erroneously, that the modernist model was a literal representation of a larger reality. This notion is an impossibility, since there are always unforeseen variables that modify a project during its implementation. With this in mind, it should be mentioned that reality is always richer than any given project. While this may seem contradictory, or even critical, it is anything but that. On the contrary, an urban planning proposal could hardly wish for a better

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Barcelona: Retro-fitting the Ildefons Cerdà project and addressing the future

Figure 3 Cerdà‘s map contrasted with current situation.

compliment. Not only does it suggest that an urban planning proposal has lasting power, it also embraces unforeseen factors and processes that were likely to be unimaginable at the time of their inception. (see fig. 3)

The following are well worth highlighting: - The planning of Barcelona‘s great avenues as regional infrastructures – especially Gran Via and Avinguda Diagonal – which have become fundamental metropolitan elements. - The effective incorporation of high-capacity transport systems (railways and underground) into the urban network of streets and avenues, in such a way that while they serve the whole of the city their impact on the general functioning of the city is fairly limited. - The subsoil, not only as a service space that generates a hygienic and healthy city, but also as a space that incorporates many elements that complement urban activities, especially car parks. An analysis of the current situation reveals the enormous importance of the development of the subsoil. The confirmation of its importance forces us to reappraise its role in modern cities and make better use of it. We cannot continue ignoring the logic of an element that – although it is underground in some sectors – is as important as anything above ground level. This realization should prompt us to consider ways of linking private and public subsoil, or the subsoil with the ‘visible‘ parts of the city, so as to develop a more rational approach to its future use. - Better functional diversity. In theory, the Cerdà project was designed to meet the needs of new forms of modern housing and to find space in the outskirts for industry. The current situation illustrates not only its great functional richness and morphological complexity, but also the complexity of activities. The Eixample district in Barcelona is currently home to over 300,000 people – in itself comparable to a city the size of the Geneva – and an equal number of people work there. It is, then, the paradigm of a city where work, housing, leisure and services are available in the same surroundings. Cerdà‘s goal of creating a block that resembles a ‘hamlet‘ or small village was, up to a point, successful. - The interpretation of some geographical factors and the image of the city. Cerdà‘s project placed little emphasis on the seafront. Quite the contrary, it was given secondary importance. The initiatives taken to recover the seafront have led to remarkable developments on the waterfront, despite the location of the railway to Mataró and the scant importance the sea had as an attraction. (see fig. 4) 36

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Figure 4 The waterfront: Cerdà‘s map contrasted with current map.

Barcelona: Retro-fitting the Ildefons Cerdà project and addressing the future

The project‘s recovery Since the return of democracy, the administration of the city of Barcelona has made a great effort to redefine Eixample, as well as other districts around the city, and this policy has helped to ‘mature‘ or breathe new life into the project. Perhaps this maturing process has managed to overcome a certain polarity between project and reality, namely the idea that the adulteration of the project would be irreversible and lead to some parts being spotlighted as ‘good‘ (parts of the right side of Eixample, for instance), and others classified as overexploited and, therefore, lacking interest. On the other hand, understanding Eixample as a complete entity with constituent parts allows us to see how its quality and richness can be improved, as long as the whole district receives selective, harmonious treatment in keeping with its particular characteristics.

The following are possible lines of action: Building restoration in the Eixample district. As a consolidated district, Eixample must be given careful treatment with regard to the transformation or modernization of its buildings, whether listed or not. A total of nearly three hundred projects have been completed in the last 20 years. The recovery of the courtyards inside the blocks. It is common knowledge that Cerdà proposed they should be unbuilt spaces for supervised public use. He discussed the need for parks in the city, but above all more supervised spaces that could be used by children and elderly people, since the city parks were perhaps not ideal for these age groups. Nevertheless, the project‘s speculative development soon led to an attitude of total tolerance as regards the occupation of the courtyards by extra buildings. A new law, ratified in 1985, requires that the centre of each block be left free of buildings, and one out of nine courtyards is now open to the public. This is a process that needs time, but it is satisfying to note that there are now 40 courtyards open to the public. This progress means a debate can begin about the different models for renovation in order to decide which ones best suit the public that uses and enjoys these spaces. It seems clear that the combination of amenities and a small, supervised green area is the best solution for this series of spaces, apparently simple but with notable charm and located in quality surroundings. (see fig. 5) A review of Cerdà‘s isotropic grid in its totality, attempting to avoid ad hoc treatments associated with local opportunities, which may contradict the project‘s original idea. Using this strategy, the system of open spaces and amenities can be strengthened, which, although it does not respect the the street

Figure 5 Recovery of inner courtyards.

Barcelona: Retro-fitting the Ildefons Cerdà project and addressing the future

homogenous layout of the original project, can still provide a good service to the different neighbourhoods. Eixample extending to the seafront. The city has been extended to the shores of the sea, making Eixample a maritime façade. There were other ideas as well, such as the ‘Miami Beach‘ proposal, a model for the Ribera plain that would have resulted in a very different urban layout. This development presupposed the remodelling of a natural geographical feature using Cerdà‘s grid, even though the urban layouts correspond to current planning programmes.

Figure 6 View of the waterfront.

(see fig. 6)

Development of ‘new Eixamples‘ in abandoned areas or areas in need of a functional transformation. This is the case with some industrial and railway installations. It has led to the construction of residential and mixed-use neighbourhoods that are extremely compatible with the Cerdà grid. Particular mention should be made of the so-called sector 22 in the Poblenou district (assigned the number 22 in the zoning of the General Metropolitan Plan), the goal of which is to replace the old idea of industrial use with innovative activities. Here, the desire for change is linked to the introduction of economic activities with high added value, and it also introduces improvements in the underground infrastructures that rationalize their use. (see fig. 7)

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Figure 7 Sector 22 in the Poblenou district.

Barcelona: Retro-fitting the Ildefons Cerdà project and addressing the future

The future of the Eixample district A more detailed look at this great project – which generated a transformation that was unimaginable in mid-19th-century Barcelona, a city still walled in and surrounded by thriving villages and villas, all located in the plain of Barcelona – may reveal new ways of understanding the current reality and, above all, of contemplating the city‘s mid-term future and its prospects for urban development. This calls for a degree of ambition similar to that of the mid-19th century, comparable with Cerdà‘s. If what has come to be known as the ‘Cerdà method‘ is heeded, the desired result may very well be achieved. The modern city is assuming new urban forms, and it has different dynamics than during the industrial period. Sometimes it is difficult to uphold the same concepts or figure out how to interpret the new processes that respond to other paradigms. These processes are not formalized yet and are not well ordered. One tends to undervalue them by affirming that they are mere speculative processes. And while this may be essentially accurate, it is still necessary to recognize what is authentic, and, above all, how these paradigms can be adapted. This, in turn, would make it possible to create high-quality alternatives for interstitial public spaces and oversee their organization on a mid-term basis, in order to better integrate them with streets and inner courts and thus make them sustainable. Saying that Cerdà‘s generation asked him similar questions and that he was able to supply the answers would not be a risky assertion. In fact, this approach could stimulate the ongoing debate. The modern ‘centre‘ did not follow the example of a walled city; rather, it established other new parameters and has become a ‘central place‘ and a reference point for the metropolis in its entirety. The periphery today does not logically follow the patterns of the modern centre, but instead has other functional mechanisms, such as the specialization of uses, and also uses other compositional systems: it is formed by objects and connecting and/or feeding tubes. Raising the issue of multipolarity suggests that a proposal for new cities is being made – as unlikely as it may seem. It is necessary to work with already existing dynamics, which define new relationships in a territory that is more the street

Barcelona: Retro-fitting the Ildefons Cerdà project and addressing the future

‘infrastructured‘ than ever, and which is replete with opportunities waiting to be exploited and developed. Perhaps new concepts like those Cerdà invented to deal with the new circumstances are necessary. Perhaps a new understanding of the situation and of the models is needed – models sufficiently open to establish credible guidelines and allow the latent potential for innovation in many of the new processes to flourish, but which, at the same time enable us to rationalize the occupation of the territory and the distribution of basic services in a different way, something which is certainly different from the last century. The new city, now under construction, could perhaps set ‘well-connected compactness‘ as its goal, so as to generate an efficient combination of the new demands for space and the growing pressure exerted by the demands of sustainability and the good use of the territory. The agenda and the vision once again extend beyond municipal or local regional limits. But, certainly, this state of affairs is not so different to what had to be dealt with when extending the Eixample district into other municipalities on the plain of Barcelona. And to a large extent it was the project‘s force and clarity of purpose that helped to make this possible. Today, the challenge of environmental demands, and the requisites of comfort and freedom, shape the new urban agenda, together with the new urban culture‘s ambition to create a better city. There is no reason to reject the idea that the city of the future can be better than the city of the past.

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Barcelona: Retro-fitting the Ildefons Cerdà project and addressing the future Bibliography Joan Busquets: Estudi de l’Eixample. Barcelona 1983. Joan Busquets: Un projecte innovador convertit en una gran realitat urbana, in: Cerdá and the Barcelona of the future. Reality versus design. Barcelona 2009. Ildefonso Cerdá (1815-1876), Catálogo de la exposició conmemorativa del centenario de su muerte. Barcelona 1976. Ildefonso Cerdá: Teoría General de la Urbanización. Madrid 1867. Laboratori d’Urbanisme de Barcelona: Treballs sobre Cerdá i el seu Eixample a Barcelona. Barcelona 1992. Miquel Corominas. Los orígenes del Ensanche. Suelo, técnica e iniciativa. Barcelona 2002. Direcció de Comunicació de la Diputació de Barcelona: Cerdá i la Barcelona del futur. Realitat versus Projecte. Barcelona 2009.

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Thomas Jefferson‘s blueprint for an egalitarian American landscape Alex Krieger

Figure 2 Aerial view of Chicago, the Midwest‘s largest metropolis with its grid stretching outward beyond the horizon into the prairie.

Figure 1 The rural grid: a characteristic example of the persistent impact of Jefferson‘s Continental Survey. In this case a section of one of the western states surveyed at least half a century after the original Continental Survey of the Midwestern states in 1785.

Flying over large segments of both urban and rural America reveals a Cartesian order below. A grid prevails, as if a giant piece of graph paper was laid over the land. Think of Manhattan or Chicago, or Kansas City or much of the rural Midwest (figs. 1 and 2), and the precision of the rectilinear grid dominates. The majority of such a partitioning of the landscape, especially in city layouts, took place during the 19th century, when Americans spread across great portions of their continent, founded and settled many of its great cities. But the origins of this land subdividing tradition date back earlier, to the last third of the 18th century, and to an ideology that advocated, or anticipated, an egalitarian dispersal of citizens over the then recently liberated lands.

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Thomas Jefferson’s blueprint for an egalitarian American landscape

Before there were cities in the ‘New World,‘ much less towns or suburbs, and before there were strip malls, subdivisions, big boxes, ‘power centres‘, edge cities, highway rings and far flung exurbs, there was an unimaginably vast supply of fertile land. And there still is throughout much of America. For citizens from European societies, the promise of this bounty of land was manifold. There was the opportunity to inhabit, hunt, cultivate, harvest, mine and reap its resources, to be sure, but more intoxicating was the prospect of possessing a portion of it. It held the promise of making a small part of the New World one‘s own, and by so doing achieve self-reliance and independence from the post-feudal, oligarchic world they were leaving behind. So among the foundational ideas for understanding the characteristic pattern of American settlement – some would suggest it to be a cornerstone of American culture – was the search for a means of distributing the land to many, so as to support a democratic, egalitarian society. Framed in a less romantic way, the discovery and settlement of America unleashed one of the most potent economic forces of post-feudal societies. It entailed the idea that land might be owned and traded as readily as, say, livestock or other material possessions; that land could become a simple commodity of economic exchange; that land was as a source of wealth and status for the common citizen, not just for the landed gentry. The full social and environmental consequences of that – a universe of dispersed single-family homes on small rectilinear lots – would take at least two centuries to materialize. Figure 3 A typical mid-20th-century suburban district of single-family homes. Much of its Jeffersonian idealism is absent in the grid here, but it nonetheless serves the purpose of efficiently subdividing land for the small land owner, now no longer Jefferson‘s small independent farmer.

(see fig. 3)

The Cartesian grid The chief polemicist for an egalitarian landscape was Thomas Jefferson, drafter of the Declaration of Independence, third president and America‘s representative to the pantheon of Enlightenment era philosophers. Jefferson‘s gift for oratory produced in the Declaration of Independence the memorable phrase ‘life liberty and the pursuit of happiness‘. What appeared in his earlier drafts and was seriously debated was ‘life, liberty and the pursuit and acquisition of property‘. Indeed, variations of the latter found their way into many of the original state constitutions, where they remain. The principal tool that Jefferson foresaw in support of such acquisition and distribution of property would be the Cartesian grid. He advocated its use

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Thomas Jefferson’s blueprint for an egalitarian American landscape

Figure 5 A sketch produced by Jefferson and sent to Pierre L'Enfant encouraging him to use a grid plan for laying out the new republic's capital.

Figure 4 Jefferson‘s sketch for how the ‘western territories,‘ lands that were won from the British outside of the thirteen original colonies should be subdivided into additional states.

throughout his life for a national survey, as we‘ll see below, for demarking state boundaries, for laying out towns and cities of all sizes, including the nation‘s capital, where he insisted that Pierre Charles L‘Enfant, the capital‘s designer, should combine it with the radial street pattern that L‘Enfant, inspired by André Le Nôtre‘s work at Versailles, felt more appropriate. Jefferson deployed the grid in the cause of supporting an agricultural nation occupied by farmer-citizens – a society of ‘gardeners‘ inhabiting an idealized geography located perpetually between the agents of civilization (not always benign) and the splendours and bounties of nature. (see fig. 4 and 5)

To understand Jefferson‘s ambition for his new country, the grid and the garden must be explored as metaphors, along with a third, that of a ‘middle state of being‘, or a ‘middle landscape‘. Each of the three was important to early American occupation of the land, and in many respects, both overt and subconscious, continues to determine the way Americans still do spread across their landscapes. Each metaphor – grid, garden and middle landscape – while intertwined, warrants a separate introduction. The grid is the result of measure, a rational means to quantify and subdivide the continent, and thus may be considered an expression of mankind‘s presence and control. A grid establishes a collective, predictable order, allowing the possibility of an equitable distribution of land for a republic of small landholders. ‘The small land holders,‘ Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Madison on 28 October 1785, ‘are the most precious parts of the state. […] It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land.‘ Those little portions of land for everyone would, in Jefferson‘s mind, assure an independent, free citizenry not beholden to or oppressed by centralized or authoritarian forces. He writes somewhat arrogantly to Madison again: ‘I think 44

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our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any parts of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.‘ What was needed to avoid such corruption was a spatial concept with which to achieve the goal of universal land distribution. Universal land ownership would avoid the corruption of the ‘democratic‘, self-reliant, productive instincts among the population of a young America. And here the gridiron exhibited for Jefferson its appropriateness. In 1785, Jefferson, then a member of the fledgling US Congress, drafted an ordinance that would become the generative force in establishing the grid as a dominant presence in the American landscape.

Figure 6 Diagram describing Jefferson‘s Land Ordinance of 1785 in which land was surveyed into 6 mile square townships, and each mile square subdivided further into ‘quarter sections‘, or 160 acre plots which would later become the standard individual farm plot.

An egalitarian social and spatial order Following the settlement of western land claims at the conclusion of the War of Independence with Britain, two competing interests demanded a national land policy. On one hand were land companies eager to purchase and organize settlements on the frontier, the income from which would be a much-needed source of revenue for the badly depleted coffers of the new federal government. On the other hand was the desire of individual farmers to acquire individual plots of land, and Jefferson was determined to satisfy that goal. The Land Ordinance of 1785, and the survey of western lands commissioned to follow, resolved this conflict of goals by dividing the land into townships that could be sold whole, or as individual lots. (see fig. 6)

1 mile

0 6 12

Instantly, the new country‘s needs for a land policy became translated with mathematical precision into an order defining the vast wilderness, one that enabled the vast wilderness to be dealt with as a commodity, the ultimate consequence of which Jefferson couldn‘t anticipate. Each ‘square‘ formed by the collective grid can become a separately owned domain nurtured by an individual citizen or family. The grid thus envisioned the creation of many gardens. ‘I have often thought,‘ Jefferson wrote in a letter to his friend Charles W. Peale on August 20 1811, ‘that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, for the production of a garden.‘ Jefferson sought a nation of independent farmers, but the garden metaphor for him, as it has been for many the street

Thomas Jefferson’s blueprint for an egalitarian American landscape

subsequent Americans, stood for much more than harvesting crops. The idea of a garden, as all gardens since Eden, represents nature. It yields both sustenance and delight, and most importantly portrays the values or talents of the individual cultivator. Each owner of a ‘garden‘, whether the small farm owner of Jefferson‘s time or today‘s tract homeowner and his lawn mower, are cultivating their own garden while remaining guardians of their own domain. One cannot underestimate the power that such an ideal has had on American settlement since Jefferson‘s time: possessing a piece of land, cultivating one‘s own domain on it, and therefore retaining the promise of independence. A man‘s home is his castle, an ancient proverb states, but in Jefferson‘s terms a citizen‘s parcel of land registered his freedom and value.

Figure 8 The Royal Crescent in Bath, England. The expression of the 30 individual houses suppressed in favour of the over collective form.

Figure 7 A section of Providence, Rhode Island with its silhouette of independent houses.

Together then, grid and garden – the collective web and the individual‘s domain – form a network over the land, enabling a balance between societal constraints (present by the connective and ordering power of the grid) and individual expression (each citizen‘s garden). The primacy of the individual unit, whether a family or institution, must be respected and identified in a society aiming to become egalitarian. So compare two late 18th-century urban views: a street in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Royal Crescent in Bath, England. (see fig. 7 and 8) In Providence, the silhouette dominates, each house standing apart, portraying its autonomy as it rises amidst its own ‘garden‘. The grid of streets in Providence then serves as a sort of collective umbilical cord to control the proud

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Thomas Jefferson’s blueprint for an egalitarian American landscape

autonomous houses. The Royal Crescent is also made up of houses, but it is the collective façade that is clearly the first order of importance, not the 30 houses of which it is composed.

Figure 9 The original plan of Savannah, Georgia.

Or, examine one of the most canonical images of Jeffersonian-era American urbanism, the 1734 plan of Savannah, Georgia that preceded and inspired Jefferson. (see fig. 9) It shows a clearing in the forest and a collection of houses with fenced gardens. Savannah was in fact laid out as a penal colony and organized in wards of forty debtors under the control of a constable. In other words, established under principles far different than those of Jeffersonian egalitarianism. However, Savannah‘s plan – a grid ordering a group of houses and their gardens – was to prove authoritative as a reflection of the metaphoric powers of the grid and garden operating in combination. As if to confirm this, a mid-19th-century Swedish visitor wrote, ‘Savannah is the most charming of cities. […] It is an assemblage of villas which have come together for company.‘ In Savannah, by the device of a unit, the individual house as well as the ward, each theoretically self-sufficient but multipliable in a way that preserves their identity while resolving itself into a larger communal order, the gridiron plan seems tailored to an egalitarian social and spatial order.

