IJburg

Back in the early ‘90’s, planners in Amsterdam settled on an approach for urban growth and expansion that called for building a network of artificial islands at the mouth of the IJ. The development would be called IJburg. Planners decided to create a series of five islands designed to accommodate a mixture of residential and commercial activity, with 18,000 housing units and a projected population of 45,000 people. I visited the largest island, called Haveneiland, depicted in the 2004 aerial photo below. Progress has been rapid, and it’s now almost entirely filled in.  The vast majority of projects I photographed now occupy the area seen as sand in the aerial image below. (link)

                                                                       
Despite its distance from Amsterdam’s city center, IJburg is easily accessed by a tramline that runs down the central corridor of the islands, a street called IJburglaan. The islands are connected by a series of interesting and unusual pedestrian and traffic-carrying bridges. On Haveneiland, much of the street network is paved with dry-lain granite and brick pavers.  The island has a cleverly integrated canal system, both part of the drainage system and also a design amenity that provides small-scale recreational access for kayakers and small boats. Almost every residential block includes integrated underground parking spaces, or covered parking in interior courtyards for residents. A walk around treats you to an entire catalogue of innovative approaches to urban parking: green-roof parking by a canal, a drive-through interior courtyard for cars, lower level parking with natural lighting and trees, and even a car elevator. The level of infrastructure investment here is really quite astounding. As an additional public amenity, the project has a couple of beaches and a waterside pedestrian walk that stretches the length of the island.

The planners and designers worked actively to incorporate both a diversity of income levels and housing types within the community.  Broadly speaking, they have followed a principle of 30% social housing (a Dutch term for low-income and publicly supported housing), 40% middle-income market rate, and 30% high-income housing.

The planners chose to organize the project with an orthogonal grid, in which every block is 70 to 90 by 175 meters with wide streets and sidewalks. It’s one of the few places in the Netherlands where you can look up or down a residential street and see street wall recede into the distance: a familiar site in Chicago or New York or Baltimore, but here quite unusual.  Civic space on IJburg is also organized with a more traditional balance between semi-private inner-block courtyards, street hardscape, and a few entirely public urban squares organized within the grid pattern. The largest of the parks is Theo van Gogh Park, named after the Amsterdam filmmaker murdered in 2004 by an Islamic fundamentalist.  A street wall of some of the taller residential projects surrounds the park.  By occupying several square blocks within the meter of the street grid, it has the feel of a mini-Central Park.

There seems to have been a script for materials standards: every building is at least partially, if not wholly, done in brick, perhaps a nod to traditionalism in the New Urbanist sense. There are also no high-rise residential buildings; a few small towers are 8 or 9 stories, but the average height is four or five. Within this limited material and typological palette, the planners create visual and social diversity by assigning a mix of designers and unit types for each block. Block 24 at Haveneiland, featured in an article in “Nieuwe Open Ruimte in het Woonensemble” a 2009 publication by the TU Delft housing program (a source for much of my information about IJburg), incorporates the work of three architecture firms in building a retirement home, single family housing, and a multi-unit project with social and market-rate housing.

In walking around, I saw visual diversity but functional sameness. It's a feast for the architect's eyes, but also a pretty quiet place. I wonder if the city plan leaves enough room for the inadvertent and unanticipated.  Perhaps there could have been more space in the framework for organic self-determination and multi-generational time as design tools. Planners can’t always anticipate what a community might need but they can plan for flexibility and change. I'd like to have seen more of a ‘planning for the unanticipated’ logic. The approach is common sense on a regional scale, but I’d like to see it deployed at a single block level, with gaps and smaller, more human-scaled parcels allocated horizontally or even vertically amongst the larger ones, adding to functional complexity over time as diverse and disparate owners and users invented ways to occupy the niche spaces. Call it planning for infill.

I couldn’t help but feel that the commendable effort to create visual diversity in form (and thus suggest social plurality) is partly undermined by an opposite reality: the underlying patterns of real property ownership are monolithic. No two blocks are the same and the quality of architecture is very high, but as you walk down a one kilometer stretch with each big residential project making it's exposition in a slightly  different shade of brick, you get the sense that architects have assumed the role of public-relations managers, softening and humanizing ‘image’ for the select few non-profits and businesses that own, control, and develop space. The 'annexation of the mosaic' by large interests occurs as cities evolve I guess, but it's too bad when they start out this way.  On Haveneiland, the individual's participation in form-making (except as a consumer thereof) is largely absent.

