036. Imagination / Inagination

Imagination is essentially a rejection of the tyranny of forms,

of anything fixed, a movement towards the heart which by intuition breaks

through the crystallization of life and allows for growth.

(Attributed to Bachelard)

A Flock of Birds, Meester Visserplein, Amsterdam, 2011

035. MVRDV out of the context

"...As it has liberated itself from the necessity of having to be constructed, the discipline is moving from the paradigm of constructing buildings into the paradigm of offering new methodologies for analysis of our built and unbuilt environments..."

034. The Undutchables

The Netherlands is reputed to have the highest average density in the world. Yet nowhere in the country itself is there impression that this really is the case. Certainly not when compared to Hong Kong, New York or Rio de Janeiro. The Netherlands may be well populated generally but not unduly so. Vast areas of it seem to be filling up with a suburban 'matter' of low cost housing-with-gardens, low rent offices, warehouses, factory-style farms, motorcycle scrambling areas and other elements with a lowish density.

The country can steadily be regarded as a city-state, a northern Monaco of sorts, filled with this low-density, lightweight urban matter lacking a clear form of organization, consisting as it does of development that has to be varied all over and perhaps as a result, ends up looking the same. This urbanity is more concerned with quantity than with quality. How then are we to dope with an urban matter that cannot be considered entirely valuable? Accepting this condition as fixed and simply continuing the present trend will cover most of the areas still open and envelop our entire society in a greyness. Is it possible to reconsider this situation by carrying densities to an extreme and rufflling the texture with inserts or polarities?

Is it possible to imagine ultra-dense areas that can soak up program like a sponge and save our pastoral landscapes from being totally suburbanized? Might we go so far as to regard our territories as a confluence of areas with a dense and more permanent, near monumental status and others with a much lighter mode of urbanism? Can we examine the possibilities and impossibilities of these extremes and discover their prospects and limitations?

Strong idea and visual impact, effective numerical performance.
Can this be a solution for suburbanization in Poland, too?

On the photo a new office building in Utrecht-Alendorp Business District

034. Loveless

Too late for repentance,
You have to accept your death sentence.

4 Hero, Loveless

033. Dutch invention no.1

Ice skating as depicted on a 17th century painting entitled Ijsvermaak by Frederick Avercamp (1585-1634)
The Dutch started using skates in 13-14th century mostly for transporting goods. It was in the Middle Ages in Low Lands when blades have been added to the skates. The designed remained essentially unchanged until the present. First being a practical solution for transportation in winter time, the new activity was discovered to have a potential of becoming a sport only when all year long ice skating rinks have been discovered. This happened also in the Netherlands around year 1880 in the city of Amersfoort.

032. Why are you distracting me?

Note: Distraction as a method

031. Quote of the day

Relax. It's just another building. World is full of buildings.
Faiz Zohri

030. Rationality VS Crazyness

They say in the culture of the Netherlands one can find a mixture of rationality and crazyness. How can anyone stand such a strong contradiction within oneself? I have been always obsessed with investigating the factors that shape culture within the natural conditionings. It has not been a fair investigation I must admit, I have been rather concentrated on finding arguments that side my preconceived and imagined assumptions. Why are Dutch a mixture of rationality and crazyness then?

Back in Polish mountains the wind called Halny blows in the end of each winter. Then, from time to time there makes the news an information about increased number of suicides presumably caused by the wind. It's true that some humans are particularly vulnerable to alternating air preasure. When a strong and unexpected wind hits an unstable individual this might indeed cause a problem. Here in the Netherlands I felt creatively excited a couple of times just when it was blowing hard, although I think I was still quite far from committing a suicide.

Dwelling in the Netherlands has always been marked by a harsh relationship between the man and the sea. But it was habitable land that was always in shortages and step by step had to be stolen from the sea. Implementing complicated engineered structures and mechanism has always been a challenge. It required a lot of co-operation in society and personal discipline in an individual. Subordinating wind was crucial for the organization of communities but it still affected many individuals.

Is then the "land" - a mass, a definite structure - responsable for the rationality within the people as opposed to the "sea" or actually the "wind"- fluid or invisible undefined entities - determines the crazyness factor within us? Is this to be translated into the dialectics of form in the architecture? A relationship between a somber straight line and some funky dancing polycurve? What elements define us the most back in Poland?