The ethic of the middle link Gridiron plans have, of course, existed throughout history, discovered by almost every civilization that had reached a certain evolution. In agriculture-based societies, the grid appeared out of the need for irrigation and land reclamation, as in the cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Egypt, China and preColumbian Peru. During periods of empire building, it proved conducive to establishing military order and ease of colonization, as in the cultures of the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Incas and the Chinese. Once discovered, the grid‘s advantages are manifold: it is a simple device with which to survey, subdivide and therefore control territory. It lends itself to ease of record keeping and therefore to census taking and taxation. It facilitates clear orientation and movement. It is generally non-hierarchical. But in addition to its historic attributes, it began to acquire in the New World an inherent ideological substance. Various commentators, observers, politicians and polemicists from Jefferson on began to associate qualities such as democracy, economy, morality, rationality and pluralism with the grid, as they began to use it more and more frequently, and even more and more indiscriminately in laying out towns and cities.

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Thomas Jefferson’s blueprint for an egalitarian American landscape

For the non-hierarchal grid also supports land speculation and expediency, which 19th-century Americans began to take ample advantage of, leading Frederick Law Olmsted, America‘s greatest park designer, to refer to the grid as ‘the epitome of the evil of commercialism‘. The contemporary American landscape, with its thousands of miles of decentralized suburbs and exurbs, while not exclusively a product of Jefferson‘s grid, nonetheless speaks quite powerfully about a legacy of land distribution quite different from what Jefferson had imagined. Land distribution less in the cause of egalitarianism than as a commodity of economic exchange and wealth building. Nevertheless, the idealization of a non-hierarchical means of distributing the land to enable many Americans to ‘cultivate‘ their own ‘garden‘ remains very present in the culture, and is intertwined with the third metaphor mentioned above, of a ‘middle landscape‘. The longing to inhabit a place positioned permanently between two extremes, that of the city and of unspoiled nature, has preoccupied American intellectuals, and city builders for that matter, from Jefferson to today. Indeed, the roots of such longing date back to the discovery of America, as Europeans became intrigued by the prospect of a New World untouched by civilization. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among other Enlightenment philosophers, began to postulate a state of innocence, a rediscovered Edenic place, against which to gauge the progress of European civilization and especially its faults. A theory about an ‘ethic of the middle link‘, and later the more sentimental cult of the ‘noble savage‘ (identified as the native American) emerged to argue that the very processes of civilization bred artificialities and social imbalances, stresses that periodically had to be overcome. The best possible human condition, it was postulated, must then be a middle state between intellect and instinct, and in physical terms lie between an untamed nature, the frightening domain of the wilderness, and the city, the repository of society and culture. And so could it be possible, it was asked, to settle a yet unspoiled New World in a way that would avoid the negative characteristic of each extreme, creating an environment where the best attributes of nature and civilization could be simultaneously enjoyed? To this end the American mind has repeatedly returned. Over time, naturally, the wilderness was tamed and receded, and so the antagonists became the country and the city, with a pastoral condition becoming identified as the desired middle ground. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the mid-19th century, expressed this most profoundly: ‘I wish for rural strength and religion […] and city facility and polish. I find with chagrin that I cannot have both.‘ Such chagrin merely intensified the search, whose current day manifestation remains the near ubiquitous American single-family suburban home, positioned at some distance from the frictions of the city centre, and within easy access, at least in anticipation, to the countryside and nature. (see figs. 10) Emerson was hardly alone in hypothesizing a middle landscape. A contemporary of Jefferson, Hector St. John de Crèvecœur wrote in 1782, three years prior to the Continental Survey, a much-read account in Europe, entitled Letters of an American Farmer. In it he describes an America evolving into three realms: a string of pioneering outposts pushing westward across the continent; a realm consisting of an expanding region of prosperous farms; and a developing region of cities patterned after European society. He moralized that the latter 48

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Figure 10 A typical mid-20th century suburban house on the right with its recent addition that absurdly dwarfs the original, indicative of the perpetuation and to an extent the "bastardization" of the American Dream.

Thomas Jefferson’s blueprint for an egalitarian American landscape

produced undesirable social conditions, the pioneering outposts were harsh and uncivilized, while the middle realm provided the best setting for virtue and happiness. A century following Jefferson, Frederick Jackson Turner, a noted historian, postulated a virtually identical and influential theory, concluding that it was in the settlements near the frontier, rather than in the frontier itself or the established cities eastward, that a truly distinctive, innovative and democratic America emerged.

Figure 11 Plan of the University of Virginia as designed by Thomas Jefferson. The great lawn anchored at one end by the library is open to the broader landscape at its other end. To either side are five two-storey pavilions each dedicated to one of the 10 ‘subjects‘ initially taught. The lower level of each pavilion contains the classroom. The upper level is the residence of the faculty who teaches in that classroom. The colonnades connecting the pavilions contain the student rooms. Beyond them are a series of gardens and other support structures.

And Jefferson too, rhetorically referring to himself as ‘a savage from the wilderness of Virginia‘ believed an agrarian, pastoral middle landscape was an ideal upon which to focus the energies of the young republic. This aspiration was eloquently displayed in two places of his own design. At the University of Virginia, a great axis has been created, anchored at one end by the great edifice of the library, both symbol and storehouse of knowledge and society, and stretching in the other direction to the free and verdant hills of Virginia, to

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Figure 12 Detail view of the colonnades which define the great lawn at the University of Virginia.

Thomas Jeffersonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s blueprint for an egalitarian American landscape

Figure 13 Monticello, Jeffersonâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s estate in Virginia

the wilderness. (see figs. 11 and 12) Student and faculty residences and classrooms are located midway, organized in a grid amidst a lawn and gardens. His own estate, Monticello, similarly creates an axis from home to nature, as it gently embraces a Virginia hilltop. (see fig. 13) In both places his American blueprint of grid, garden and middle landscape exist literally and metaphorically. Ultimately, Jefferson imagined a future America as that point of conversion from wilderness (chaos) into a garden using the tools of society. Indeed, for him the continuing re-enactment of that conversion, by each citizen, represented the particular purpose of American civilization.

Meaning of

Thomas Jefferson’s blueprint for an egalitarian American landscape Bibliography Frederick Doveton Nichols and Ralph E. Griswold: Thomas Jefferson, landscape architect, Charlottesville 1978. I.T. Frary: Thomas Jefferson, architect and builder, Richmond 1950. Kenneth Hafertepe: An inquiry into Thomas Jefferson‘s ideas of beauty, in: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, (2000) June, pp. 216-231. Hugh Howard: Thomas Jefferson architect: the built legacy of our third president, New York 2003. William Howard Adams (ed.): The Eye of Thomas Jefferson, Charlottesville 1976. Leo Maex: The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, London 1964. John W. Reps: The making of Urban America; A History of City Planning in the United States, Princeton 1965. John W. Reps: Thomas Jefferson‘s checkerboard towns, in: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, (1961) October, pp. 108-114.

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‘I want my street back‘

Meaning of

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‘I want my street back‘

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The street, a landscape A task for the landscape architect Noël van Dooren

This essay originates from a series of analytical sketches of the street grid of The Hague. These materials from 1982 were made by the city architect and urban planner Rein Geurtsen and his assistants at the time, Maurits de Hoog and Kees Thielen. The Delft-based trio made the sketches to support a critical analysis of the new building that housed the Lower House of Parliament. The essay could be mistaken for an investigation of some fairly marginal matters. However, I will attempt to show that I have pulled a single thread from a fascinating tangle, like a tracker picking up a scent. So what is it all about? Let us take the scenic route before returning to the sketches made by Geurtsen and his associates. About 25 years ago, landscape architecture started to significantly grow in popularity, something that could be likened to the conquest of the city. I started my studies at Wageningen University in 1985, and can irreverently state that our most profound encounters with the city were with the urban green structure, the city park and the cemetery. Barely 10 years later, city squares, streets and even whole residential neighbourhoods were completed, which were designed by landscape architects. Consider the station square in Enschede by OKRA, the city centre of Breda by B+B, Monnikenhuizen in Arnhem designed by Buro Lubbers, and the Borneo-Sporenburg housing development in Amsterdam by West 8. It is immediately apparent from these examples that this development did not involve green squares, green streets and green neighbourhoods — quite the opposite. The landscape architect turned out to be a stony type. It is one of the movements that significantly changed the face of landscape architecture in a short time. Even more than before, it placed Dutch landscape architecture in an exceptional position in the international arena. It is unique to see such an active interest in urban design that could also be expressed in tangible projects. The fascination for this increase in popularity dates back to the 2002 publication about Alle Hosper, which I co-authored. In that book, we portrayed several decades of professional development in landscape architecture, focusing on the master craftsman Alle Hosper. In 1987, Hosper was assigned a leading role in a project in The Hague, De Kern Gezond (‘Healthy to the Core‘), in which the municipality worked to improve the inner city public spaces in The Hague. We viewed that massive project as one of the tangible moments when landscape architecture began its conquest of city squares and streets. In addition, not insignificantly, this project marked the return of design in city spaces. That raised the question of the conditions that gave rise to this project and why Alle Hosper, or — more abstractly — a landscape architect, was assigned such a role in that project. While trying to figure out this kind of puzzle, I enjoy leafing through magazines from the time period in question; in this case, Wonen TA/BK and Plan. In those pages, I came across the series of drawings I referred to earlier, made by 54

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The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect

Figure 1 Rein Geurtsen and colleagues demonstrated how the main structure of The Hague was related to sand ridges and the peat layers between them. This drawing from 1982 was one of the first of its kind. At the time it was not an obvious way of working, certainly in urban design.

Geurtsen and his colleagues. They sketched out the street grid of The Hague, distilled down to a number of key lines in the orthogonal system that characterizes the city. The key to this study is that they correlated the street grid to the substrate below, The Hague (an alternating pattern of sand deposits and peat) and the building ensembles that developed on and around the underlying layers. In more tangible terms: they linked the work being done on the city to knowledge of the landscape â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;beneathâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC; the city. (see fig. 1) In paging through those decadesâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC; worth of back issues, I also discovered a short article by Adri Duijvesteijn, alderman in The Hague at that time, who took an educational trip to Liverpool in 1982 and sounded the alarm when he returned: if we keep on churning out new satellite cities like Zoetermeer, and we fail to consider the role of the existing city centre, then that city centre will go to the dogs. In short, reading between the lines of these two finds, I saw a number of urban architects disassociating themselves from the labyrinth of participation, from the residential zones and models from the 1970s; rediscovering the role of the design; regaining an interest in the existing city, and reading that city as a landscape as well.

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The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect

StreetWorks The StreetWorks project gave me the opportunity to delve deeper into the subject at hand, since, to put it dramatically, it gnawed at me. What was gnawing at me was this coalescing concept: could it be possible that the rise of landscape architecture after 1985 was made possible by the demolition being carried out in city planning? And if so, where did these city builders ‘suddenly‘ acquire their fascination with landscapes? Did the classical principles and references for landscape architecture that were cherished in Wageningen play any role? It was appropriate that StreetWorks was the context for this research, since the essence of the problem could be formulated in terms of the conquest of the street as a landscape. In writing this essay, I had the opportunity to speak at length with a select group of people. And perhaps it is good to clarify from the start: it is not the case that the entire field of city planning, or the architecture programme in Delft as a whole, was captivated around 1980 by the design, the city centre and the landscape. On the contrary, it was in fact a select group of people, which included a number of figures who continue to play a part in the debate concerning city planning and landscape architecture even now. Rein Geurtsen and Maurits de Hoog have already been mentioned, but Frits Palmboom, Dirk Sijmons, Jan Heeling, Gerrit Smienk and Henk Engel can also be noted. As an aside, it is worth mentioning that this list of names includes two former heads and a director of the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. Also, these people held very different opinions on the topic; I am not defining a coherent group here. In some sense, the group was in fact so small that it helps to define part of the success of landscape architecture. Urbanism in general, and certainly urbanism in Delft, had alienated itself from design in the 1960s and 70s. The field had been severely fragmented by conflict concerning the legacy of modern construction on the one hand and process-oriented urban renewal on the other. In the 1980s, when the opportunities for design increased as a result of all sorts of factors, and the landscape (or, in a more abstract sense, concepts like environment, ecology, identity) occupied a stronger position, city planning did not immediately have a response ready — except for the aforementioned small group. Landscape architecture was able to formulate an answer in a broader sense. I do not believe that the field of landscape architecture originally was aware of its role: it happened because landscape architects were given a chance in individual projects. It is only in retrospect that we can see this as an important shift in the tasks that are considered part of the domain of landscape architecture. A concise summary of where I am headed here could be: but we can be grateful to the urban designers for the route they mapped out first. That image is not unequivocal, either: designers in both disciplines work actively to explore the interfaces between city planning and landscape architecture. However, landscape architecture has without doubt expanded as a result of the exploration of this borderline; an expansive oeuvre of hard-surface and urban designs were added. The chance that urban designers were given to map out that route can certainly be attributed to their proximity to the architectural discourse — a discussion far removed from ‘my‘ Wageningen. One thing inspired sincere amazement in me while researching the background for this essay. My inquiry into the motives of the aforementioned group of urban designers introduced me to worlds in which I stumbled around by feel alone, where landscape architecture only 56

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The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect

seeks its sources in bits and pieces. This essay does not offer sufficient length to provide an adequate outline of which sources were discussed, which connections could be made between them and how we should interpret those connections. However, I shall venture an attempt. I will ally myself with Frits Palmboom, who speaks in terms of a Dutch track and an Italian track. A brief description of the situation in Delft is needed first. In Re-Urb, Nieuwe plannen voor oude steden (‘Re-Urb: New plans for old cities‘), Wouter van Stiphout (from Crimson Architectural Historians) offers a nice perspective on that time. When Palmboom and De Hoog came to study in Delft, there was serious chaos after all the events of 1968, and architectural education crumbled into many little splinter groups, with leaders and followers. Aldo van Eyck was a very vehement presence; Carel Weeber initiated intense debates — and more than that, urban renewal had gained momentum. Starting in the older western districts of Rotterdam in 1969, it was seen by many as a promising trend, which brought building back to the basics: the ‘man in the street‘. After only a few years, doubt crept in again. The architectural concepts used in urban renewal seemed dated, and urban renewal did not seem to matter. The struggle over the Nieuwmarkt area in Amsterdam illustrates the diametrically opposed perspectives. Big words were dropped in the course of that conflict, and quite a few labels were handed out; Geurtsen, for instance, was seen as representing the ‘critical rationalists‘. This summary does not do justice to the multifaceted and contradictory voices clamouring to be heard in Delft, as documented by Wouter van Stiphout. The point here, however, is that these chaotic circumstances offered space, creating room to research new standpoints. It was in that context that Geurtsen was operating as a lecturer, and De Hoog and Palmboom charted their course as students. Two tracks Let us start with the Dutch track. Aldo van Eyck should be mentioned first. Van Eyck, along with Jaap Bakema, was a prominent member of Team X, which emerged in the 1950s from the rubble of the Congrès internationaux d‘architecture moderne (CIAM). Alison and Peter Smithson were also there, in any case inspiring Frits Palmboom with their views on infrastructure as one of the ‘great identifying devices‘ of metropolitan systems. Van Eyck tried to reformulate the concept of space utilized by the Modernists, defining a concept of place that entailed a far greater focus on identity and context. His research on the Dogon in Mali sparked off interest in the relationship between habitation and conditions of the landscape. The Dogon people built their homes on a specific transitional zone in the landscape. The close proximity of so many homes developed into a type of urban situation. Van Eyck was fascinated by the role of the individual, the interventions carried out by the individual and how they can congeal into an urban mass. In that vision, the city could grow from the bottom up, rather than being merely a model of city planning or a large, designed structure. The city hall that Van Eyck designed in Deventer in the 1960s is seen as a breakthrough: in its divided structure and exterior, it had actually reached an understanding with the existing city — and that was considered new and different at that time. In 1966, Van Eyck became a professor in Delft, in tumultuous times. He was assigned a number of young assistants, including Rein Geurtsen. However, his club of assistants also included another figure who is relevant to the subject of this essay: Pjotr Gonggrijp. Gifted, extremely well read and introverted, the street

The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect

Gonggrijp was a man who had a huge project: drawing a new map of the Netherlands. A map which showed a direct relationship between the urban development of the Netherlands and the landscape. Gonggrijp and his finely detailed maps sketched on tissue paper were a huge inspiration to the group of urban designers that broke through in the 1980s. De Hoog, Palmboom and Geurtsen all referred to the significant influence his work had on their own work, bringing it up of their own accord. On the one hand, there was the precision with which Gonggrijp drew the city and the landscape; on the other hand, there was the way his maps displayed the magnificence. Palmboom has said that Gonggrijp was the source of his idea that you can comprehend the Netherlands in terms of a delta. Along with Michiel Polak, Gonggrijp gave lectures that Palmboom and De Hoog attended as students. In those lectures, the outlines of Van Eyck‘s views were expounded against the backdrop of CIAM, Team X and Forum. Gonggrijp also displayed highly magnified sections of his map in those classes. His lectures would have an impact on a large group of people. Gonggrijp‘s maps were also displayed at the legendary exhibition on ‘The street, a form of community‘ that was organized in 1972 by the Van Abbe Museum. Geurtsen speculates that Gonggrijp and his ilk were indebted to Pieter Verhagen, an older root for the urban designer‘s interest in the landscape, who has been the subject of extensive research by Marinke Steenhuis. The Italian track runs through a group of designers who made a name for themselves in the international architecture debate in the 1960s and 70s. They returned to a study of the historic Italian city based on the principles of its forms, and translated their findings into interventions in the existing city. In the 1950s, Saverio Muratori had already started what Philippe Panerai describes exquisitely as a ‘patient and modest study‘. While the campfires of the exciting CIAM conferences smouldered on elsewhere, e.g. in the establishment of Team X — after all, both sides focused primarily on the new city — Muratori and his students targeted the fabric of the ancient city of Venice. Carlos Aymonino continued that research with Aldo Rossi in Padua, referring to it as morphological. Internationally, parallels were seen in the work of Jean Castex and Bernard Huet in France, and Oriol Bohigas and Joan Busquets in Spain. Architectural historian Ed Taverne played a role: he was familiar with the work being done by these people and introduced them in the Netherlands. Casabella was another source; that Italian magazine regularly published the outcomes of these morphological explorations. And in 1978, the Roma Interrotta manifestation attracted significant attention to interventions in the existing city. This Italian work was read in Delft in the context of the growing interest in the concept of typology, which a group surrounding Max Risselada had made a focus of their studies. Among others, Giulio Carlo Argan, the Italian architectural historian, published on this topic, creating the link between architectural typology and the morphological research referred to above. Those years saw a sharp increase in typological research, planning analysis and morphological research. OASE magazine was established in Delft — first published under the name O — to feed the education being offered. Panerai appears in its first issues, with his essay ‘Typologies‘ (1980), but we also find examples of morphological research in Delft. City architect Stefan Gall recently also confirmed in an interview how this was the starting point for a new generation. The work being done by Muratori and his group was not about landscape as such, and certainly not about landscape architecture. In essence, it was about precise vision. It required fine-tipped pens. I interpret it as follows. This precise 58