The modernist urban planning experiments and residential high-rises of the 1960's were forthright and express about their posture toward residents: today the conceptual diagrams of ownership and influence are more discrete. Depending on who you talk to, the aesthetic impact of this change could be postive, negative, or ethically neutral. My real concern is that the housing blocks of projects like Ijburg, are, like their modernist ancestors,  contractually ‘fixed’ in time and space on a scale more amenable to institutional management than to residential quality of life. When they wear out, they'll be replaced by similar projects or torn down within the same institutional framework: there won't be many surprises. This of itself is not all that sinister, but when I encounter twenty blocks of it all at once, it does run up against my idea of what a productive city should be - no matter how good the architecture is. 

The cities I like best are those that have room for surprise, that embody scalar incongruencies of large interests and small side-by-side... real contrasts of intentionality...ground for unexpected conveniences...a few landmark buildings lavished with care beyond necessity...other buildings that are minimal, anonymous, and open to future possibilities... unplanned redundancies...functional complexities...collisions, confrontations, and synergies in adjacent types of use and aspect... a successful city as both part evidence and part cause of its visual, cultural, and commercial diversity. IJburg does not embody this...at least not yet. My critique is partly unfair: these are qualities that can’t be furnished ready for occupancy or emerge from a single plan, and they might be a luxury. Still, they can be encouraged in the way cities and economies promote ownership interests and partition space at the outset. Time will tell if the IJburg plan is flexible enough to do the job. 

The Kraanspoor, Amsterdam

The Kraanspoor is an office building designed by the architecture and interiors firm Ontwerpgroep Trude Hooykaas. It is located on the river IJ across from the heart of historic Amsterdam in a former industrial complex called NDSM pier. The site was vacated by the bankrupt Netherlands Dock and Shipbuilding Company in the early 1980s and was largely vacant for twenty years. The last ten years have seen the adaptive reuse of the site’s massive factory buildings, cranes, and open areas as a mix of residential, office, recreational, and cultural space.  The weather was typically Dutch the evening I visited.

The project is named the Kraanspoor (crane track in Dutch) for its site: the top of a crane track built in the 1950’s for unloading cargo ships. It is 270 meters long (almost 900 feet),  13.5 meters high and 8.7 meters wide and stands in the water just off the edge of a pier. Trude Hooykaas’ idea was to re-use the platform as a base for a long, sleek, and lightweight elevated office building. In  2007, the project was completed with financing by ING Real Estate.

The location and the use of the crane track make it an extraordinary project – visually dramatic both by day and particularly by night, when the glass facade is illuminated.  It makes a strong contribution to the Amsterdam waterfront, skillfully building upon the industrial heritage of the area with an adaptive re-use that’s entirely forward-looking, both in both visuals and technical substance. The louvered double glazing system and a heating and cooling system that uses the water of the IJ for heat exchange are among its more progressive design features. It has a complex posture toward the environment, all at once projecting high-tech minimalism, environmental consciousness, a respect for historic context, and a crazy neo-archigram aesthetic (it’s a long skinny organism on legs that drinks up river water to heat and cool itself).

Take a look at the links below for a more detailed project description with exterior and interior photos:

http://www.archined.nl/oem/reportages/kraanspoor/Kraanspoor_eng.html

A site plan and some great pictures showing site pre-conditions can be found here: (scroll down to view) http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=539382&page=7

 

 The history of how the project came about is also noteworthy. The built portfolio of OTH, lead by architect Trude Hooykaas, consists primarily of installations and interiors work. The Kraanspoor project happened not because Hooykaas was the Dutch real estate industry’s go-to architect for long skinny office buildings on crane tracks; it happened because the project was her idea.  She initially pitched the plan to the local municipality in 1997 and after a lot of feasibility study and negotiation, the building was realized by private developers who chose to participate in her admittedly good the idea. The process took ten years, but produced an extraordinary result. 

Kraanspoor’s project narrative is not an exception in the Netherlands – recent architectural successes at the IJburg and Javaeiland developments are also attributable to an architect’s early and important role as instigator of a project. In the Netherlands, parties in government and finance demonstrate a robust appreciation for the idea that good design can yield economic returns over the longer term, and often get architects involved a lot sooner.

While the established model of client as instigator and architect as service provider will always be far more prevalent, the Kraanspoor project is an encouraging reminder that if an architect has an exceptional idea of their own, they can get it built. A tangible vision, like the one Trude Hooykaas furnished for the Kraanspoor project, captures the popular imagination and becomes leverage to hold planners and developers accountable to a higher standard for urban space. With perseverance and savvy, the architect’s good idea inverts the norm.

