Day 3 – Amsterdam Walking Tour 3-12-2023

If it seems like all I do these days is talk about the weather, it is because I do... Although the rain has stopped and the wind is blowing a bit less, this weather is atypical. It is still rather cloudy, and temperatures are still much below average. Speaking of climate change, weather and society resiliency, carbon labs, harvest maps, and slow mobility make a lot of sense. As you will soon read, here in the Netherlands the students are at the center of it all! The Rotterdam 2023 group is complete now! We all met in Amsterdam this morning and will begin walking northward towards the IJdock, a multiuse complex and island located on the river a short distance from Amsterdam Central Station. The plan is to walk a 14km (8 miles) loop around the IJ River. 

The IJDock complex was designed by Dick Van Gameren in association with Bjarne Mastenbroek in 2011. The island on which it is located accommodates both office and apartment buildings. Specifically, the complex is home to the Palace of Justice by Claus en Kaan Architecten, which operates out of an energy-efficient, state-of-the-art building designed to meet the capacity of future use. The Magistrate Court of Amsterdam operates two out of the five buildings of the complex. The building is multi-functional and complex in design. At the time of its construction, the project faced a tight budget and other strict design conditions. However, a compromise was reached to include a complex of buildings in the Masterplan for the area.

The Baltimore architects of the group started a critique of the program. They argued that a courthouse could not possibly activate a part of town that had long been forgotten. Yet, on the contrary, I argued that the Courthouse was just one of the many buildings creating a multi-functional program on-site. The area offers diverse activities within a complex development designed by Kaan Architecten. The dock 60x180m (200x600ft), accommodates offices, hotels, apartments, a haven dock, a police station, and a courthouse.  Fundamentally, the architects conceived a mass occupying the whole dock, extruded it, and cut through it to gain views toward the IJ.  The overall shape resembles sailing boats hence the connection to the river.  While the hotel is glassy with 300 rooms and is 15 meters (50 feet) wide, the apartments are open on the waterside and closed on the roadside.

It is my opinion that the design team worked cleverly in maximizing occupancy on this thin section of the town, a part of town that needed attention and redevelopment. The Courthouse was a necessary program. It does not draw passers-by on its own. However, the rest of the program does.  The designers were careful not to isolate but to integrate this necessary function into amenities that compensate for an otherwise isolated and monofunctional building.

Walking north along the IJ is Silodam. The building (1995 to 2002) is located in the western part of the Amsterdam harbor where an extensive urban redevelopment in the 90s transformed former silos into housing, offices, workspaces, and both commercial and public spaces. MVRDV Silodam is a 20-meter (65 feet) deep and ten-story-high urban envelope, that used to be one of the biggest flat buildings on this side of the IJ.  The building’s program is apartments that differ in size, layout, and price addressing the housing needs of a vast variety of people desiring to live in Amsterdam. Although old and in need of maintenance, the building still stands strong.  Its rough and rudimentary aesthetic perfectly re-conciliates with its waterfront prime location. It looks like a stack of containers, but its core has fundamentally changed the way we design communities. In a video about Silodam, architect Nathalie de Vries, a founding partner with MVRDV, says the building “has become a cross-section of Amsterdam society, so you’ll find families, older people, people with many different hobbies, attitudes, and lifestyles, and they’re all united in one building.”

Before lunch, we crossed the IJ and arrived at the NDSM (Nederlandsche Dok en Scheepsbouw Maatschappij), a former shipbuilding and repair company (1946-79) area.  Starting in 2013, this area went through an enormous transformation: in the US this development would be called gentrification. A bunch of artists launched the trend of beautification making this area attractive for development. Yet, in the Netherlands, planning involves transformation without displacement. Any new development requires 35-40% of social housing. This helps to retain residents while uplifting parts of the city that would otherwise remain unattractive.

Leaving NDSM, the route took us along some recent developments in the old working, mostly industrial, district of Amsterdam North including Schoonschip, the sustainable houseboat community. This floating neighborhood of 46 households, is ecologically and socially sustainable. For over ten years, the residents have worked hard to design, develop, and realize Schoonschip. The houses are very well insulated. They are heated with heat pumps; tap water is heated by solar water heaters and heat pumps; they generate their electricity with photovoltaic solar panels; all the houses are connected to a smart grid; there are separate streams for the disposal of grey water and black water; all houses have a green roof that covers up at least one-third of the roof surface; residents share electrical cars, cargo bikes, and e-bikes; Sustainable materials and installations were integrated as much as possible into the design and construction. People collaborate to live more sustainably. The community is set up to be an open-source platform: by sharing their living experience, residents intend to inspire other communities to apply the same concept and innovate to inspire ever-greater future realizations.

We finally arrived at the Eye on the IJ. From there we were a step away from the ferry to the Central Station. The day in Amsterdam was coming to an end. The Eye provides a breathtaking view back into the city. From the Eye, the group could look back at the start of our tour and, hopefully, make sense of the loop we had just completed. Today concludes our Amsterdam adventure. From tomorrow on, we will be Rotterdam focused and the students will have the chance to add to their life experience.  They will take a deep dive immersion into the Rotterdamse way embracing the city’s motto “Rotterdam Makes it Happen!”

Day 1 – UNStudio Visit

Day 2 – Black Heritage Tour

Day 4 – Delft-Rotterdam – Back Down Memory Lane

Day 5 – Architecture Evolving

Day 6 – Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen

Day 7 – Office for Metropolitan Architecture

Day 8 – Time to Say Goodbye