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The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect

vision led to questions such as: why is it the way it is? Frequently, those questions could only be resolved by seeking the answers in the underlying landscape, the soil and water system, but also the interventions that later generations had carried out in and on that landscape, which would later prove to be the resilient limiting conditions for urban growth. Such urban morphological research often involved streets and routes, and especially the streets that define the main structure of the city, that patiently see diverse fashions in city planning and architecture zip past. These concepts were applied in education as taught by Rein Geurtsen from the late 1970s onwards: first-year students were asked to describe a route that they knew well, using words and images, but first and foremost tracking down the principles that might explain why the route looked the way it did. Historic research as a basis for design This backdrop of Dutch and Italian perspectives offers a context for the renewed interest in the existing city. That interest was the subject of intense debate in Delft — were these people working on history? Coming from some, that was a serious insult. However, the morphological interest was never inspired by historical motives; it was intended as a framework for design. Wouter van Stiphout had this to say on the matter: ‘The signs of modernity are tracked down with retrospective excitement.‘ And, perhaps even pithier, he described it as research in order to use ‘the resources and terms of urban design to explain that which had not been brought about by urban design‘. The morphological interest was immediately put to productive use in design. That is the important additional development in the urban design discourse: the renewed interest in the topic. Discussing this revival in design at length here would be going too far. It is important to realize that it was a reaction to urban renewal. It was an innovative process, but its actual results were critically evaluated. In Delft in particular, the return of design is also associated with reconquering the discipline of urbanism as an independent and valuable contribution to the city. Rein Geurtsen, for example, was closely involved in research on the professional association of urban designers in a time when the urban designer, like the architect, was seen as an artist — an artist who had unfortunately been banished to the belfry in the process of urban renewal, driven into a corner where there was no room for urban design. As De Hoog puts it, ‘Design in those years was like swearing in church.‘ Geurtsen and co. argued in favour of urban design that would be rational, analytical and independent, and thus also advocated a discipline that would make its own contribution to design. By returning to sketching, this urban design would extricate itself from the abstract models and make itself necessary again. There is of course much more to say on this matter. For instance, it also concerns the rediscovery of the city and all things urban. Consider Paris, Barcelona and Boston — and Rotterdam‘s own Kop van Zuid. The desire for further depth is apparent from a contradictory interpretation offered by Palmboom: it is not so much a revival of design; rather, the focus on design had continued to live on — but among a small group, who were able to propose new concepts in that time in particular. What were the tangible results of this? First, a considerable group of architects and urban designers became familiar with urban morphology research. In the architecture school in Delft, several generations after 1980 were ‘raised on‘ such volumes as the LAS book and De stad, object van bewerking (‘The city, object of manipulation‘) . Urban morphology research reached its high point the street

The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect

in the publication Amsterdam als stedelijk bouwwerk (‘Amsterdam as an urban construct‘) by Jos Louwe and Casper van der Hoeven, which extensively studied the development of the old and new Amsterdam in that light. The critical discussion that De Hoog and Rudy Stroink wrote about this publication in Oase offers a good glimpse into that way of thinking. In that article, they depicted urban morphology research as an activity in service to design . Individual urban designers picked up the material and ran with it. Rein Geurtsen, for instance, in his urban morphological analysis of Maastricht, made quite a contribution to the rediscovery of the Maas River in that city, and we can see the developed results now. De Hoog gathered a following with his city comparisons and conducted groundbreaking research with VillaNova, the firm he ran at the time; his work including redrawing Rotterdam on its substrate. I first encountered De Hoog‘s work when I started working at H+N+S in 1992 and had the privilege of conducting a study with De Hoog on Schiphol. De Hoog‘s work embeds not the street, but the entire infrastructure system and the associated urban development in the underlying landscape, suddenly revealing relationships between the inner line of dunes, the barge canal and the motorway. (see fig. 2) De Hoog also worked with H+N+S on a series of regional studies in Twente and the Gelderland Valley, among other locations. Dirk Sijmons, the S in H+N+S, who studied in Delft in the same period, shares this perspective. Although Sijmons made a major detour via the countryside, H+N+S was hugely important in triggering the realization that the ‘landscape-outside-the-city‘ was driven by urban conditions, and that the development of the city could in part be understood based on conditions of the landscape. However, what may well be the most dramatic contribution came from the pen of Palmboom, in his groundbreaking 1987 publication Rotterdam, verstedelijkt landschap (‘Rotterdam, urbanized landscape‘) , in which he demolished the idea that Rotterdam is an artificial city built from models. He proved his point by sketching out the relationships between urban patterns and the underlying rivers, their dikes and banks, and the reclaimed peat bogs behind them. The direct influence of Gonggrijp and the Smithsons can be seen in the fact that Palmboom did not stop at where the city is anchored in the pre-1850 map, but also included the modern infrastructure of roads and motorways, because it plays a highly defining role in the character of Rotterdam. (see fig. 3) Wageningen What fascinates me is that Wageningen essentially explored a number of comparable fields via a different route, as well as a few shared sources. I am first reminded of Jan Bijhouwer, the first professor of Landscape Architecture in 1949. Bijhouwer was in frequent contact with soil expert Cornelis Edelman, and the latter‘s research inspired him to write his classic work on landscape architecture, The Dutch Landscape. In a certain sense, he untangles the same complex relationships between soil, reclamation and human habitation in that book as Pjotr Gonggrijp would just under 20 years later in his maps. Still, there are minimal substantive connections between the re-evaluation of the landscape ‘under‘ the city in terms of urban design, as it was done in Delft, and the Wageningen explorations. Geurtsen, Palmboom and De Hoog, for instance, were not influenced by Wageningen when they made their discoveries at that time; in fact, they had no idea that their interest in landscape was remotely related to Wageningen. One reason might be, as Palmboom indicates, that the morphological interest in Wageningen ‘stopped at 1880 and the city line‘. Nevertheless, some connections did exist. To start with, the plan that Bijhouwer 60

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Figure 2 The drawings of Maurits de Hoog are important because he looked beyond the contemporary appearance of the Randstad and recorded the landscape phenomena that largely determined the development of the metropolis.

The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect

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Figure 3 Frits Palmboom offered a totally new way of looking at Rotterdam. ‘Beneath’ the city lies a pattern of rivers, peat streams and polders that mark out the city – sometimes almost literally. But Palmboom was not interested in history alone; he also considered that the ‘traffic machine’ helped define the character of the city.

The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect

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The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect

proposed for Kethel was well known and served as a source of inspiration. In Wageningen, for example, there was also a small bulwark of urbanism. Until 1979, it was occupied by Wim van Mourik, a classically trained urban designer. Van Mourik had an affinity with the Delft School of Marinus Jan Granpré Molière. The fact that Granpré Molière worked closely with landscape architects in the Zuiderzee polders must have reinforced that connection. Ben Eerhart, an urban architect who studied at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture (from the first class to study Urbanism there), taught the introductory principles of urbanism to landscape architects there for years. Paul Achterberg, landscape architect with Quadrat, still remembers working on a design project headed by Eerhart in 1997, conducting a morphological study on Oudewater. In the cases of Eerhart and Van Mourik, their morphological studies were primarily inspired by the work of Kevin Lynch and Gorden Cullen, who had grappled at length with the legibility of the city type. In the Delft debate where Geurtsen, De Hoog, Palmboom and others were active, however, the discussion had already passed beyond Lynch and Cullen, not least because those authors focused too strongly on the external form of the city. And Granpré Molière had no place among the new generation either: the yearning for the small-scale, easy-to-read city was sympathetic, but not truly based on analysis. It was closer to an ideology: this is how the city should be. The analysis of infrastructure systems, functional connections, city forms, water system, reclamation and soil were the main priority — which was why Geurtsen was categorized as a ‘critical rationalist‘ in the highly polarized atmosphere so characteristic of Delft at that time. Delft also had a chair in Landscape Architecture, although it would be more accurate to say that it followed the explorations of the urban designers, rather than guiding them. The work of Clemens Steenbergen, which showed great similarities to research in urbanism, originated from the same source. Smienk and Steenbergen, for instance, worked together closely. Trained as an architect, Smienk graduated under the supervision of Van Eyck, based on a plan for the Markerwaard. It is also interesting that the Blauwe Kamer magazine, persistently seen by some as a ‘Wageningen publication‘, referred to urbanism and landscape in the same category as early as 1990. Bakker & Bleeker A few landmark moments in this study of street and landscape should not go unnoticed in our discussion. Bureau Bakker & Bleeker was founded in 1977, and would later become B+B. Landscape architects Ank Bleeker and Riek Bakker left the Zandvoort urban design firm, having had enough of watching landscape architecture playing a support function and filling in the green spaces by definition, after the structure of the urban design had been worked out. It would hardly be possible to overstate how significant the establishment of Bakker & Bleeker was for the emancipation of landscape architecture. A few accomplishments offer sufficient proof. Alle Hosper drew up the plan for the public spaces on the banks of the IJ River in Amsterdam in 1996; a few years later, Michael van Gessel became the supervisor of the same area. Thirty years ago, it would have been unthinkable for a landscape architect to hold such a position in the heart of the city, and to successfully lead urban designers and landscape architects. Riek Bakker made quite a splash as Director of City Development in Rotterdam. Her contribution to the structure of the Kop van Zuid was significant. The firm she later ran, BVR, would help her conquer strategic design research as well. A simple shopping street in Beverwijk, in the late 1970s, is the third accomplishment. The street and the street

The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect

the square are tangibly outlined as a product of landscape architecture. The second moment came in 1975 when Alle Hosper went to the Department of Zuiderzee Works, where he worked with urban designer Teun Koolhaas. Together, they drew the outlines of what was intended to become Almere. This city planning and landscape development on the newly reclaimed land took place off the radar of the developments in Delft — the polders were far away, and constituted a dynamic world on their own. However, it was a key moment when landscape architect Alle Hosper worked on the same hierarchical level as Koolhaas in designing the city. Hosper commissioned the young Bakker & Bleeker firm to work on the Almere Buiten area, and draw up a plan for the urban design of that part of the city. A few years later, Hosper moved to B+B to become director. B+B was asked to work on De Kern Gezond, and Hosper headed that initiative. Viewed in this context, many different lines converged in 1987 in The Hague at the start of the De Kern Gezond project. There was a renewed focus on the city that singled out the design, giving the landscape architect a key role in an innercity, brick-and-mortar context. It can be noted here that the personal fascination of people may ultimately play a bigger role than the dividing lines between different disciplines. In the early 1980s, urban designers Palmboom and Joost Schrijnen collaborated with landscape architects Michael van Gessel and Riek Bakker on the Prinsenland project. They worked together in concert, on an equal basis and from a landscape perspective. Afterword This essay is extremely speculative. It suggests a relationship that is in essence still unproven as yet. However, even if that relationship were not to be confirmed, this essay describes a remarkable episode in urban design, and an even more remarkable episode in landscape architecture, which took place more or less successively over time. I view this essay as part of a larger work in which I would like to clarify how ideas have developed in landscape architecture in recent years. Because we have been moving full speed ahead over the past few decades, an enormous amount of work has been produced. Much less time has been spent on looking back to see where it could have originated. Such retrospection puts the success in perspective somewhat, forcing us to stay sharp to retain the territory we conquered and enabling us to look at the results with a critical eye. In the final round of corrections, I am struck by my words that refer to ‘conquered territory that must be retained‘. It forces me to face the question of whether I am talking about a ‘territorial war zone between disciplines‘ or a common and cherished theme. All the more reason to conclude with a sincere ‘to be continued‘! Noël van Dooren is an independent landscape architect, writer and researcher. He is pursuing a PhD in drawing techniques in recent landscape architecture at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. Three interviews were conducted for this article, with Rein Geurtsen, Frits Palmboom and Maurits de Hoog.

Drawing

The street, a landscape: A task for the landscape architect Bibliography Crimson (Wouter van Stiphout): Re-Urb, Nieuwe plannen voor oude steden, Rotterdam 1997. Rein Geurtsen (red.): De stad, object van bewerking,Delft 1988. Maurits de Hoog and Rudi Stroink: Amsterdam als stedelijk bouwwerk, analyse van een methode, in: Oase (1986) 11, pp. 5-15. Frits Palmboom: Rotterdam, verstedelijkt landschap. Rotterdam 1990. Catherine Visser and Renate Mous: Interview met Stefan Gall. http:// rotterdamarchitectuurjaren70. blogspot.com Philippe Panerai: TypologieĂŤn: een middel tot inzicht in de logica van ruimtelijke patronen, in: Wonen TA/BK (1981) 12, p. 7-21. Casper van der Hoeven and Jos Louwe: Amsterdam als stedelijk bouwwerk, een morfologische analyse, Nijmegen 1985. Marinke Steenhuis: Stedenbouw in het landschap; Pieter Verhagen (18821950), Rotterdam 2007 A. Duivesteijn: Liverpool, de les van een langzaam wegrottende stad, in: Wonen-TA/BK (1980) 7, pp. 3-7

the street

Drawing the street Sketchbook Making a drawing forces the designer to reveal his or her own reality. The drawing makes you choose; if not, the drawing chooses for you. The drawing of the street therefore shows the essence of the street and the relation of a project to the public realm, and by that to the city as a whole. In this way everyone writes his or her own story of the street. No better way for the designer to tell a story than by drawing. The drawings are a selection from student projects produced within StreetWorks. The different drawings reveal a wide range of expression. The universal and simple act of drawing illustrates the richness and relevance of reduction.

Drawing

Joram van Otterloo â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Analysis of future spheres and spaces, Avenida da Boavista, Porto

Elizabeth Keller â&#x20AC;&#x201D; The Width of Savska Cesta, Zagreb

Drawing the street: Sketchbook

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Steven Broekhof — Postponed Meeting on Pitkäsilta, Helsinki

Donna van Milligen — An underground escapist city, Helsinki

Drawing the street: Sketchbook

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Robert Bijl — Shops at the Unioninkatu, Helsinki

Akihiko Ono — Road + Life = Street in Amsterdam

Drawing the street: Sketchbook

the street

Bénédicte Herr — Gooiseweg, Amsterdam

70 Avital Broide — Empty Spaces along Leith Walk, Edinburgh

Andreas Sager — Gooiseweg, Amsterdam

Drawing the street: Sketchbook

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Jérôme Nicod — Public deck on the Gooiseweg, Amsterdam

Michel Cherbuin — Gooiseweg, Amsterdam

Drawing the street: Sketchbook

the street

Eva Danielsen — Porte d’Anderlecht, Brussel

Mari Jyrkiäinen — Bergensesteenweg, Brussel

Michel Cherbuin — Gooiseweg, Amsterdam

Drawing the street: Sketchbook

Drawing

Victor Bergnes â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Open Space Scheme, Bergensesteenweg, Brussel

Quentin Savarit â&#x20AC;&#x201D; When the space does not belong to anyone : the way to define missing limits,Bergensesteenweg, Brussel

Drawing the street: Sketchbook

the street

Anneke Sluijter â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Avenida da Boavista, Porto

Teresa Martinez Fernandez â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Use of the Roof at Bergensesteenweg, Brussel

Drawing the street: Sketchbook

Drawing

Arjen Aarnoudse — Intuitive Map of Savska Cesta, Zagreb

Victor Spijkers — Savska Cesta, Zagreb

Drawing the street: Sketchbook

the street

creating

‘I want my street back‘

Meaning of

the street

‘I want my street back‘

the street

Streetwise Rotterdam The city at eye level Rogier van den Berg The streets of Rotterdam have a more questionable reputation than many other cities in Holland. Visitors to this city on the Maas often complain that they ‘can‘t find their way around‘ - which simply means that the street grid doesn‘t automatically guide you to the tourist highlights. And hapless travellers who do find their way discover that a ‘city square‘ in Rotterdam is a desolate void where pedestrians are at the mercy of the speeding cars that dominate the space. The archaic quest for a clearly recognizable city centre that guides you effortlessly through its streets is deeply rooted in the European consciousness, and perhaps even more so in the Netherlands, where even the major metropolis – the Randstad urban conglomeration – is a swarm of cities clinging to the western coastline, featuring small urban concentrations with a historic centre, canals and a church. The mental map that allows outsiders to orient themselves in cities almost everywhere in the lowlands does not hold true in Rotterdam. Rotterdam is different. The city centre was completely obliterated by the bombardment on 14 May 1940. This event has left indelible traces on the structure of the city‘s development. However, even before World War II, the Rotterdam tradition of city planning was already driven by a large-scale vision unusual in the Netherlands. The grandeur of the ‘international metropolis with a world-class port‘ is an ambition cherished by the planners of Rotterdam, and it has defined the development of the city. This passion for a grander scale and the pursuit of progress has never been relinquished. It is an anti-picturesque school of thought that is intrinsic to Rotterdam and sets the city apart from other urban areas in the Netherlands – but there is a flip side to this unique identity. The reconstruction of Rotterdam and the successive planning dogmas that followed have fragmented the city centre. It happened in part due to the focus on large-scale infrastructure and in part due to the often highly localized development of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In this simultaneously massive and localized worldview, the street as a place has often been left out of consideration, or simply ignored. As a result, the street grid has never developed naturally in the way we see in cities that display historic development, where streets have been worn into the fabric of the city, leaving natural patterns over time. Where you find exactly the spot you‘re looking for on that one corner that you recognize at once. It is the aim of this essay to illuminate a line-driven perspective on development, as an alternative to the localized neighbourhood approach. The intention is not to impose a historic city model on Rotterdam, with its compositions of streets and city squares. No, Rotterdam characteristically has different levels of scale and time periods coexisting side by side. That is part of Rotterdam‘s identity. However, the approach to urban development should be focused on finding a 78

Creating

Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

better way to connect Rotterdam‘s diversity, reassessing the missing links in the city map with the aim of creating natural routes through the city and improving the experience people have in the streets. This requires meticulous precision in design and programming – and that precision is exactly what has been underappreciated in Rotterdam‘s tradition of sweeping transformation. In recent years, improvements in how people experience the quality of public space have been directly related to the renaissance of a number of streets. This offers an extra incentive to shift from a top-down planning tradition to the street view at eye level. The street offers a new lens to rethink the city of Rotterdam - especially in view of more largescale interventions planned for the future.

Figure 1 Map of the 1903 Expansion Plan as proposed by G.J. de Jongh.