The Grid: LITERALLY

The Expo Haarlemmermeer conventional hall was built in 2002 for the Floriade, a massive horticultural exhibition held every ten years in the Netherlands. At 19,000 panels and nearly 30,000 square meters, it may still hold the record as the largest photovoltaic roof in the world. Whether actually the largest or not, the 2.3 MWp installation is certainly among the most interesting. The building was a turnkey project built by Siemens AG and implements a wide range of their solar power technologies. The design is simple, rational, efficient, adaptable, and without attitude: except maybe the decision to paint the superstructure yellow – a clear take on the ‘electric grid’ - get it? Yeah. A project overview from Siemens can be found here: www.pvresources.com/en/top50pv/floriade.pdf.

Today, the building is used as an expo and convention hall. When I visited, it was the site of a huge French-themed flea market complete with accordion players, cancan girls (a suitable-for-all-ages version) and decidedly non-French concession stands selling herring, oliebollen (Dutch donuts), and vlaamse frites (Flemish fries). The near two hundred vendors sold vases and porcelain figures (mostly not fit for the curio-cabinet), stamped brass ashtrays, clothes, old tools, and broken electronics. I added to the milieu as the crazy man staring in wonder at the ceiling...

The objects of my fascination were the photovoltaic panels twenty-five feet overhead. The key idea here is that the glass and polymer laminate solar panels actually are the building envelope, not simply external attachments or embellishments over a conventional roof structure. The panels are also semi-transparent, admitting 17.5% of available light into the exhibition space, which turns out to be more than enough for good visibility. The space doesn’t feel dark at all. For it’s massive size, it’s a very lightweight structure and the thinness of the supporting columns is very impressive. It was also quite comfortable inside the building compared with the cool Fall weather outside. 

The building has an interesting relationship with the surrounding landscape design. A rolling ground plain comes in under the building canopy, creating an intermediate condition for half the building as a sheltered terrain. People can both walk and drive in and out of the space.  The overlapping and blending of architectonic and topographic conditions demonstrates a Dutch attitude toward ecological context as an equally malleable component of the human-fabricated environment. The lightness of the building’s literal footprint draws a clear parallel to the lightness of its ecological footprint.

One of the clear goals of the project was to limit construction costs to a bare minimum and to develop a system for rapid assembly. For this reason, the project employs an almost “off the shelf” constructional approach using existing greenhouse technology. Large-scale greenhouses have a long tradition in the flower and vegetable growing industry of Holland and so it was natural to adapt the form for this purpose. The project integrates a new level of technological innovation and performativity with existing construction methods and standard materials. The project is groundbreaking yet shows the synergy possible in layering new technologies and design ideas upon existing precedents.

 The decision to place panels in peaked-ridges allowed for the greatest density of collection surface on the roof relative to structural integrity and lightness, but also presented challenges. In short, the output of a directly linked solar assembly is limited by the output of its weakest performer. In the afternoon, most of the power is generated by the panels that face west: if the east and west were linked up in the same circuit, the east facing panels, with less sun exposure, would be a drag on the performance of the west facing panels. Instead, the two halves are fed separately through their own inverters, which convert the direct current generated by the panels into alternating current used by the grid, and then to separate transformers, which ramp up the voltage to grid standards. The result is a system where each sub-component operates at it’s own maximum efficiency throughout the day without draining the other. Building tectonics and the engineering of photovoltaic systems have to be closely coordinated: they interlock and inform each other.

Should this project even be in the Netherlands? It’s routinely cloudy here throughout the year, the high latitude makes for lower intensity light, and the days are quite short in winter. Yes, this is true: certainly a place with more sun would have profited far more from the investment. Not every Dutch building will be a photovoltaic building in the future. Obviously, the photovoltaic industry has not reached grid-parity in energy production costs, and it is clearly more cost effective to use wind power for electricity in the Netherlands. Still, the building is proof of the strong commitment made by the Dutch to explore and implement a huge range of new technologies in design: something we can all profit by.

This kind of meta-structure and the environmental relationship it fosters has wide-ranging potential. Distribution centers, malls, and big-box retail are all conventional ideas that can be redefined. The Wal-mart of the future will be an amazing place. Further afield, the canopy system could define a new type of development – mixed-used urban places for living, light industry, and manufacturing powered by intrinsic energy sources. We could throw this idea at Arizona and southern California. It could be used in extreme desert environments to create performative shading structures: modern-day caravanserai, deployed as nodes of activity on the suburban plains. The possibilities are pretty exciting. As technologies improve, the aspect of the roof can change (perhaps to an ETFE canopy with imbedded thin-film solar), and the program below can be imbued with greater programmatic complexity. Whatever the future holds, at Haarlemmermeer, a precedent is successfully established.