029. Palermo shooting

028. Buildings as tools

Picture 1: An open-air model of the Zollverein industrial complex. Essen, Germany

Picture 2: Workshop inside the Kokerei building. Essen, Germany





027. Duende

Yesterday I went for a flamenco evening in one restaurant in the city center. There was a vocal, a guitar and a drum. Three people were playing, thirty people were listening, eating and drinking. What I heard was indeed full of energy and passion. Some of the few words the beautiful voice uttered and I managed to fish out were: esperanza de primavera. But they don't have a direct meaning here. Important was that the lady was singing about love, hate, friendship and death, notions present in everyone's life everyday.

I thought this: Flamenco has just the same content as any other folk and ethnic music around the world. The story is just being told in slightly different way, the special way the Flamenco nation sees it.

I felt comforted by the thought how we, the people of the planet Earth, are united by the mundane. I feel comforted time and again when I reflect on housing issues in architecture. A need for shelter is one of the most basic demands for humans and other species. Therefore designing shelters for architects should in fact be a mission full of devotion and compassion. Let's not be borded by the daily routine. Let's realize about the the beauty and importance of the mundane and find at least some amount of comfort there. Let's find our own version of beauty and tell others about it!

026. A sheet of paper found at UNStudio

025. Building as a body, client as a plant - Developing and testing a thesis

Conclusion preview:

Dear client. A scientific methodology has been developed for the design process of your house. We will establish if your place is in the world of animals or plants or somewhere in-between. A series of associations, abstractions and materializations will serve as necessary catalysts in the process. The final design will derive directly from the performed research. Please transfer the first payment to the account number specified in the tender document.

024. Objet trouvé

This is a 1920s house from north of Holland. A functional form is involving imagination. Is this enough or shall we look for less definition and more abstraction? Architectural tasks need a lot of consideration not only on the compositional level but also on the dialectics of every architectural element. How building touches the ground, how building articulates its entrance, what do the windows point at. - let's not take all these things for granted. Nobody will ever care to distinguish architecture from mere building engineering if not us.

Image of the house found on Nai's Flickr photostream

023. On Peter Eisenman and on Towers

Extract from material gathered during the work on the competition for a university campus and a 120-multifunctional tower.

Peter Eisenman during a lecture in Vanderbilt University:

"I have always argued, that one of the ways one can understand culture and where it is through its architecture. For example in Princeton University you can measure the changing climate of relationships and the evolution of Princeton by which buildings were towers. In Princeton the first tower was the Chapel and it stayed that way for 30 or 40 years until after the War. The second tower was the Library, so the shift from the sacred to the secular. As Princeton became more and more secular institution even admitting women. The third tower at Princeton was the Administration building which was another sign of the movement of the times, the application of Administration and Management in our educational processes. The forth tower was Math and Science tower showing the movement toward the sciences at the Liberal Universities."

Now, we are a couple of years later and maybe it would be handy to define the current shift of paradigm. What will be the next good reason to have towers, if any. - reaching out for the divine, striving of human kind for self-assertion, an ambition of a single powerful individual? The most of the program for the competition tower that was developed was concerning the so-called auxiliary program - essentially voids with public spaces. Are then the towers with stacked piazzas the future of the business or is it just a dead end? Will communities ever be able to finance such investments and under which circumstances?

022. Part of the Family

The central role of Rem Koolhaas for building up new generations of architects

021. Dear Ben

What did you do when you were 26?

020. The choice of profession

Leave me alone!

019. Terms of interest...

...are too many!

018. Reconsidering the digital - post in progress

In order to retain its importance for people architecture must remain in retroguardia. In the wake of all forces and processes that shape the contemporary world - digitalization, facebookisation etc..These processes are too much rooted in the contemporary societies. Architecture in many of it's aspects has lost meaning. To become self acclaimed as a discipline it must point to the issues and qualities. It must not be visual, it must be shearly connected to the human body and human  physicality.

The Bird's Nest has been a turning point. The cost of the building (400 million dollars) was equal to the cost of the whole opening ceremony of the Olympics. Most of the people around the world have seen both the building and the event only in the digital. Will it be possible one day to actually have the opening ceremony only in digital without ever spending money for real event as well as for stadium. The budget for a rendering company could be ten times smaller but in the end most of the people would never feel the difference. Preparing renderings has shifted from being mearly a service to architects to a discipline on its own.

The way the work proceeds at major architectural companies bases mostly if not entirely on a digitally generated images. Most of the implications how a building could be done in terms of interesting structure are just put aside.

The same processes don't concern only the iconic architecture and particular event (insert remarks from Sennet and the density). Internet has such a profound impact on our daily lives that, our social life is there, life of a nomad.

Yet we are still longing for something more than an image, for a true presence of space, another person and a story. Therefore should architecture continue this insane competition or marriage with the digital pretension of being important? What is my personal response?..