A love of large-scale infrastructure No other city in the Netherlands has embraced large-scale infrastructure as enthusiastically as Rotterdam. The city‘s love of large-scale infrastructure and open layout dates back to an earlier era than the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) concept that reigned supreme after the destruction of the city centre. Even before World War II, the expansion plan proposed by G.J. de Jongh in 1903 allowed for broad boulevards. This demonstrated progress and innovation in Rotterdam: a modern city with close ties to the biggest port in the world. The concept created room on the boulevards for through-traffic, local traffic and, importantly, freight traffic. The broad boulevards have become the paved arteries that feed the ‘city of work and industry‘. At the time, De Jongh was the director of municipal works; in that capacity, he had a major influence on the expansion of the port complex. In his plans, the city layout is intrinsically linked to the port expansion and the accompanying large-scale infrastructure. (see fig. 1)

the street

Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

Rotterdam grew rapidly in the early 20th century. G.J. de Jongh expected a westward movement, shifting away from the centre, along with the westward development of the port area. De Jongh drew Heemsraadssingel to the west of the city centre as a central axis which was intended to end at the Coolhaven harbour that he planned. Heemraadssingel is twice the width of the other boulevards in his expansion plan. He designed a profile with car lanes, as well as a separate lane on each side of the canal to carry goods to and from the port. The separate lanes for freight traffic and the extended inner harbour were never realized, but they do illustrate how much the port orientation at that time defined the city layout. In the end, the city built ‘respectable residential districts‘ along Nieuwe Binnenweg and Mathenesserlaan, expanding westward. Nieuwe Binnenweg already connected the centre of Rotterdam and Delfshaven; Mathenesserlaan was a new road. The lanes and long lines so characteristic of De Jongh‘s plans were magnificent for that time, but are now taken for granted as connecting lines on the city map. De Jongh‘s street plans already bore evidence of a strong faith in the future of the growing port city and the large scale he envisioned for it. After De Jongh, infrastructure continued to increase in scale. A number of dramatic changes in the city plan were made to accommodate the increased traffic. The outlines of the old city faded into the background and the Coolsingel became a ‘representative‘ city boulevard. A new city hall, main post office and trade exchange along the Coolsingel marked the success of the dynamic port city. In 1913, A.C. Burgdorffer succeeded De Jongh as director of municipal works and was responsible for a breakthrough that penetrated into the city centre, allowing for the construction of a street called Meent, which was intended to link the lines of the former city walls to each other. (see fig. 2) In 1914, Burgdorffer passionately pursued his plans for access routes into the city centre. World War I put an end to his plans, but his traffic flow scheme did later help inspire the reconstruction plans after World War II. (see fig. 3) In the years leading up to World War II, the concept of the functional and open city continued to develop, influenced by CIAM architects. The aim was to achieve coherence in how housing, work, recreation and traffic were situated. The destruction of the Rotterdam city centre paved the way for a longcherished ambition to be fulfilled: rebuilding Rotterdam from the ground up, recreating it as a functional city based on a large-scale infrastructure plan. It was characteristic of the process that W.G. Witteveen, who was the next city architect after Burgdorffer, had to make way for C. van Traa, a much more radical architect, following the initial plan for the reconstruction of Rotterdam. Witteveen was seen as too small-scale and too conservative. Van Traa started developing a new Basic Plan for Rotterdam even before the war ended. In his plan, the destruction of the city centre created opportunities for incorporating infrastructural junctions. The result was a functional structure for large-scale boulevards. Van Traa focused his efforts on Coolsingel as the central traffic boulevard, sketching it in even wider than before and adding even more allure. Weena, labelled ‘Station Boulevard‘ on Van Traa‘s basic plan, was an important route, connecting Hofplein to Beukelsdijk. After that, there was a vast empty space for quite a distance, occupied only by the Groothandelsgebouw and the building centre development. In the plan 80

Creating

Figure 3 A map drawn by the Public Works Department showing Burgdorfferâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 1914 plan for traffic corridors in the inner city, which was not implemented.

Figure 2 Burgdorfferâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 1913 plan for improving the traffic situation in the inner city. Space was cleared for the construction of the Meent. The Zandstraat neighbourhood was to be demolished to make way for the new town hall and post office.

Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

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Figure 4 Map of the Van Traa Foundation Plan for the reconstruction of Rotterdam, 1946.

Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

proposed by Van Traa, Weena was 100 metres wide from the facade of the buildings on one side of the street to the buildings across the way. Intensification of the city centre In 1964, Van Traa passed on the sceptre of city architect. By that time, the mood of the city had changed. The people and politicians of Rotterdam perceived the city as chilly, empty and unfriendly. Resistance to plans for large-scale infrastructure gradually swelled. The emphasis shifted to urban renewal of the pre-war districts surrounding the city centre. The reconstruction of the Old West district bordered by Nieuwe Binnenweg focused on targeted demolition and architectural rebuilding, as well as the construction of pedestrian routes through the neighbourhood. (see fig. 5) The emphasis on local improvements meant that the long lines of the overall city map were disregarded almost entirely. The urban renewal divided the city up into chunks, fitting them together in a jigsaw puzzle of neighbourhoods. (see fig. 6) Nieuwe Binnenweg, a major road that connected a series of these urban renewal areas, was left up to the owners of the businesses that lined it. This historic city street that linked historic Delfshaven to the Rotterdam city centre went into decline, resulting in empty shop fronts and an unsafe thoroughfare. The instinctive drive to move back to a smaller scale was also evident in the criticism of the large-scale construction of the Coolsingel, which was pared down to a profile with only four lanes. Pavilions sprang up along the wide sidewalks that lined the boulevard, followed in 1976 by grass beds and planters. It was all in vain; Coolsingel was still an oversized through-road with heavy traffic, and the 82

Creating

Figure 6 The urban renewal divided the city up into chunks, fitting them together in a jigsaw puzzle of neighbourhoods.

Figure 5 The reconstruction of the Old West district focused on targeted demolition and architectural rebuilding, as well as the construction of pedestrian routes through the neighbourhood.

Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

the street

Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

attempts to inject a ‘cosy‘, small-scale feel were misplaced in this profile and felt fairly artificial.

Figure 7 City planning in the area around Weena.

From the 1980s on, the city centre saw a major increase in concentration and density. New buildings sprang up, gradually filling in the gaps in the urban tapestry to prevent further fragmentation of the inner city – fragmentation that resulted in part from the large-scale infrastructure built under Van Traa‘s regime. The main roads from his plan were transformed into boulevards: ‘routes and areas intended for all forms of traffic‘. The city planning in the area around Weena, which had already started in the late 1970s, is the clearest example of this transformation. Until that time, Weena was still a street with a profile 100 metres wide; in the 1980s, it was narrowed by situating additional buildings on both sides of the street, within the existing profile. It was intended to be a ‘green street‘, with five new rows of trees. (see fig. 7) The car and tram lanes did not need to be moved. The facades were easy to accommodate in the spatial plans for the north side of Weena, but the buildings on the south side were a problem. How could buildings be positioned in front of and between the structures that were already in place? The Weena plan was eventually put into practice, resulting in the Woongebouw on Hofplein, the Unilever building, the Nationale Nederlanden building, Stad Rotterdam and the VSB Bank. Weena was an attractive location for offices due to its easy accessibility and the economically advantageous terms offered to entice businesses to come to the area, as an antidote to the sluggish economy at that time. In the end, it proved more difficult to realize housing along Weena.

Creating

Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

Weena became a boulevard boasting metropolitan grandeur, but it was still an unpleasant area for pedestrian traffic. The arcades of the various buildings did not line up, and public functions along the plinth of the buildings were built sporadically. A secondary location for the Boijmans Van Beuningen art museum on the ground floor of the Nationale Nederlanden insurance building was quickly closed again. The aim had been to create boulevards for ‘all flows of traffic‘, but this ambition was not fulfilled on Weena. This was not only due to a lack of coherence in how the buildings were constructed in relation to the street; another issue was the fact that the car lanes on this major road interrupted the natural flows of pedestrian traffic, which primarily moved north and south between Rotterdam‘s central station and the city centre. Renaissance of the street After decades of neighbourhood-based operations and large-scale infrastructure interventions, the revitalization of Witte de Withstraat suddenly marked a significant policy shift in the 1990s. Moving away from the patchwork approach, the city-wide programme made it possible to put a street on the map in an entirely un-Rotterdam fashion. Witte de Withstraat is a street that has a wealth of history. The offices of a number of newspapers were on that street, and the Rotterdam Art Circle has been based there since 1898. From the 1970s on, the street‘s reputation went downhill rapidly due to the many shady cafés, sex clubs and illegal gambling establishments. In the 1980s, the problems grew worse when hard drugs started being sold in the area. In the 1990s, the street had a total makeover. The municipality made use of its rich history, developing the concept of the ‘art axis‘ or ‘cultural kilometre‘. Galleries and art institutes settled along this up-and-coming street. The Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art was established in 1990, followed in 1999 in the same building by the opening of TENT, the exhibitions department of the CBK centre for visual arts. In the slipstream of these developments, entrepreneurs opened new restaurants and trendy fashion boutiques. By now, the street‘s attraction is no longer limited to the large group of ‘creatives‘ who live and work in the city; Witte de Withstraat has become an established hot spot in its own right. The street‘s success culminates each year in the ‘World of Witte de With‘ festival, when all the galleries and other establishments open their doors to the street, and the street itself becomes a stage for all sorts of performing arts. A previous common and now an avenue, called Meent, was Burgdorffer‘s prewar breakthrough. Some of it still stood after the bombardment and has been going through a similar process in recent years, more or less autonomously. Meent forms a line that pedestrians can walk from Lijnbaan to the market on Binnenrotte. Meent is lined by many residential apartments, and the groundfloor level has filled up in recent years with entertainment, nightlife and shops for urbanites who like to see and be seen. Part of its success is the fact that you can drive a car through the street and park parallel on both sides of the street. The street as a programme-based cluster with its own ‘profile‘ works here as well. Nieuwe Binnenweg, which was neglected in the urban renewal of the 1970s, now has its own revitalization plan, just as Witte de Withstraat did in the 1990s. The focus has shifted back to the street. The renaissance of Nieuwe Binnenweg shows the street

Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

that both architectural precision and a strong programming concept have the power to give a street a new lease on life. The Rotterdam Development Corporation initiated the revitalization of Nieuwe Binnenweg in 2008, focusing on the street. Business owners, the municipal government and the local housing association pooled their resources. The street had turned into a loose string of nail studios, take-away restaurants and hair salons. Specific profiles were used to attract new businesses: social life, culinary discoveries, adventurous experiences. Attempts were made to harmonize these efforts with local neighbourhood initiatives. Binnenweg was not supposed to turn into just another Dutch street lined with typical national retail chains like Hema and Blokker. The street was fixed up, one building after another. New shops and cafés followed in the wake of this strategy. The Hubshop sold trendy fair trade products; Chez Mo-I offered home catering. The Olijventuin restaurant did well, and a new Urban Espresso Bar recently opened there, in a classic corner location with spacious picture windows. Shopkeepers are now renovating their shops in line with an ‘image quality plan‘, drawn up for each of the buildings. Besides the success of programme-based profiles, the end of Binnenweg also shows that the struggle to achieve the success of the street often involves a fierce fight for every square centimetre. In 2006, the arcades built and designed by architect Pietro Hammel in 1979 were tackled. These five blocks were part of the urban renewal plan for the city‘s Old West district, rising to fill the spot where the post-war provisional shops once stood. The volumes are staggered towards the front. However, it became apparent soon after construction that the arcades that gave the ensemble its name were not working. They are too low, and the columns are too wide. The space inside the arcades is dark, and the shop fronts lack visibility. Not an appealing spot for entrepreneurs. The homeowners‘ association had the arcades demolished to make way for new shop fronts, which were moved forward 2.60 metres compared to the previous situation. Overhanging trim running in an unbroken line along the shops helps the complex to look more like a single entity. The change in the relationship between the buildings and the street resulted in an appealing shopping strip, and the end of Nieuwe Binnenweg is once again a favoured destination for the people of Rotterdam. In the same period, a change was made across the street in front of the wellknown Rotterdam establishment and pop venue Rotown, where the owner built a wooden bench to fence off the car lane. This large, urban piece of furniture created a place where people could enjoy sitting beside this fairly busy street. Once the dark arcade was removed, the shop fronts were repositioned 2.60 metres closer to the street, and the city bench was built across the way. The public domain at the end of Nieuwe Binnenweg flourished once again. These changes were small interventions on the scale of the city, in no way comparable to operations such as the Weena plan. However, they had a huge impact on the public use of the street and continuity in the urban tapestry – and that continuity is essential in Rotterdam. Although there may be room for debate on how Hammel‘s design was handled, the intervention does demonstrate the high degree of precision required to bring (new) life to a street.

Creating

Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

Streets that make a city It seems as though Rotterdam hardly developed a tradition of urban architecture for the design of the street as a pleasant place to be in the second half of the 20th century. The bombardment of the city centre and the grand plans for the rapid reconstruction of the city seem to have skipped the ‘middle scale‘, missing the bridge between the building and the street in their designs, or oversimplifying the blueprints. At the same time, the continuity of the street grid was wrenched completely out of alignment due to the bombardment and the collision between the large-scale infrastructure and the patterns already in place in the city. At all these junctures, the street as a connector of neighbourhoods and locations that each have their own quality of life remained underappreciated, or was not considered carefully enough. As a result, neighbourhoods coexist side by side without converging, and crucial links between different parts of the city are lacking. Visitors to Rotterdam referred to in the introduction literally lose their way. The city lacks a natural order telling visitors how to move through it and how buildings are positioned along the streets. The tide seems to be changing, however. In recent years, the successful attractions in the city centre have been largely related to the success of a specific street. Witte de Withstraat, Meent and Nieuwe Binnenweg are all good examples. They show the key role that a street‘s programme plays in its success, highlighting how the perceived quality of an environment is determined by the carefully considered design of the ‘middle scale‘, where the building borders the street. This volte-face in the approach to the perceived quality of the city centre has been expressed by the municipality of Rotterdam in its city centre plan for 20082020, entitled ‘The city centre as a city lounge‘. This plan refers to the meagre ‘quality of place‘ in Rotterdam as the ‘Achilles heel of the city centre‘. ‘Although a great deal has been improved in recent years, a top European city needs to have a city centre that invites visitors to spend time there, to stay around for a while. A city centre with charm and atmosphere. The factors involved here concern the quality of the layout of the public space, effective handling of car traffic, space for pedestrians to stroll through, and especially consideration of what fills the plinths on the ground floor of buildings.‘ The line-oriented approach that this essay advocates goes beyond upgrading the outdoor spaces and redesigning the plinths of buildings. Particularly in times of crisis, a line-oriented approach can offer a framework for smaller-scale interventions that have a major impact on how the city is perceived and used. It can be a new agenda for tinkering with a city dominated by a strong tradition of top-down planning, creating a perspective on urban architecture that no longer operates along regional principles, but focuses on lines. Each line is different and its value needs to be accurately assessed. Where are the points that function poorly; where are crucial links missing in the continuity of the city‘s fabric? The map that AIR Rotterdam made of the city centre clearly shows the excessive public space it contains. (see fig. 8) A line-based perspective offers inspiration to consider the scale and design of the street and the buildings that line it. An additional complication in the design process is the fact that natural walking routes do not always coincide with the orientation of the street plan. When such mismatches occur, how can you design a programme that maps a logical ‘path‘ through the city? the street

Figure 8 The map that AIR Rotterdam made of the city centre clearly shows the excessive public space it contains.

Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

This is one of the tasks that will shortly need to be addressed along with the structure of the area around the station. The new central station presents an opportunity to scrutinize the walking routes from the station to Lijnbaan and Karel Doormanstraat. This is the chance to design smart crossings over the pedestrian-unfriendly Weena by introducing an attractive programme and precise design in the plinths. A line-based approach does not advocate uniformly designed city streets with car-free zones throughout, nor endless sidewalk cafĂŠs and cosy nooks at every turn. That would not do justice to the diversity of the streets in Rotterdam. In a line-based approach, each street would be assessed according to its actual value, so subsequent interventions could be tailored to fit the circumstances. A wide city boulevard simply cannot be easily shrunk to convenient dimensions. That leads back into the trap of the misplaced, small-scale pavilions and planters inserted into the profile of Coolsingel in the 1970s. No, the intervention on Westblaak, another of the wide boulevards in Van Traaâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s Basic Plan, was assessed more accurately. The Westblaak Skate Park opened there in 2000. The profile had enough room for a skate park with nearly a dozen features. The park was developed in consultation with local skaters, so it actually works really well. A group of artists applied a design to the ground level in a brightly coloured asphalt coating. The skate park is in constant use and has become one of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s attractions. In this spot, the intervention suited the scale of the street and the programme at a dynamic location surrounded by traffic whizzing by. The city springs forth from its streets. It would not do Rotterdam any harm to consider the city from this perspective. Smart ways of connecting the diverse streets, and activating the street level at just the right points: that is the point of 88

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Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

a line-based perspective. It requires meticulous precision in both design and programme. This calls for an urban architecture that is not limited to the grand outlines, but makes statements at the level of the pavement and the front door, the awning and the window and the tree in the street. Then Rotterdam too would have streets that make the city.

M. Aarts (ed.): Leven in de Stad, Rotterdam op weg naar het jaar 2000, Rotterdam 1987.

Special thanks to: Heidi Klein, architect at Zandbelt&vandenBerg. She conducted the research for this article together with Rogier van den Berg.

U. Barbieri (ed.): Stedebouw in Rotterdam, plannen en opstellen 1940-1981, Amsterdam 1981.

Mercé de Miguel i Capdevila, head of urban planning, ds+V/city of Rotterdam. She was interviewed for this article.

Hans van Dijk, ‘De gezelligheidsrevolutie 1965-1985‘, in: Martin Aarts (ed.): Vijftig jaar wederopbouw, een geschiedenis van toekomstvisies, Rotterdam 1995.

Bibliography

AIR, het architectuurcentrum van Rotterdam: Stedenbouw, vak of vacuüm, Rotterdam 2009

Gemeente Rotterdam: Binnenstad als city lounge, binnenstadsplan Rotterdam 2008-2020, Rotterdam 2008. Paul van de Laar, Mies van Jaarsveld: Historische Atlas van Rotterdam, de groei van de stad in beeld, Nijmegen 2006. Han Meyer: City and port, Transformations of Port Cities London, Barcelona, New York, Rotterdam, Utrecht 2009. Michelle Provoost: Massa en Weerstand 1920-1945, in: Martin Aarts (ed.): Vijftig jaar wederopbouw, een geschiedenis van toekomstvisies, Rotterdam 1995. C. van Traa (ed.): Rotterdam, de geschiedenis van tien jaren wederopbouw, Rotterdam 1955.

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Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

Coolsingel

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Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

Heemraadsingel

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Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

Mathenesserlaan

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Meent

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Nieuwe Binnenweg

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Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

Weena

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Streetwise Rotterdam: The city at eye level

Westblaak

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Witte de Withstraat

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From the streets Ton Schaap This essay deals with the street in Amsterdam. Consciously or not, a new street is designed with a whole series of existing streets as references. This is also true in Amsterdam. In this article I will discuss examples from the 17th, 19th , 20th and 21st centuries and how they relate to one another. This is just a small selection, however, since completeness would require an entire book. I am limiting myself to what I know, what has struck me, and what I have been able to contribute to. Street and block Amsterdam is a city of streets. In the 1950s and 1970s numerous experiments with other forms of urban tissue were carried out in the western and southeastern expansion districts. The underlying idea was that another form of society, dominated by the collective, would emerge after World War II. The division between private and public was considered outmoded or ‘bourgeois‘. But since the 1980s the street has been making a comeback in Amsterdam urban design. Streets and blocks have again become the basic building units of the city, as the IJ banks and IJburg development illustrate. Yet it is not for that matter a dogma, and exceptions are still possible — just think of the Funen residential park in Amsterdam-Oost, the GWL site in the west of the city, and the Overhoeks Campus that is now under construction in Amsterdam-Noord. Streets and blocks answer the living requirements that suit the locations and the densities that are relevant in Amsterdam. The revival probably also has to do with the typical Amsterdam niche in the Dutch housing market, as the only real ‘city‘. The clear definition of public and private and the contrast between the busy street and the calmness of the area enclosed by the block also appeals to new city residents. In this case one can add ‘shelter‘ to calmness. It is almost always windy in Amsterdam, and the bicycle is almost as important as the car for city transport. Protection is essential for a well-functioning open space — playing in it and cycling through it — whether private or public. Streets and blocks distinguish Amsterdam from ‘the provinces‘ and ‘the Vinex neighbourhoods‘ where the tone is set by a patchwork of ‘experimental‘ forms. A system of streets and blocks is an efficient form of urban design. Anyone who has ever tried to place a given building volume on a particular site with a restricted building height in such a way that similar conditions are created for as much of the volume as possible knows that the result is what the Germans call a Blockrandbebauung (‘perimeter block‘). Positioning the volume around the edges means that many wishes can be met: maximum amount of circulation over minimum amount of hard surface, and every unit is connected to the street. Moreover, there is quietness and greenery on one side of each floor: the courtyard side. A building arranged around a space seems smaller than an equally large building surrounded by space. It‘s a question of what the priority is. The only difficulty is possibly the structure and maintenance of the underground infrastructure, in combination with the use and load from traffic.

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The block and street, or street and block, illustrate the ‘Escher principle‘: equality between form and counter-form. The form of the space between the buildings is just as important as the form of the buildings themselves. There are no leftover parts. The block is the mouldable intermediary between building and public space. This principle was discovered again during the period of urban renewal in the 1970s. The premise of modernism was abandoned, namely the acceptance that space was endless and had to be continuous. No longer was the absence of the perimeter block acceptable. The contrast between public and private became more important, at the expense of equal exposure to the sun for all dwellings. Diagonal views or light entering from the west and north or east can also have a quality. The irresponsible closed corner became an attractive corner again. Some residents of the street can only enjoy the sun after work. They derive more benefit from a garden to the north. Others prefer to sit on a terrace, in a park or along a quay. The possibility to meet one another is of the utmost importance in a city where more than half of the houses are occupied by just one person. The building block can meet the needs dictated by the demographic reality in which the nuclear family is no longer dominant. The Eastern Harbour District in Amsterdam is teeming with all sorts of buildings designed for these new city dwellers. The street over time The street has been part of urban design all down the ages, from the Greek ‘New Town‘ Miletus to Haussmann‘s Paris. That doesn‘t make designing a new street easy. We all have a tendency to forget ugly streets and compose an idealized picture of the beautiful and successful examples. However, that ideal cannot simply be copied directly. There are reasons why those historical examples were made in that way once, and one cannot underestimate the role the time factor played back then. Really bad streets are altered or demolished. Those that still exist are, by definition, strong survivors. A new street is almost always more boring than an old one. Time can help, and time will tell us whether a street is a survivor. The ideal street according to an Amsterdammer is first and foremost one containing water, a canal, or else one of those pleasantly winding streets in the old part of the city, which are actually sea dikes built by hand. The position of a street within the surrounding network of streets does the rest. Centrally located streets attract shops and cafés, but often only after some time. Some streets in well-to-do neighbourhoods have well-stocked shops for the daily groceries. The dream of most city dwellers, however, is to have a busy retail street around the corner. That gives them the best of both worlds: shops nearby and quiet in one‘s own street. The automobile arrived in the 20th century. Denial was followed by acceptance and then overreaction, with the disappearance of the street as a preliminary end of history in Brasilia or Bijlmermeer. But regulations didn‘t lag behind. The average Dutch wishes for ‘movement and accessibility, but not too much noise‘ is set down in law. In the Netherlands it is almost impossible to incorporate four lanes of traffic in the profile of a city street or avenue without violating the Law on Noise Pollution, or the more recent regulations concerning air pollution and other environmental objections. The initial reaction of urban designers and the street

From the streets

Ertskade

scale: 1:500

Ertskade is a 20-metre-wide street on the Sporenburg pier. The houses along both sides are three levels high. The lower level has a 3.5-metre gross ceiling height. Sometimes it contains an office, sometimes a living room and sometimes a carport. The streets and doorsteps feature brick surfaces. Rows of elms line both sides of the street. Everything is very normal. The interesting element is the strip of asphalt along the southern edge, which is intended for drawing, playing or skating on. The row of bricks between the strip and the house gradually becomes a ‘margin‘, a transition from the private to the public domain. After work in the evening hours the strip becomes a ‘front garden‘ for the residents, a place to eat, drink or just sit outside. In the meantime, the asphalt forms a strip for skating and learning to cycle — an essential skill for the people of Amsterdam.

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traffic engineers was to aim for the complete separation of different types of traffic. Experiments were conducted in the Western Garden Suburbs, and a complete separation was achieved in Bijlmermeer. That last step turned out to be one too many. The raised roads in Bijlmermeer have since been lowered again. The city street with mixed uses for all types of traffic is now the norm in Bijlmermeer too. Wibautstraat Wibautstraat is illustrative of the difficult relation Amsterdam has with vehicular traffic. Created almost by accident when a railway line was rerouted, the ‘street‘ started a new life in the 1950s and was based on studies of examples in East Berlin. After construction of the metro, the street was surfaced poorly and cheaply and lined by urban renewal blocks that lacked any urban vision. Some sections of the street have parallel service roads, others have separate cycle lanes, and yet others have both. Vehicles are confined to four gently curving traffic lanes and there are strips of greenery with bushes and lime trees. Shops are located along the side streets. The street profile is now being remade on the basis of an ‘open plan process‘ that mainly involved neighbourhood residents. The service roads will make way for broad pavements with wide cycle lanes and regular rows of trees as the setting for the university and residential buildings that line the street. The fourlane traffic system will be retained. Wide pavements, wide cycle lanes, standard traffic lanes for vehicles and four rows of sycamore trees will create the new setting. The combination of free travel for students and the metro system have meant that the biggest concentration of students in the Netherlands is found in the area around Weesperstraat and Wibautstraat. The buildings once occupied by major newspapers are now home to trendy entertainment venues and countless small businesses. The University of Amsterdam and University of Applied Sciences are building faculties here for tens of thousands of students. Amsterdam seems to be discovering new metropolitan possibilities. It all fits into the trend that everybody spends the years between 18 and 25 in a big city.

Jan Kalff and H.P. Berlage There is a universal need to articulate a street pattern to enhance orientation and to break that pattern, thereby avoiding the oppressive effect of too much ‘rue corridor‘. Berlage wrestled with this issue. His preliminary sketch for Plan Zuid, in the spirit of Camillo Sitte, who had just risen to prominence, led to a macramé-like structure that did not convince his clients, the city authorities. In the definitive design he introduced a system of broad tree-lined streets, avenues in fact, to articulate the large expansion district. Their width, almost 60 metres, is similar to that of Keizersgracht, where Berlage lived. The maximum length of a straight section is 1200 metres, along Churchilllaan between Victorieplein and Muzenplein. The Egyptian decagon that he put forward to explain the angle created by the avenues resulted in bends that closely resemble the bends of the 17th-century canals in the centre of Amsterdam. The longest straight section there is one kilometre along Prinsengracht between Westerkerk and Leidsegracht. In Zuid, Berlage replaced the water in the canal profiles with greenery. A separate system of canals forms the water management system in Zuid. Streets and trams provide for the transport of people and goods. The Berlage streets are essentially elongated public gardens. The shops are located on the side streets, which are half as wide, c. 30 metres. They connect with the street

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Wibautstraat

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Out of the two options considered during the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;open plan processâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;, the choice was for a profile with an 8.5-metre-wide central strip of greenery containing two rows of trees. The sycamores are arranged in triangular formations. Located at various points directly beneath the street are metro circulation corridors. The central strip is raised half a metre to allow the trees to grow better. Two traffic lanes flank each side of the central strip. Parallel to them is a zone for deliveries, and then another row of sycamore trees. Finally there are wide pavements with adjoining squares wherever the buildings make that possible. Three-metre-wide cycle lanes are incorporated into the pavements. The squares are fitted with recreational equipment and lounge zones by design firm Concrete. A number of blocked side-streets will be reopened. No uniform architectural guidelines have been set for the buildings along the street. The calmly designed space of the street will form a counterpoint to the highly diverse buildings.

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They will become even more diverse rather than be replaced by more coherent structures. The plan focuses primarily on the form and function of the ground floor of the buildings, the plinth. In terms of buildings, Wibautstraat will be closer to a New York avenue than to a Parisian or Berlin boulevard.

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Keizersgracht

scale: 1:500

Keizersgracht is the widest of the three main canals that encircle the centre of Amsterdam. It is 55 metres wide from facade to facade. Once intended to be the most distinguished canal, it is actually the most boring. Prinsengracht is livelier and the profiles of Herengracht and Singel are better and their straight sections shorter. Though equal in height, they are narrower in width, and the proportions are therefore better.

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From the streets

Apollolaan

scale: 1:500

Apollolaan is one of the structuring avenues in Berlageâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s plan. It is 55 metres wide. The special element is the central green strip which is 14 metres wide and features four rows of lime trees and elm trees. The general rule that a profile can have a maximum of one row of trees for every 10 metres in width is clearly evident in Plan Zuid. The buildings are about as tall as those on Keizersgracht, up to the maximum height possible without a lift in Amsterdam, i.e. 15 metres. The big scale of the street facades ensures a totally unique appearance in comparison with the equally wide Keizersgracht. Grandeur is the appropriate positive qualification, while paternalism would denote the negative impact.

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Ceintuurbaan

scale: 1:500

Amsterdam‘s version of the European phenomenon of the ‘ring‘ is the 30-metre-wide Ceintuurbaan. The street connects all 19th-century expansion districts and, in terms of functions and public, is the most diverse street in the entire city. The profile is in principle simple: a street with a tramway in the middle, one lane of vehicular traffic in each direction, and wide pavements with rows of sycamores. Separating the tramway and introducing separate cycle lanes led to a visible struggle to redefine the street profile along its entire length. Trees had to be retained, while pedestrians had no lobby. The result was a succession of sloppy interventions that, viewed in a positive light, lent a material element to the whole varied ensemble in terms of pavement edges, tree crowns and raised pavement slabs.

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existing radial streets dating from the previous period of development in the 19th century, Plan Kalff. The residential streets are smaller again, usually about 15 metres wide. It is a carefully composed ensemble that boasts both hierarchy and long sight-lines (the aforementioned 1.2 km) as well as intimacy in the narrower, sometimes angled residential streets. Thus the painterly quality and intimacy advocated by Sitte is combined with the style of Parisian boulevards and Vienna‘s Ring, precisely the things that Sitte was campaigning against. A less well-considered project was the 19th-century city expansion that preceded Nieuw-Zuid. The 30-metre-wide Ceintuurbaan is the most important urban addition of that period. It was put on the map by the municipal urban designer Kalff together with three city parks that are more or less linked to this ring. A building height of four or five floors is possible in Amsterdam without a lift. Most buildings were between 12 and 16 metres in height. An accepted guideline that eventually became a regulation in the building codes stipulated that light from above the buildings along the opposite side of the street had to be able to reach the window sill of the lowest window at an angle of 45 degrees. That resulted in streets of 15 to 20 metres in width. The method of development based on concessions to private land owners resulted in a certain variation in street widths and building depths. Although unintentional, many streets acquired a square profile, where the street is as wide as the buildings are tall. Boring and actually only acceptable if the square effect is concealed by rows of trees or other elements. That led to what would become known as Plan Zuid. The 19th-century ring is now centrally positioned because the city expanded later to the south, west and east. The houses are popular with new city dwellers who can access the entire city by bike. Many of the streets in the 19th-century belt have developed into examples of the mixed use championed by Jane Jacobs. Ceintuurbaan is one of the most varied of these. IJ banks and IJburg Construction of the western and south-eastern expansions meant that the city was finished. It was only by developing the former industrial zones that the exodus of residents in search of bigger dwellings could be halted. The urban ambition in developing the banks of the IJ was to make the IJ waterway part of the city once again, as they once had been. Seaworthy ships travelled as far as the Dam. Damrak was the outer harbour, Rokin the inner harbour. Railway embankments, shunting yards, shipyards and the station complex drove the city and the IJ apart. The shunting yards became redundant in the mid-20th century. Transhipment of goods from ships to trains declined in favour of transfer from ships to vehicular transport. A planned underground rerouting of the railway — still vital for the transport of passengers — proved too expensive. A form of urban design along the IJ consisting of public quays, streets and blocks was possible and, highly unusual for the time, postmodern. The master plan, set down in a 1989 policy document containing guidelines, stated that the designers at the city‘s department of physical planning would create an urban plan made up of streets, blocks and public quays. A tunnel was planned to carry large-scale vehicular traffic from the ring-road to the centre. In all other public spaces the goal was a mixture of slow traffic and ‘tamed‘ traffic. Half of the required parking space was provided underground. The department designed the profiles of all public spaces along the IJ. Precision in the connection between buildings and the new public realm could be achieved through collaboration between architects and the department. 106

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Java canal

scale: 1:500

The profile of the four small canals on Java Island is a result of an idea proposed by Sjoerd Soeters for an element that would introduce a new, smaller scale and ‘hollow space‘ determined by the height differences on the elongated pier. His aim was to make the profile as narrow as possible, which is why there are no pavements and no parking places. The water is just wide enough for two rows of small moored boats and a navigable channel between them. To indicate that we are dealing here with ‘follies‘, the height of the bridges is geared to the route passing over them, not to the route passing beneath them. What‘s more, the detailing of the pedestrian and cycle bridges suggests likewise. The car bridge on the northern side has a small channel through it to limit swell water in the small canals.

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Borneo canal

scale: 1:500

The inner harbour on Borneo already existed but has been widened by five metres. That extra space served as a work site for the now world-famous row of private dwellings. The profiles and layout are the work of the designers at the city department of physical planning.

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Lampenistenstraat

scale: 1:500

The width of Lampenistenstraat is determined by one-way traffic, cyclists in both directions and the minimum width of a city pavement (3.5 metres). Along one side are parallel parking places with trees positioned between the parked cars. A special feature is a 60-cm-wide pavement edge that can accommodate the entrances needed for the many private carports. The whole profile is paved with brick. Along with the concrete entrances and pavement edge, there are therefore two materials, which is the maximum number for a good street profile.

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From the streets

IJburglaan

scale: 1:500

IJburglaan contains space for two lanes of traffic, pavements, separate cycle lanes and a tramway set in a green strip. A special feature is the extra width for the traffic lanes and the strip that contains the tramway. That is lowered to allow emergency services to overtake a row of cars. Parking is also possible without blocking other vehicles. Parallel parking on a main street — a so-called 50-km/hr street — is in fact undesirable according to Dutch regulations on account of traffic safety. Yet it has been created here for the benefit of adjoining functions and to lend the street an ‘inhabited‘ character. A four-lane road would have resulted in higher vehicle speeds and more cars than are permissible in the Netherlands on a residential street. (See also Wibautstraat.)

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Haveneiland

scale: 1:500

A 20-metre-wide street is the ‘standard‘ street on Haveneiland. Two rows of trees on the first large, wide pavements and a 7.5-metres-wide traffic lane for cars and bikes make up the public section. Two bordering strips 1.2 metres wide connect the house to the street carefully. The special feature here is the surface of the traffic lane, a light granite that beautifully reflects the light in the street and thus enhances one of IJburg‘s biggest qualities, which is particularly intense as it reverberates between the water and clouds. The granite strips turn the blocks into islands in their own right, just like the islands of ancient Rome. The whole grid of Haveneiland is a 30-km zone. That was the only possible way of making intersections between equal streets under current regulations.

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From the streets

IJburg 2

scale: 1:500

IJburg 2 addresses the radical changes that hit the Dutch real estate market recently. The northern half (profile left) will have wide streets with several houses and appartments in four-storey blocks, built for collectives and small developers. A margin zone four-metres wide allows for entries to sunken parking spaces, front gardens and stairs to the first floor or piano nobile. Individual, privately developed houses frame the public space in the southern half. Streets are narrow and end with a view of IJmeer. Parking is inside the building envelopes (profile right).

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Steigereiland

scale: 1:500

Noordkade on Steigereiland is a place of note. The family homes are located in the open landscape of IJmeer. The northern banks of IJburg are detailed to withstand floods and floating ice and that required a protective profile, 8.5 metres wide and accessible to pedestrians and cyclists only. The slightly convex form of the banks means that every house feels it is â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;alone in the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC; when viewed from the island.

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One has a view of the IJ and the other islands from the quays. Views of spires and striking buildings south of the railway line strengthen the spatial relation. The sight-lines across the wide stretch of the IJ and the preserved dock basins are long (three kilometres from the connection to Java Island to KNSM Island, and from there to the Posthoorn Church, for example.). A new scale has been introduced into the Amsterdam cityscape. Views across the water from inside the apartments or from a nearby quayside have been created for the 100,000 residents of the 50,000 dwellings that will eventually rise up along the IJ. As a contrast, the islands feature sheltered spaces where no landscape horizon is visible. Narrow streets (11 metres wide) appeared on Sporenburg, narrow canals on Java Island and inner courtyards on the inner harbour on Haveneiland. The ‘Venice method‘ was introduced on the banks of the IJ, and later too on IJburg, which is planned as an archipelago of new islands. Each island has its own network of public spaces, which is determined by the form and position of the island and the programmatic wishes at the moment the design was drawn up. The introduction of semi-public inner courts on Haveneiland has been successful in some places, and less successful in others. That is the reason why improved versions of blocks and streets have been deployed on the last two islands of IJburg. What is ‘modern‘ here is not only the integration of parking facilities inside the block and the preservation of the peace and quiet of the inner courtyard, but also the ‘inhabited‘ street wall. That street wall features beautiful entrances to houses and small apartment complexes. At each entrance there is a storage space for bikes, small front gardens and pavement zones that create a place on the street that each house can appropriate. Big windows and bay windows create views of the street from the living spaces. Streets have a recognizable profile in each neighbourhood. And, like everywhere along the IJ banks, they extend from quay to quay. They offer a perspective on the water. They are articulated by bridges and by large and small public parts and squares. The streets in the Noordbuurt area are wide and leafy, while those in the Strandbuurt area are narrow. The corners are crucial in a plan of streets and blocks, for it is at the corner where the street and block meet each other most intensely. That has consequences for both. In both neighbourhoods there are tall spaces that connect directly with the pavement. Time will tell whether shops, cafés, day-care centres and workspaces will appear here. In the plan the water blocks are an exception. Blocks, harbours, park and access routes are viewed together as a ‘water park‘ in which all sorts of combinations and inversions in and between the big buildings are the order of the day. Building and urban design overlap here, just as they did during the heyday of the Metabolists. The street has disappeared and only the block remains, in the water. Finally Apart from a few recommendations concerning craftsmanship — apply no more than two materials in the horizontal plane of a profile in addition to water and greenery, avoid square profiles, place no more than one row of trees taller than 15 metres per 10 metres of profile width — I fear that no recipes or rules can be deduced from the above. Designers would do well to look around them and carry a measuring tape with them at all times, or to practice with dimensionally stable footsteps. Good residential streets exist, just as busy and popular but ugly ones do. One thing is certain, however: in Amsterdam the street has become the basic unit of the city again. To create good streets, a comparison with existing streets is required, in combination with the best possible use of the computer and 114

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the model as means to determine the desired spatial proportions in the profile and discuss them with other people. Functional diversity cannot be imposed but it can be facilitated, for a start by creating taller ceiling heights at ground level. Furthermore, climate and ground conditions also play a role. They differ from city to city. What remains the same everywhere is the importance of density and the relation between built surface area and the intensity of use of the street. What is also equally important everywhere is the position of a street within a network. There, too, the computer proves its usefulness. The effect of small shifts can be calculated quickly. What makes the design of good streets difficult is the almost delirious overreaction to the phenomenon of the car in the city, and the efforts, through more and more laws and regulations, to eliminate all possible safety risks in advance. There are countless possibilities, ranging from complete separation to complete integration. They can easily be exploited through an undogmatic search for an optimal effect that can differ in every situation. And all as part of a joint search to find an answer to the question that has always been, and will always be, relevant: the best address for a house in the city. Profiles drawn by Stephan Sliepenbeek

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StreetWorks Projects Introduction Streets direct our gaze. Streets place buildings in perspective and string structures to one another to form a city. All streets, all around the world, are more or less the same: linear spaces with a beginning and an end that people move through. Yet it takes little effort to tell where a street photograph was taken. And you often even know in what period. The appearance of the street, with the people, the buildings, the furniture, seemingly contains enough details to trace it. And there are so many elements present in the street that an infinite number of derivative forms can be constructed out of this simple and universal basic principle. And indeed, of all the millions of streets around the world, no two are the same. Each building in the street chooses its place in relation to the collective and thus defines its position in relation to the world outside. The building line, height level and roof line are just the most elementary references. A choice has to be made each time, whether you like it or not, and the number of choices is huge. Some buildings stand in line and so donâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;t stand out; others set themselves apart so that they are more commanding, turn away from or enter the space of the street with a cornice or a bay window. The proportions of each individual building relative to the surroundings are just that little bit different â&#x20AC;&#x201C; everywhere, every time. The designer decides the position each time. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s why all streets are different. And therefore all cities. StreetWorks is about this awareness. A designer always chooses, even when he makes no choice. It is primarily through materials and forms that he chooses his relation to the street and, therefore, his relation to the city. The student projects presented here deal with the relation of the design to the street. They are divided into five categories: Confirming, Broadening, Transforming, Dissolving and Avoiding. The work is largely taken from the third-year projects held in six different European countries. The presentation also features first- and second-year projects made parallel to the theme in Amsterdam. Six European cities were selected for the StreetWorks project. Thirdyear students from the departments of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture worked on one street in each city for their project. Besides Amsterdam, the cities were Brussels, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Porto and Zagreb. These cities all have about one million inhabitants and therefore have a relatively recognizable and legible city form. They all share a fairly strong, central, old city core and a demonstrable relation with the surrounding landscape. A street located between the centre and the edge was then selected in each city.

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Amsterdam: Valkenburgstraat / Nieuwe Leeuwarderweg

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Confirming Is it possible to impute all qualities to the street and then add something else to it? Is it possible to respect the laws of the collective and still be recognizably present? The answer is, of course, yes. Probably as many as 80 per cent of all buildings â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;just join inâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;. They connect up and add their bit. These are the buildings that literally build coherence. They are the norm and are sometimes of exceptional quality. The urban designer, too, often feels at home with this approach. In fact, perhaps itâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s the task of the urban designer to introduce patterns, to design regularity and relate buildings to one another. It is then up to the architect to determine the extent to which he respects the rule or wants to be an exception.

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Streetworks: Projects

Boudewijn Winnubst Zagreb – Savska Cesta: B Block, Little Zagreb Tutors: Lada Hrsak and Rob van Leeuwen Little Zagreb is a typical closed parameter block from Zagreb which is turned 90 degrees. It was a challenge to keep the new design close to the original horizontal block, which meant preserving functions, form and appearance and translating them into a unique ‘vertical’ character. Turning the block creates new challenges, opportunities and solutions for a relatively normal programme.

Zagreb — Savska Cesta Zagreb — Savska Cesta B Block, Little Zagreb Boudewijn Winnubst Boudewijn Winnubst Tutors: Lada Hrsak and Rob van Leeuwen Tutors: Lada Hrsak and Rob van Leeuwen Project P5 Project P5

ka Cesta nnubst rsak and Rob van Leeuwen

Zagreb — Savska Cesta Boudewijn Winnubst Tutors: Lada Hrsak and Rob van Leeuwen Project P5

B Block, Little Zagreb

131

GROSSSTADT AMSTERDAM

Confirming WIBAUTSTRAAT - RUYSCHSTRAAT

Streetworks: Projects

WOONGEBOUW

GROSSSTADT AMST IMPRESSIE INTERIEUR Marco Kramer Amsterdam - Wibautstraat: Großstadt Amsterdam NIVEAU 4 GROSSSTADT AMSTERDAM Tutor: Erik Workel WOONGEBOUW WIBAUTSTRAAT - RUYSCHSTRAAT Setting a new standard for the metropolitan feeling that Wibautstraat lacks. A sensible icon for the city, creating an entrance to the city. GROSSSTADT AMSTERDAM

oongebouw op de hoek Wibautstraat - Ruyschstraat met hoge dichtheid. ouwkundig antwoord formuleren op het stedelijk weefsel utstraat enOPGAVE de Swammerdambuurt. De programmatische druk Een groot woongebouw op de hoek Wibautstraat - Ruyschstraat met erkingen van locatie in onorthodoxe eende extreem hogeomzetten dichtheid. ieen. Een nieuwe standaard zetten voor het Een stedenbouwkundig antwoord formuleren op het stedelijk weefsel an gevoel dat de Wibautstraat ontbeert. Een zinnig van de wibautstraat en de Swammerdambuurt. De programmatische druk alsmede beperkingen van stadentree. de locatie omzetten in onorthodoxe de stad, als markering voor de

WOONGEBOUW

WIBAUTSTRA

WIBAUTSTRAAT - RUYSCHSTRAAT ONTWERPGEDACHTEN

NIVEAU 5

NIVEAU 3 PLATTEGRONDEN 1 1a200

ONTWERPGEDACHTEN

NIVEAU 5

IMPRESSIE INTERIEUR

woontypologieen. Een nieuwe standaard zetten voor het metropolitaan gevoel dat de Wibautstraat ontbeert. Een zinnig icoon voor de stad, als markering voor de stadentree.

NIVEAU 4 IMPRESSIE INTERIEUR

NIVEAU 4

NIVEAU 3 PLATTEGRONDEN 1 1a200 NIVEAU 3 PLATTEGRONDEN 1 1a200

Titel:

Gorssstadt Amsterdam Wibautstraat als ‘Boulevard of broken dreams’

Docent: Start: Beoordeling:

Wibautstraat als ‘Boulevard of broken dreams’ Erik Workel Maandag 26 Oktober Erik 2009Workel Docent: Maandag 14 decemberMaandag 2009 26 Oktober 2009 Start:

Titel:

Beoordeling:

Gorssstadt Amsterdam

Maandag 14 december 2009

IMPRESSIE INTERIEUR

ONTWERPGEDACHTEN

SITUATIE 1a500

ONTWERPGEDACHTEN

MARCO KRAMER | ARCHITECTUUR | ACADEMIE VAN B

MARCO KRAMER | ARCHITECTUUR | ACADEMIE VAN BOUW

Großstadt Amsterdam

Großstadt Amsterdam Setting a new standard for the metropolitan for the city, making the entrance to the city. feeling that Wibautstraat lacks. Afor sensible iconmaking the entrance to the city. Setting a new standard for the metropolitan the city, feeling that Wibautstraat lacks. A sensible icon

SITUATIE 1a200

ONTWERPGEDACHTEN

132

Matta-Clark: ’central meeting-place for groups Matta-Clark: ’central’meeting-place for groups ’

Confirming

Streetworks: Projects

Hein van Lieshout Amsterdam - Wibautstraat: Großstadt Amsterdam Tutor: Erik Workel A building — to live and work in — as a sculpture hewn from a virtual structure of spatial units measuring 3 x 3 x 3m. aanzicht Wibautstraat 1:200Wibautstraat 1:200 aanzicht 06

werk & s

werk & semi-publieke functies werk & semi-publieke functies

01 00

raat 1:200

-1 Deymanstraat zicht op auto´s

zicht op auto´s

aanzicht Wibautstraat 1:200Wibautstraat 1:200 aanzicht doorzichtige gevel

doorzichtige gevel

impressie Ruyschstraat richting Oosterpark impressie Ruyschstraat richting Oosterpark

centrum

Ruyschst

doorzichtige gevel

-1 Deymanstraat

zicht op auto´s

’creating a sense of physical and visual instability’

Ruyschstraat

Matta-Clark:

Ruyschstraat

’creating a sense of physical and visual instability’

doorzichtige gevel

Matta-Clark:

ge gevel

doorzichtige gevel

werk & semi-publieke functies wer

Ruyschstraat

Ruy

rngen 2009 -architectonische dingen

impressie Wibautstraat richting centrum impressie Wibautstraat richting centrum

Großstadt Amsterdam

Hein van Lieshout - 14 december 2009 -architectonische dingen Hein van Lieshout - 14 december 2009 -architectonische dingen

impressie Wibautstraat richting centrum impressie Wibautstraat richting centrum Hein van Lieshout - 14 december 2009 -architectonische dingen Hein van Lieshout - 14 december 2009 -architectonische dingen

133

Confirming

voordeuren

Streetworks: Projects

Zuidas

portiek

25 m Joris Vos Amsterdam - Van Leijenberghlaan: Orientation Oriëntatie van Leijenberghlaan Tutor: Franz Ziegler

voordeuren

tuinen

Docent: Franz Ziegler Student: Joris Vos Datum: Oktober 2009 Richting: stedenbouw

P3a: Stedelijk ensemble (Streetworks): van Leijenberghlaan, Amsterdam

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P3a: Stedelijk ensemble (Streetworks): 73m van Leijenberghlaan, Amsterdam

38m

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Docent: Franz Zie Student: Joris Datum: Oktober 2 Richting: stedenbo

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Gesloten bouwblok

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Verschillende manieren van transformatie

134

▲

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▲

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▲

Nieuwe bouwblok

▲

Gesloten bouwblok

▲

KNSM

▲

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▲

Westerdok

▲

Westerdok

Confirming

Streetworks: Projects

Anne Dessing Amsterdam - Beethovenstraat / Van Leijenberghlaan: Urban Ensemble Tutor: Franz Ziegler The urban route along Beethovenstraat / Van Leijenberghlaan in Amsterdam Zuid is just one of the few lines that cross the Zuidas. The route is strongly divided into different zones. From the city to Buitenveldert, the road leads you through different annual rings by the masters of urban design. Each zone contains its own type of development. Only at the beginning of Leijenberghlaan is it difficult to trace the archetype of development. How can you create spatial cohesion along this street? Moving the green strips to the middle of the profile makes the Buitenveldert character visible from the Zuidas. This bank also provides space for cyclists and pedestrians. This makes the street significantly more accessible for those users. The taller development is arranged right along the building line to accommodate the jump in scale between the Zuidas and Buitenveldert. e stedelijke route Beethovenstraat/ van Leyenberghlaan

in Amsterdam zuid is één van de weinige doorgaande lijnen die de Zuidas kruist. De route is sterk in verschillende zones gedeeld. Vanuit de stad naar buitenveldert leidt de weg je door verschillende jaarringen van de grote meesters in de stedenbouw. Iedere zone kent zijn eigen type bebouwing. Het straatprofiel is nagenoeg overal symmetrisch, behalve in de zone waar de Leyenberghlaan begint. Ook is daar de archetype bebouwing moeilijk te herleiden.

bebouwing

In en rond de grenzen van dit deelgebied is de afgelopen jaren veel gebeurd. Daarbij is weinig rekening gehouden met het oorspronkelijke stedenbouwkundige plan. Eens sloot het gebied aan op een groene bufferzone tussen stad en buitenwijk. Tegenwoordig vormt deze bufferzone de hoogstedelijke Zuidas. De opgave is om de straat één ruimtelijke samenhang te geven.

wegenstructuur fiets en voetganger

Daarvoor liggen kansen in het brede straatprofiel. De laan is flink overgedimensioneerd. Door de groenstroken naar het midden van het profiel te verplaatsen, wordt het buitenveldertse karakter vanaf de zuidas zichtbaar. Op deze berm is ook plaats voor fietsers en voetgangers. Dit maakt de straat voor die belangrijke groepen een stuk toegankelijker. De hogere bebouwing wordt direct aan de rooilijn geplaatst om de schaalsprong tussen de zuidas en buitenveldert op te vangen.

B estaand profiel ter hoogte van Gelderlandplein groenstructuur

wegenstructuur auto

Oorspronkelijk plan

bestaande bebouwing

H uidige situatie

bebouwing Beethovenstraat & van Leyenberghlaan

STEDELIJK ENSEMBLE ANNE DESSING | P3A | BEGELEIDER FRANZ ZIEGLER| 2009

Amsterdam — Beethovenstraat / Van Leijenberghlaan Anne Dessing Tutor: Franz Ziegler Project P3a

Urban Ensemble The urban route along Beethovenstraat / Van Leyenberghlaan in Amsterdam Zuid is just one of the few lines that cross the Zuidas. The route is strongly divided into different zones. From the city to Buitenveldert the road leads you through different annual rings by the masters of urban design. Each zone contains its own type

of development. Only at the start of beginning of Leyenberghlaan is it difficult to trace the archetype of development. How can you create spatial cohesion along this street? Moving the green strips to the middle of the profile makes the Buitenveldert character visible from the Zuidas. This bank also provides space for cyclists and

pedestrians. This makes the street significantly more accessible for those users. The taller development is arranged right along the building line to accommodate the jump in scale between the Zuidas and Buitenveldert.

STEDELIJK ENSEMBLE135 ANNE DESSING | P3A | BEGELEIDER FRANZ ZIEGLER| 2009

Streetworks: Projects

Broadening The walls are just the literal edges of the street. In practice the reach is much larger — the side streets, the world behind the buildings, the courtyards and alleys. All of them can ultimately be traced back to a particular street — sometimes because this street has acquired mythical proportions, such as the Amsterdam canals or the PC Hooftstraat. But sometimes too because these are simply the route into the city (Lairessestraat, Haarlemmerweg). The design of these ‘widened‘ streets establishes connections in the city and can lend buildings and places orientation. A new reality is made by juggling with the characteristics of the street. This begins with an awareness of what the street is, and then being able to give it a twist.

136

De Gooiseweg past zich in de Watergraafsmeer aan aan de verkeerstechnische situatie. In het nieuwe profiel wordt de Gooiseweg een laan met een groene middenberm 78 38 60 en een dubbele bomenrij. Om de lijnen van de polder zichtbaar te maken, wordt de laan onderbroken op het moment dat de weg het poldergrid snijdt. Streetworks:A9Projects SPOOR ? A10 SPOOR principe lengteprofiel Gooiseweg 3 3 9 5 10 7 25 16 16 4 wonen ? SPOOR A10 SPOOR A9 78 38 60

Broadening

afzonderlijke buurtjes 1:1000

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afzonderlijke buurtjesbestaand 1:1000

SPOOR principe lengteprofiel Gooiseweg 1 Amsterdam to the max

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A10 SPOOR A9 De Gooiseweg past aan aan de verkeerstechnische In het nieuwe profiel wordt de Gooiseweg een laan met een groene middenberm 38 zich in de Watergraafsmeer 73 situatie. 78 38 60 SPOOR A10 SPOOR A9 SPOOR A10 SPOOR A9 1 bestaand SPOOR A10 Om de SPOOR A9 principe lengteprofiel enGooiseweg dubbele bomenrij. lijnen van de polder zichtbaar te maken, wordt de laan onderbroken op het moment dat de weg het poldergrid snijdt. De weg ligt over de een hele lengte op een

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SPOOR A10 SPOOR talud waardoor je de hoogteverschillen in Watergraafsmeerpolder SPOOR A10 SPOOR 1 bestaand het onderliggende landschap niet ervaart. 9 5 De weg ligt over de hele lengte op een Watergraafsmeerpolder Watergraafsmeerpolder talud waardoor je de hoogteverschillen in Watergraafsmeerpolder Diemen landschap niet ervaart. groene randen Watergraafsmeerpolder Diemen SPOOR A10 Watergraafsmeerpolder Diemen met grote bomen SPOOR A10 2 gewenst SPOOR A10 lijnen van de polder alsligt herkenbaar element SPOOR A10 SPOOR Een weg die laag in de polders engroene randen met grote bomen hoger in Diemen. Vanuit het landschap SPOOR A10 SPOOR Watergraafsmeerpolder 2 gewenst SPOOR A10 SPOOR bekeken is dit het ideale profiel. lijnenbruggen van de polder als herkenbaar element als bruggen als accent Een weg dieaccent laag ligt in de polders en Watergraafsmeerpolder Watergraafsmeerpolder hoger in Diemen. Vanuit het landschap Watergraafsmeerpolder Diemen bekeken is dit het ideale profiel. 01A bruggen als accent bruggen als accent Watergraafsmeerpolder Diemen Watergraafsmeerpolder Diemen 3 compromis In de Watergraafsmeerpolder worden het SPOOR A10 grid weer zichtbaar gemaakt. SPOOR A10 3 compromis In Diemen wordt het talud smaller maar SPOOR A10 In de Watergraafsmeerpolder SPOOR A10 SPOOR even hoog. worden het gebundelde infrastructuur grid weer zichtbaar gemaakt. In de Bijlmer past de weg zich aanSPOOR aan de A10 3 3 9 5 5 25 11 16 16 SPOOR 20 Watergraafsmeerpolder In Diemen wordtbuurt het talud smaller maar SPOOR A10 SPOOR en verknoopt hij zich weer met het 78 38 even hoog. gebundelde infrastructuur maaiveld. Watergraafsmeerpolder Watergraafsmeerpolder In de Bijlmer past de weg zich aan aan de 316 9 5 25 11 163 16 7 2025 3 9 5 55 11 16 11 Diemen 7 3 20 Watergraafsmeerpolder Hogeschool Amsterdam buurt en verknoopt hij zich weer met het 78 38 78 38 62 maaiveld. Watergraafsmeerpolder Diemen

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SPOOR

ontsluiting fiets 1:1000 Watergraafsmeerpolder

Bieke van Hees Amsterdam – Gooiseweg: Road Meets City Meets Road Tutor: Martijn de Wit 1 ! Gooiseweg is1 the only road that (as part of a longer line) extends from A10 to A10, right through Amsterdam. bestaand ! you drive into and out of the Right through the time, through the landscape. Along this line, 1 Amsterdam to the max ! 1 Amsterdam to the max Amsterdam to the max city in different ways. Is this still1 Amsterdam? Through polders! and green edges, past ‘forgotten‘ residential areas and indistinct zones, through suburban ‘problem neighbourhoods‘. Under the 2 2 A10 and railway tracks, over the A9, to Gaasperplas. WEL Howherkenbaarheid can Gooiseweg become recognizable NIET wijken verbinden WEL netwerk verbinden creëren WEL groene plekken behouden again, for the city and the neighbourhood? Gooiseweg assumes the identity of its surroundings 2 Wibautstadstraat and forms the link between the2 city and neighbourhood, between city and landscape. nieuw Wibautstadstraat principeprofiel Watergraafsmeer

137

groene buffer

de zogeheten Engelse landschapsstijl. Hierdoor gingen de Zochers over op de zogeheten ‘late landschapsstijl’, die soberder en vloeiender van lijn was, zonder kunstmatige ‘stemmingselementen’. Door hun werkzaamheden bij het naar de laatste mode herinrichten van de in geometrische barokstijl aangelegde buitenplaatsen en parken brachten zij de ‘late landschapsstijl’ in Nederland tot verdere ontwikkeling en tot grote bloei. Daarbij probeerden zij hun ontwerpen steeds in overeenstemming te brengen met de omgeving.

P-koffer relatie weg

relatie randen

Broadening flexible ruimte

Streetworks: Projects

flexible ruimte

focus

Niek Heijboer Amsterdam – Frederiksplein: Park Square Tutors: Marie-Laure Hoedemakers and Oana Rades The backbone of the design is the connection between Van Woustraat and Utrechtsestraat. This connection is translated in the design into a fault line with offshoots extending all over the square. The park square is organised with this spatial intervention, and the street becomes part of the park square. primaire route WEAKNESS

STRENGHT - onbebouwde ruimte in een sterk geurbaniseerde omgeving - vertoeven in een groene ruimte - verschillende gebruikers - ligging aan de rand van historisch centrum - randen met typische, sfeervolle Amsterdamse bebouwing Ontwerp - fraai bomenbestand

- versnippering en eilandvorming - dominante verkeersfunctie - manifesteert zich niet aan de omliggende straten relatie randen - maakt geen gebruik van zijn unieke ligging - architectuur van de bedrijfsgebouwen - heeft weinig tot geen relatie met gebouw van DNB

OPPORTUNITIES - creëren van een betekenisvolle ontmoetingsplaats - oriëntatie en eenheid - identiteit en functie - ligging aan de rand van historisch centrum - flexibele ontmoetingsruimte - verkeersfunctie relatie met het plein geven

conceptueel diagram

THREATS - plein louter als verkeersknooppunt - sociale veiligheid - bebouwingsdruk - onduidelijke functie van de ruimte - ad/hoc ontwikkelingen - verdwijnen van kostbaar groen

vorm evolutie

richtingen

vorm evolutie

ontwerptekening van L.P. Zocher

plantsoen van Zocher aangelegd in 1870

breuklijn

fragmentatie: plein (hardscape) en park (softscape)

ontwerptekening van L.P. Zocher

ruimtelijke beleving: open/gesloten

Niek Heijboer_P1B_2009

triplex model: vloer - wanden - dak

zichtlijn doorsnede bestaande situatie, west-oost relatie randen

cafe

spelen school

relatie randen

P-koffer groene buffer

ZOCHER, Louis Paul (1820-1915) L.P. Zocher was een telg uit een vermaard geslacht van tuinarchitecten. Zowel vader en zoon waren gefascineerd geraakt door de zogeheten Engelse landschapsstijl. Hierdoor gingen de Zochers over op de zogeheten ‘late landschapsstijl’, die soberder en vloeiender van lijn was, zonder kunstmatige ‘stemmingselementen’. Door hun werkzaamheden bij het naar de laatste mode herinrichten van de in geometrische barokstijl aangelegde buitenplaatsen en parken brachten zij de ‘late landschapsstijl’ in Nederland tot verdere ontwikkeling en tot grote bloei. Daarbij probeerden zij hun ontwerpen steeds in overeenstemming te brengen met de omgeving.

schaal 1:500

P-koffer relatie weg

relatie randen flexible ruimte

flexible ruimte focus

primaire route relatie randen

conceptueel diagram plantsoen van Zocher aangelegd in 1870

vorm evolutie

ontwerptekening van L.P. Zocher

ruimtelijke beleving: open/gesloten

Niek Heijboer_P1B_2009

schaal 1:500

dam – Frederiksplein eijboer Marie-Laure Hoedemakers and Oana Rades P1b

Niek Heijboer_P1B_2009

Park Square

Frederiksplein

138 Laure Hoedemakers and Oana Rades

Niek Heijboer_P1B_2009

Park Square

Broadening

Streetworks: Projects

Chris Verstappen Amsterdam – Linnaeusstraat/Middenweg – Ringdijk: The Moment Tutors: Helga van der Haagen and Martin Hopman Ringdijk connects Linnaeusstraat to Middenweg and therefore forms the transition to form the Watergraafsmeer area. The transition from peat reclamation to impoldering is currently scarcely tangible or noticeable: a ‘Missing Link‘. The design turns crossing Ringvaart and Ringdijk into a moment. As a result, the ‘Missing Link‘ becomes a ‘Super Link‘.

is currently ‘Missing Link’. aart and Ringdijk

into a moment. As a result, the ‘Missing Link’ becomes a ‘Super Link’.

ult, the ‘Missing Link’

straat/Middenweg - Ringdijk

The Moment Ringdijk connects Linneausstraat to Middenweg

peat reclamation to impoldering is currently

139

into a moment. As a r

Broadening

Streetworks: Projects

140

ivides the City ices through the city. With four

Wonderful avenue profiles, urban walls and parks

landscape of the east-west lines is connected

Erwin van Schagen Amsterdam â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Gooiseweg: Gooiseweg Divides the City Tutor: Martijn de Wit Gooiseweg slices through the city. With four to six traffic lanes on a bank five to seven metres high, this city motorway cuts a swathe through Bijlmermeer, Diemen and Watergraafsmeer. The underpasses are mostly narrow and dark. Wonderful avenue profiles, urban walls and parks along the east-west lines are reduced by these underpasses into a roadway, cycle lane, footpath and ditch. It divides the city into east and west. A minimal transformation, connects the urban landscape of the east-west lines and activates the space on both sides of and beneath Gooiseweg.

Broadening

Streetworks: Projects

Arjen Aarnoudse Zagreb â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Savska Cesta: Savska Stories Tutors: Lada Hrsak and Rob van Leeuwen Savska Cesta is a trace, not a sharp cut. Savska Cesta leads from the River Sava to the city centre. Savska Cesta translates as: mixed use in different grain sizes, high-rise projects, an open urban fabric, arcades and pedestrian areas, embracing existing buildings, commercial public space and public green.

ies a is a trace, not a sharp cut. Savska from the River Sava to the city centre. a translates as: mixed use in different high-rise projects, an open urban

fabric, arcades and pedestrian areas, embracing existing buildings, commercial public space, and public green.

141

Broadening

Streetworks: Projects

Sander Olden Edinburgh â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Leith Walk: Leith Walk Connections Tutors: Jo Barnett and Ingeborg Thoral The Visitor Centre connects the busy Leith Walk and the quiet and relaxing world behind the street facade; Pilrig Park and the Water of Leith.

KAUPPATORI KAUPPATORI market square market square Andrew Page

eith Walk d the of Leith.

142 verkeersintensiteit verkeersintensiteit

locatie

Broadening

Streetworks: Projects

Andrew Page Helsinki â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Unioninkatu: Kauppatori Market Square Tutors: Nanne de Ru and Sander Lap

routing

KAUPPATORI market square

Andrew Page

Andrew Page Andrew Page

nivo 2

restaurant - b

nivo 1

restaurant - b

nivo 0

markthal

axometrie

verkeersintensiteit locatie verkeersintensiteit locatie

zonering locatie zonering locatie

routing marktsituatie routing marktsituatie

143

Streetworks: Projects

Transforming Sometimes the street is not good enough. It is diffuse or simply unpleasant. Or much more can be made of it. In such cases mild methods are available. A hump in the surface emphasises an important crossing. A new building on a corner makes you aware of the turn in the road. They can also be more radical. If the form, length or width of the profile is altered, the view of the surroundings changes. An opening in or between buildings interrupts the linearity and creates such a condition. A building at the end of the street where nothing ever stood gives the route a destination. The perception of the surroundings is formed as you walk or drive. Change the way of moving and you also change the city.

144

P3b november / december 2009

docent erik workel menno trautwein academie van bouwkunst P3b november / december 2009 docent erik workel

Transforming

Streetworks: Projects

Menno Trautwein Framed /窶的ngekaderd Amsterdam Wibautstraat: Framed Tutor: Erik Workel menno trautwein academie van bouwkunst P3b november / december 2009 docent erik workel

145

sant

Arnulfstrasse

Paseo de Castellana

Champs Elysées

Transforming

Avenida da Boavista 4

kruispunten en accenten (4), in hoge snelheid (5), van noord naar zuid (6) en met de oriëntatie op het centrum (7)

Avenida da Boavista, zoals hij gebruikt wordt: van noord naar zuid en op de plekken waar deze wegen kruisen

Avenida da Boavista, tempografisch met een lange verblijfstijd in het centrum en vluchtig gebruik van de rest van de straat

Streetworks: Projects

Anneke Sluijter Porto – Avenida da Boavista: Reprise Tutors: Marijn Schenk and Bas Liesker Located along the street are energy fields that offer opportunities for the theme of liveliness and intensive usage of the street. Adding programme, form and meaning to these energy fields will strengthen them and create a reason to go there. Through that, the Portuguese people will form a relation with the street, and it will acquire a significance in the collective memory of Porto. analyse energievelden aan de Boavista: kiem, te versterken, bestaand

De Avenida da Boavista is als een onvoltooide sonate. Net als een goed muziekstuk start de Boavista met het thema van een levendig centrum en trekt dit thema door in levendige energievelden langs de straat. Deze sequentie eindigt echter bij de Rotunda en het leven van de stad lijkt niet verder te gaan. To c h b i e d t d e B o a v i s t a k a n s e n o m h e t m u z i e k s t u k t e v o l t o o i e n . L a n g s d e s t r a a t b e v i n d e n z i c h e n e r g i e velden die kansen bieden voor het thema van levendigheid en intensief gebruik van de straat. Door proReprise g r a m m a , v o r m e n b e t e k e n i s t o e t e v o e g e n a a n d e z e e n e r g i e v e l d e n , z u l l e n z i j v e r s t e r k t w o r d e n e n e e n r e dthe e nstreet vorm n o m fields n a a rthat d i e p l e k t form o e t and e g ameaning a n . D ato a rthese m e eenergy k r i j gfields e n dwill e P o r t o g e zaerelation n e e n with r e l athe t i estreet m e and t d eit will s t r aacquire a t e na Located along aree energy zal het een betekenis krijgen in het collectieve geheugen van Porto.

offer opportunities for the theme of liveliness and strengthen them and create a reason to go there. significance in the collective memory of Porto. intensive usage that N e t ofa the l s estreet. e n s Adding o n a t e programme, w o r d t d e B o a vThrough ista op g e the s p aPortuguese n n e n t u people s s e n twill w e form e grote energievelden (de expositie en de r e p r i s e ) m e t k l e i n e r e t h e m a ’s e r t u s s e n ( d e d o o r w e r k i n g ) . D e e n e r g i e v e l d e n v e r s c h i l l e n v a n e l k a a r i n karakter en daarmee wordt de vorm bepaald. De mate van levendigheid en energie bepaalt of de straat versnelt of vertraagt, programma aantrekt of afstoot. Door de energievelden aan elkaar te rijgen met een tramlijn over de hele Boavista, komt de nadruk te liggen op het voetgangerspubliek, bereikbaarheid en het leven op straat.

In de serie van energievelden ligt de grote opgave in het maken van het slotstuk, de reprise. Deze tegenhanger van het centrum wordt de grote trekker aan de kust van Porto. Het wordt het ultieme rustpunt in de stad waarin alles ver traagt en de Boavista over een ‘slow motion carpet’ wordt getrokken. Het Parque do Sossego brengt het buitenleven van de Portogezen in de stad en biedt plek aan iedere Portogees, met zijn eigen snelheid en vorm van gebruik. Een groot meer biedt kansen voor alles wat in de zee niet kan, in de bossen kun je tot jezelf komen en is er ruimte voor bezinning. In deze rustzone krijgt de Boavista een nieuw verloop waarbij hij langs de mooiste plekken van het park slingert. Van ongekende hoogten met waanzinnige vergezichten over het meer en de zee tot tunnels die onder de groene wereld van het bos doorgaan. De oude route van de Boavista vergaat met de tijd en wordt door het park opgenomen in de rustwereld. Het asfalt verouder t en de natuur gaat het beeld domineren. Van een drukke snelweg verandert deze oude route in een imposante groene as waar gewandeld en gespeeld kan worden. Als cadenza (laatste uitspatting van de solist) van deze reprise kijkt de generaal vanuit de zee terug op de imposante as die hij lang geleden heeft bedacht.

UAA ranglijst: versnellen ++

vertragen --

businesskern snelweg Serralves hotelkern Rotunda centrum park

ontwerpingrepen in de Boavista

Parque do Sossego

zoek

conceptkaart werking energievelden Boavista met bijbehorende ranglijst

Reprise

plankaart Parque do Sossego met concept profielen

146 LAAG 1 Parque do

LAAG 2 Hoogtelijnen

1. REPRISE! het maken van het slotstuk

2. sossego binnen de desassossego

3. tram: parels rijgen en leven op straat

4. noord-zuid verbindingen

opgave: het maken van een slotstuk, de missi

Transforming

Streetworks: Projects

Eglé Suminskaité Amsterdam – Wibautstraat Tutor: Erik Workel

Location in the city

Impresion of Wibaustraat

Impression of loc

Big scale of Wibaustraat Big ( plan/ scale elevation) of Wibaustraat ( plan/ elevation)

Big scale of Wibaustraat Big scale (ofplan/ Big Wibaustraat elevation) scale of Wibaustraat ( plan/ Bigelevation) scale (ofplan/ Wibaustraat elevation) ( plan/ elevation Big scale of Wibaustraat ( plan/ Big elevation) scale of Wibaustraat ( plan/ elevation)

Impression of location

mpression of location Impression of location

pression of location

Big scale of Wibaustraat ( plan/ eleva

straat ( plan/ elevation)

Existing situation Existing situation Existing situation Existing Existing situation situation Existing situation Existing situation et (ofplan/ Wibaustraat elevation) ( plan/ elevation) Existing situation

Posibilities Posibilities Posibilities

Posibilities

Posibilities Posibilities Posibilities

Concept scheme Concept scheme Concept scheme scheme Concept schemeConcept Concept scheme Concept scheme Concept scheme

Posibilities

( plan/ elevation)

am — Wibaustraat Amsterdam — Wibaustraat nskaité Eglé Suminskaité k Workel Tutor: Erik Workel 3b Project P3b

Concept scheme Concept scheme Concept scheme Concept scheme WEST ELEVATION (SC 1:200)

Existing situation

Concept sch

Posibilities

0 FLOOR PLAN (PARKING) 45 PARKING PLACES

3 FLOOR PLAN ( 7; 12

4 FLOOR PLAN ( 8; 11)

5 FLOOR PLAN ( 9; 1)

6 FLOOR PLAN ( 10; 2)

147

Transforming

Streetworks: Projects

Peer Peters Amsterdam â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Gooiseweg: Bijlmer Canal Tutors: Gianni Cito and Mark Eker

Amsterdam, Gooiseweg Peer Peters Tutors: Gianni Cito and Mark Eker Project P5

148

Bijlmer Canal

Transforming

Streetworks: Projects

Joram van Otterloo Porto – Avenida da Boavista: Boavistas Tutors: Marijn Schenk and Bas Liesker

6&7

2 4

LIGGING VAN DE BOAVISTA’S

BOAVISTA’S

Joram van Otterloo, P5 Porto, Bas Liesker & Marijn Schenk

5 6&7

BOAVISTA’S

Porto — Avenida da Boavista Joram van Otterloo Tutors: Marijn Schenk and Bas Liesker Project P5 Joram van Otterloo, P5 Porto, Bas Liesker & Marijn Schenk

Boavistas

Porto — Avenida da Boavista Joram van Otterloo Tutors: Marijn Schenk and Bas Liesker Project P5

Boavistas

DE ‘BOA’VISTA’S!

149

Transforming

Streetworks: Projects

Joram van Otterloo Porto – Avenida da Boavista: Boavistas Tutors: Marijn Schenk and Bas Liesker

2 3

6&7

LIGGING VAN DE BOAVISTA’S

BOAVISTA’S

Joram van Otterloo, P5 Porto, Bas Liesker & Marijn Schenk

Porto — Avenida da Boavista Joram van Otterloo Tutors: Marijn Schenk and Bas Liesker Project P5

150

Boavistas

Transforming JESSE ZWEERS

- P5

3de verdieping educatie

Streetworks: Projects

A4 1:400

4de verdieping

productie

EMERGED IDENTITY

Jesse Zweers Helsinki – Unioninkatu: Emerging Identity Tutors: Nanne de Ru and Sander Lap The new Design Forum is a place where young creative talent can develop and work on developing a stronger image of Helsinki‘s identity. The row of university buildings acquires a new main building. This completes the row as a counterpoint to the monumental main building. It gives a new appearance from the busy route into the city and makes a new and clear entrance for the university campus. The new volume is like a Finnish injection into the monumental buildings from the Russian period that have dominated up to now. 4

2de verdieping educatie

root raam dat tige straat met ie het gebouw grote expositie om binnen te naf alle kanten

A4 1:400

3de verdieping

educatie

begane grond cultivering

n van de hoofd e is en de gevel esign identiteit

gevel aanzicht

rtzetten in het

JESSE ZWEERS

n zijn op elke rale omgeving e werkruimten. functie op die ute is van hout. r de route en is

- P5

EMERGED IDENTITY

1ste verdieping cultivering A4 1:400

2de verdieping

educatie

on van de kern on en hebben en doorlopend

dig opgebouw geperforeerde uus. De platen van de gevel tstraling heeft, taat een moire

21 17

18 17

1 2 3 4

langsdoorsnede

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

stilte ruimten auditorium lezingzaal klaslokaal workshops werkplekken lounge

gevel aanzicht

atelier kantoor vergaderzaal groot vergaderzaal klein opslag

SCHAAL 1:250

0 10

-1 verdieping kelder

DRS

100

GEV

A4 1:400

1ste verdieping

cultivering

expo 1 14 expo 2 OPEN VOUWEN 15 filmzaal archief Het programma is verdeeld in drie lagen. De lagen zijn zo opgebouwd16dat elke doelgroep zijn specifieke relatie heeft met het aanliggende programma. Het entree 17opgallery de begane grond 18 informatieloket 13

heeft de centrale rol bij binnenkomst. Ook voor de voorbij lopende mensen op de straat. De educatie heef een relatie met het aansluitende universiteit gebouw en 19 totentree de straat van het restaurant universiteit campus. Ook is er een verbinding met het universiteit gebouw20zodat de studenten 21 garderobe een overdekte verbinding hebben. De productie laag is de bovenste laag en die moet altijd 22 bar door de educatie laag voor ze werk kunnen exposeren.

ontmoeting

De vloeren van de verschillende lagen vouwen naar elkaar toe open. Hier ontstaat de ontmoeting tussen de doelgroepen en vind er interactie plaats. De opengevouwen vloeren zijn vormgegeven als groten trappen die ook extra groten treden hebben om op te zitten. De vloeren zijn zo gevouwen dat het uitzicht vanaf de trap past SCHAAL bij de plaats in de context. 1:400 De trappen vormen de plafonds van de dichte volume vastgesteld in de programma analyse. 0 10 25 50 100 Elke dichte functie heeft weer een relatie tot de twee vloeren die hij doorkruist. Zo vinden de ontmoetingen op en in het dichte volume plaats.

productie

educatie cultivering

Waar de vloeren vouwen opent de gevel zich. Dit zijn de bijzondere momenten die de gevel vormt. Over het algemeen is het een gesloten gevel met een perforatie, maar waar de gevel open vouwt ontstaan er ramen. De gevel vouwt zich zo open dat het vanuit de tijdlijn langsdoorsnede geleidelijk opener wordt naar de toekomst toe. De gevel is helemaal open op de kop richting het park. Hier is maximale vertoon van binnen naar buiten en andersom.

programma kelder

cultivering

binnengevel + kern

vloeren

A4 1:400

route

SCHAAL 1:250

0 10

BELEVINGSROUTE Hoe dieper de bezoeker het gebouw binnen treedt hoe meer ze komen te weten van het ontstaan van de design identiteit. Als bezoeker wordt je meegenomen in een draaikolk omhoog langs de verdiepingen. Bij elke verdieping word het besef van identiteit groter tot VOUWEN OPEN helemaal boven waar ze kunnen bezichtingen hoe het gemaakt wordt. De route voert over Het programma is verdeeld in drie lagen. De lagen zijn zo opgebouwd dat elke doelgroep de grote trappen waar mensen hun verdieping gebruiken. Het is geen dwingende route, en zijn specifieke relatie heeft met het aanliggende programma. Het entree op de begane grond des te nieuwschieriger je bent des te verder je zult gaan. Wel vind de eerste kennisneming al heeft de centrale rol bij binnenkomst. Ook voor de voorbij lopende mensen op de straat. De plaats vanaf de straat. educatie heef een relatie met het aansluitende universiteit gebouw en tot de straat van het dichte volumen circulatie universiteit campus. Ook is er een verbinding met het universiteit gebouw zodat de studenten een overdekte verbinding hebben. De productie laag is de bovenste laag en die moet altijd door de educatie laag voor ze werk kunnen exposeren.

Hoofd gebouw facultiteit; literatuur theater film en televisie

Universiteit bibliotheek

facultiteit; kunst

DESIGN FORUM

HELSINKI

buitengevel

facultiteit; cultureel onderzoek geschiedenis talen filosofie

De vloeren van de verschillende lagen vouwen naar elkaar toe open. Hier ontstaat de ontmoeting tussen de doelgroepen en vind er interactie plaats. De opengevouwen vloeren zijn vormgegeven als groten trappen die ook extra groten treden hebben om op te zitten. De vloeren zijn zo gevouwen dat het uitzicht vanaf de trap past bij de plaats in de context. De trappen vormen de plafonds van de dichte volume vastgesteld in de programma analyse. Elke dichte functie heeft weer een relatie tot de twee vloeren die hij doorkruist. Zo vinden de ontmoetingen op en in het dichte volume plaats.

productie

educatie cultivering

programma

Waar de vloeren vouwen opent de gevel zich. Dit zijn de bijzondere momenten die de gevel vormt. Over het algemeen is het een gesloten gevel met een perforatie, maar waar de gevel open vouwt ontstaan er ramen. De gevel vouwt zich zo open dat het vanuit de tijdlijn geleidelijk opener wordt naar de toekomst toe. De gevel is helemaal open op de kop richting het park. Hier is maximale vertoon van binnen naar buiten en andersom.

ontmoeting

vloeren

route

STEDENBOUWKINDIG

identiteit

verbinding

it tite en id

lijk

ke ng a eg to tie la cu cir id he en

6310 m2 totaal

180 m2 180 m2 200 m2 sanitair techniek stalling service

150 m2 250 m2 50 m2 150 m2 entree restaurant garderobe bar algemeen

m2 m2 m2 m2 m2 m2 200 400 200 150 800 100 expo 1 expo 2 filmzaal archief gallery informatieloket cultivering

600 m2 500 m2 300 m2 100 m2 150 m2 atelier kantoor vergader groot vergader klein opslag productie

m2 m2 m2 m2 m2 m2 m2 150 200 150 400 400 200 150 stilte ruimten auditorium lezingzaal klaslokaal workshops werkplekken lounge

op educatie

PROGRAMMA

Het uitgebreide programma is een mix van; leren, produceren en vertonen. Juist de combinatie van deze verschillende catogorieën maakt samen een sterk compleet geheel. De verschillende catogorieën versterken elkaar en vullen elkaar aan. Ook maakt de combinatie het tot een actief gebouw en een levende sfeer in het straatbeeld. Het gebouw is zo ontworpen dat het speelt met de programatische behoefte van open en dicht. Elke categorie heeft zijn specifieke relatie met de context maar ook een eigen relatie met het aansluitend programma in het gebouw.

DESIGN FORUM

Ik ontwerp een design forum. Het is een plek waar jong creatief talent zich kan ontwikkelen en bouwen aan een sterker beeld van de identiteit van Helsinki. Zo helpt het afstuderend talent van Helsinki mee aan het versterken van de identiteit van Helsinki. Het is ook een plek waar jong afgestudeerde zich kunnen vestigen en hun bijdragen kunnen leveren. Door hun krachten te bundelen en samen een gemeenschap te vormen, is het de broedplaats voor jonge creatieve entrepreneurs. Een interactieve plek waar studenten en beginnende entrepreneurs van elkaar kunnen leren. Ook is het een plaats om elkaar te ontmoeten en je werk te vertonen. Om informatie uit te wisselen en ideeen en je kennis over te dragen. Het transformeren van de Finse identiteit tot een waarneembare identiteit.

OPGAVE

Het mee transformeren van de identiteit van Helskinki. Helsinki is uit gegroeid tot een metropool maar vanuit karakter zijn ze terughoudend. De ontwerp opgave die ik stel is het zichtbaar maken van Finse identiteit aan de straat. Finland behoord tot de top 3 van het beste onderwijs binnen de EU, maar aan het straatbeeld is dat talent niet zichtbaar. Dus versterken van de Finse design identiteit. Het besloten karakter van de straat doorbreken. Niet radicaal maar evaluerend naar een opener straat beeld toe gaan. Ik wil met mijn ontwerp Helsinki het gebaar aanreiken meer van zichzelf te laten zien en de straat een actieve rol te geven in het gebouw.

Onze straat is bepaald en gebouwd door deze bezetters. De Finnen hebben een houding aangemeten gekregen. Meteen herkenbaar in de straat is het monumentaal plein en de omliggende belangrijk gemaakte monumentalen gebouw. Dit is gebouwd rond 1830 in opdracht van de Russische Tsaar. Voor mijn gevoel geen duidelijk gebaar van Finse identiteit. Aan de ander kant van de brug verandert het straatbeeld. Daar is na 1902 moderner gebouwd, hier zien we ook het Finse karakter ontstaan. Maar vooralsnog is de bebouwing langs de straat erg gesloten, en het is vaak erg onduidelijk wat er achter de gevel gebeurt.

dicht

bespreken

bezoeken

vertonen

overleggen

exposeren

lesgeven

les krijgen

lesgeven

ontmoeting

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HELSINKI

evalueren

cultiveren

discusseren

produceren

lesgeven Design Forum

studeren

DESIGN FORUM

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bezoeken

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dichte volumen

Fotografie

Grafisch

Film

World Design Capital

Fashion

Finland behoort tot de top 3 van het beste onderwijs binnen de EU

Kunst

lidmaatschap tot de EU

2009/12

Architectuur

Helsinki snelst groeiende metropool van de Europese Unie

2000

Finland volledig onafhankelijk, eigen natie daarvoor al bezet geweest door andere landen

1995

Uitgeroepen tot hoofdstad door Russische Tsaar

1917

1990

De onduidelijke identiteit van Helsinki heeft veel te maken met de geschiedenis. Zo zijn de Finnen sterk beinvloed door hun voorgaande bezetters waar ze zich vandaag de dag nog door laten leiden. Opvallend is dat in percentage (93%) Helsinki grotendeels wordt bezet door geboren en getogen Finnen, maar toch voeren ze twee talen en is alles tweetalig ondertiteld. Daarbij zijn de Finnen introvert van karakter en kent het klimaat ‘donkere dagen’.

FASCINATIE

1802 Z

Door het maken van de analyse ben ik erg gefascineert geraakt door de geschiedenis. Finland heeft een beladen geschiedenis waarbij het land meerdere malen in bezit is geweest van haar buurlanden. Dit is duidelijk terug te zien in Helsinki en onze straat. Relatief kort geleden heeft Helsinki een transformatie ondergaan. Vanaf de Olympische Spelen uit 1952 is het onafhankelijke Helsinki in een enorm hoog tempo gegroeid. Een ‘jong’ land in de startblokken om zichzelf te ontwikkelen.

Fins...

1830

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Duits

EMERGED IDENTITY - P5 JESSE ZWEERS

1812

1876

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Finland/ Helsinki heeft een jonge identiteit:

1852

Hoe dieper de bezoeker het gebouw binnen treedt hoe meer ze komen te weten van het ontstaan van de design identiteit. Als bezoeker wordt je meegenomen in een draaikolk omhoog langs de verdiepingen. Bij elke verdieping word het besef van identiteit groter tot helemaal boven waar ze kunnen bezichtingen hoe het gemaakt wordt. De route voert over de grote trappen waar mensen hun verdieping gebruiken. Het is geen dwingende route, en des te nieuwschieriger je bent des te verder je zult gaan. Wel vind de eerste kennisneming al plaats vanaf de straat.

De stedenbouwkundige ingreep bestaat uit het programmatisch afmaken van de rij universitaire gebouwen en het bouwblok een kop gebouw geven. Een nieuw kop gebouw dat als tegenhanger van het monumentale hoofd gebouw de rij compleet maakt. Behalve een nieuw aanzicht geven vanaf de drukke route stad inwaards, maakt het kop gebouw ook een nieuw en duidelijk entree voor de universiteitcampus. Het nieuwe volume is als een Finse injectie in de tot nu toe gedomineerde monumentale bebouwing uit de Russische periode.

BELEVINGSROUTE

151

Streetworks: Projects

Avoiding Is it possible to have no connection with the surroundings? Of course not. Even aloofness is a type of relation. Nothing in the city is independent of its surroundings. Everything is connected to the rest; nothing is excluded. You can, of course, create the impression you want to remain aloof, excluded from the rest. The Acropolis does something like that. It is there, but withdraws from the ensemble, or suggests this at lest. The Nieuwe Kerk does it, as does the Nederlandse Bank on Frederiksplein. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m there all right, but donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really belong with the others: self-assured, or perhaps headstrong. The design brims with confidence and seems not to need the surroundings. The best designs exploit this distance to stage the approach; the gaze is channelled to where it should go.

152

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Bart Kellerhuis Helsinki â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Unioninkatu: Sauna on Unioninkatu Tutors: Nanne de Ru and Sander Lap Owing to its northern latitude, Helsinki has extremely long and short days. On the longest day, there is 22 hours of daylight; on the shortest day there are just four hours. Long shadows are cast across the street. The dark silhouettes move slowly across the city. A big variety of different shadows and reflections are apparent on Unioninkatu. In terms of the shadows created, this is one of the sensory places on Unioninkatu. It has a bad reputation, however. Unioninkatu has therefore turned its back on the park. Floor plan of sauna complex; a sensory experience; breaks through the hard shadows and the big squares of Unioninkatu.

Sauna on the Unioninkatu Owing to its northern latitude, Helsinki has Sauna on the Unioninkatu extremely long and short days. On the longest

diďŹ&#x20AC;erent shadows and reflections are apparent on the Unioninkatu. In terms of the shadows

Floor plan of sauna complex . . . a sensory experience . . . breaks through the hard shadows

153

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Donna van Milligen Bielke Helsinki â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Unioninkatu: Escapism in Helsinki Tutors: Nanne de Ru and Sander Lap ÂThis is a manifesto against the growing pressure where the Fins, with their typical character, genetic definition and the climatological conditions in which they live and from which they suffer. As a result, the individual Finnish happiness and the psychological state of Finland are undermined and suffer from the ghastliest forms of escapism. A network of spaces, such as an underground escapist world that is in stark contrast with the world above, could provide a responsible alternative for the macabre excuses that the Fins now resort to owing to a lack of personal expression, quiet and stability. Although invisible, life above ground will become a good deal more comfortable among all the stress and bustle. Save the Finns! Give them underground escapism!

154

Escapism in Helsinki This is a manifesto against the growing pressure

and the psychological state of Finland are

Avoiding

Streetworks: Projects

155 that the Fins now resort to owing to a lack of

Streetworks: Projects

Dissolving The street determines the appearance of the surroundings, puts buildings in their place and makes the city legible. But the reverse is also true. The lack of a street creates confusion and distance. Just think of a labyrinth, Mediterranean souks, or our familiar â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;cauliflowerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; neighbourhoods. The surroundings become less accessible, less clear and therefore more of a collective. Nobody but the insider knows the way and feels at home. A designer can purposefully participate. Removing streets suddenly makes buildings unfindable. Emphasising differences breaks structures and severs connections.

156

Dissolving

Streetworks: Projects

Freek Waltmann Helsinki â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Unioninkatu: Hotel Unioninkatu Tutors: Nanne de Ru and Sander Lap Helsinki is a city of contrasts. This is perceptible in its urban structure and architecture. The map of Unioninkatu shows the proportion between the small grain and the big grain. The large public spaces, such as the harbour front and the northern esplanade, are filled with the small grain. Sometimes they are temporary in character (market booth). As a result, public spaces are given various programme elements and different routes pass through the urban space. This is less true for the botanical garden and the Senate Square, and these spaces are therefore less used. The small grain guarantees dynamics, human scale and variation in the public space of Helsinki. Small hotel units are distributed over Unioninkatu, taking advantage of the landscape to create different atmospheres.

157

Dissolving

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URBAN EXHIBITON de mooie historische gebouwen van het universiteitsterrein worden in het open veld gezet, zodat de kwaliteit weer zichtbaar wordt

HIDDEN CITY openbaar maken van de verborgen hoven en passages zodat een aantrekkelijk winkelgebied ontstaat

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Daily Life Doesn’t Match the Metropolitan Grid

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de straat wordt gefragmenteerd gebruikt, als onderdeel van het netwerk

PUBLIC SEQUENCES een serie van publieke gebouwen ondersteunt de recreatieve routes om tegengas te geven aan het drukke verkeer

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i — Unioninkatu van Wijk Nanne de Ru and Sander Lap P5

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REPRESENTIVE GRID toevoegen van woonwerk-woningen in het dichte grid zodat een leefbaar werkgebied ontstaat

typologies, which Helsinki is not rich in.

4.5

de straat toont ‘zwakke’ plekken die wijzen op een ander gebruik van het grid

8.0

Daily Life Doesn’t Match the Metropolitan Grid The city of Helsinki has to meet high targets in terms of housing construction: 4500 dwellings each year. Most of these are built in the suburbs. But it offers an opportunity to increase density in the existing city, the Unioninkatu, saving nature areas in the process. The programme, the 4500 dwellings, is deployed to strengthen the identity of the different areas. At the same time, this offers a way to develop a number of different housing

variabel LIVING CHESS woongebied waarvan de binnenterreinen van de bouwblokken openbaar toegankelijk worden gemaakt door kleine volumes toe te voegen die gebruik maken van het bestaande hoogteverschil

The Unioninkatu is used fragmentarily, as part of the network. The street consists of five areas, each of which has a different function and is used in a different way. These differences are revealed in the public space. The Unioninkatu is legible as independent areas with crossing sight lines as the only common denominator.

The Unioninkatu is not designed an one street but emphasises the differences. The various identities are made visible. As a result you do not read the street as an axis between the observatory and the Kallio Church, but as areas in their own right.

Sanneke van Wijk Helsinki – Unioninkatu: Daily Life Doesn‘t Match the Metropolitan Grid Tutors: Nanne de Ru and Sander Lap The city of Helsinki has to meet high targets in terms of housing construction: 4,500 dwellings each year. Most of these are built in the suburbs. But it offers an opportunity to increase density in the existing city, Unioninkatu, saving nature areas in the process. The programme of 4,500 dwellings is designed to strengthen the identity of the different areas. At the same time, this offers a way to develop a number of different housing typologies, which Helsinki is not rich in. Unioninkatu is used fragmentarily, as part of the network. The street consists of five areas, each of which has a different function and is used in a different way. These differences are revealed in the public space. Unioninkatu consists of independent areas where crossing sight lines are the only common denominator. Unioninkatu is not designed as one street but emphasizes its differences. The various identities are made visible. As a result you do not read the street as an axis between the observatory and the Kallio Church, but as areas in their own right.

Dissolving

�� Streetworks: Projects

Jim de Valk Brussels – Bergensesteenweg / Chaussée de Mons: Blok Biestebroeck Brussels Tutors: Pieter Jannink and Aglaee Degros�� Brussels is a city that will transform from an industrial into a trading city over the coming decades. The Chausse de Mons is lined by building blocks containing small dwellings and gigantic factory structures. The Biestebroek block is a project in which industry within the block transforms into another function with a new public quality.

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Amsterdam Academy of Architecture Master of Architecture – Urbanism – Landscape Architecture Architects, urban designers and landscape architects learn the profession at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture through an intensive combination of work and study. They work in small, partly interdisciplinary groups and are supervised by a select group of practising fellow professionals. There is a wide range of options within the programme so that students can put together their own trajectory and specialisation. With the inclusion of the course in Urbanism in 1957 and Landscape Architecture in 1972, the academy is the only architecture school in the Netherlands to bring together the three spatial design disciplines. Some 350 guest tutors are involved in teaching every year. Each of them is a practising designer or a specific expert in his or her particular subject. The three heads of department also have design practices of their own in addition to their work for the Academy. This structure yields an enormous dynamism and energy and ensures that the courses remain closely linked to the current state of the discipline. The courses consist of projects, exercises and lectures. First-year and second-year students also engage in morphological studies. Students work on their own or in small groups. The design projects form the backbone of the curriculum. On the basis of a specific design assignment, students develop knowledge, insight and skills. The exercises are focused on training in those skills that are essential for recognising and solving design problems, such as analytical techniques, knowledge of the repertoire, the use of materials, text analysis, and writing. Many of the exercises are linked to the design projects. The morphological studies concentrate on the making of spatial objects, with the emphasis on creative process and implementation. Students experiment with materials and media forms and gain experience in converting an idea into a creation. During the periods between the terms there are workshops, study trips in the Netherlands and abroad, and other activities. This is also the preferred moment for international exchange projects. The academy regularly invites foreign students for the workshops and recruits well-known designers from the Netherlands and further afield as tutors. Graduates from the Academy of Architecture are entitled to the following titles: Master of Architecture (MArch), Master of Urbanism (MUrb), or Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA). The Master’s diploma gives direct access to the Register of Architects (Stichting Bureau Architectenregister, SBA) in The Hague. The Academy of Architecture is part of the Amsterdam School of the Arts (AHK), as are the Theatre School, the Amsterdam School for Music, the Netherlands Film and Television Academy, the Academy for Art Education, and the Reinwardt Academy. The AHK, which was founded in 1987, offers a full range of bachelor’s and master’s courses in the field of music, dance, theatre, film and television, architecture, fine art and cultural heritage. The link with arts education underlines the particular importance that the Academy of Architecture attaches to the artistic aspect in the professional practice of architects, urban designers and landscape architects. 160

Colophon Amsterdam Academy of Architecture Waterlooplein 213 1011 PG Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 (0)20 531 8218 info@bwk.ahk.nl www.academyofarchitecture.nl Editorial Board Aart Oxenaar Rogier van den Berg Machiel Spaan Klaas de Jong Editor-In-Chief Klaas de Jong Translation Billy Nolan Peter Mason Copy Editing Mark Speer Photography and illustrations Rogier van den Berg cover, pp. 90-97 Donna Bjelke p. 126 Jelte Boeijenga pp. 122-123 Gemeentearchief Rotterdam pp. 79, 81-82 Rein Geurtsen p. 55 Google Earth pp. 118-119 Maurits de Hoog p. 61 Studio Hartzema pp. 21, 26, 31, 32, 120-121 Joram van Otterloo p. 127 Frits Palmboom p. 62 Pieter van Roermund p. 125 Ton Schaap (photography) pp. 100, 102-105, 107-113 Victor Spijkers p. 128 Stephan Sliepenbeek (profiles) pp. 100, 102-105, 107-113 Fione Teunis p. 29 Jimmy de Valk p. 124 Zandbelt&vandenBerg p. 117 Thanks to Nik Berkouwer Jelte Boeijenga Jaap Brouwer Brecht Goeman Graphic Design Studio Sander Boon Amsterdam Printing Pantheon drukkers Velsen-Noord Binding Van Waarden Zaandam ÂŠ 2010 Amsterdam Academy of Architecture Architectura & Natura Publishers www.architectura.nl ISBN 9789461400048