Annual News Paper 2020 - 2021

Academic Year 2020/2021

1.5 °C 4 — 27 EDUCATION 28 — 55 RESEARCH 56 — 63 PRACTICE 64 — 65 AWARDS AND EXHIBITIONS 66 LECTURERS AND PROJECTS 67

Editorial Board Madeleine Maaskant, Joseefke Brabander, David Keuning Managing Editor David Keuning Translation and Copy Editing InOtherWords (D’Laine Camp and Maria van Tol) Graphic Design Haller Brun, Amsterdam Cover Illustration Moriz Oberberger

Printing Rodi Rotary Press, Diemen Publisher Amsterdam Academy of Architecture © 2021 Amsterdam Academy of Architecture www.academyofarchitecture.nl All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy or any storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture does not accept responsibility for errors or omissions.

TIME IS RUNNING OUT The climate crisis is the most significant issue of our lifetimes. We have to take action, to address the global challenges of climate change and environmental decline and to work towards a sustainable future.

The problems the world is facing are crucial, cross-border and comprehensive, their consequences unpredictable. Some people even say that we are ‘at war with the future’. The threat is real, but also abstract. We are still – in the West, at least – experiencing affluence and prosperity in our daily lives. But we cannot go on treating the planet the way we have. We need to change our economic system; many people say we are on the eve of a paradigm shift. Infinite growth is difficult to achieve with finite resources. The time has come to ask ourselves what ‘progress’ really means.

At the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, designing for a sustainable future is high on the agenda and topics such

as the energy transition, circular building, climate adaptation, water storage, nature-inclusive building and the development of biobased materials are central to both education and research. During the past academic year, ‘1.5 degrees’ was a leading theme throughout the study programme. In a time when the main topic of conversation is maintaining a physical distance of 1.5 m, the hellish problem of the consequences of 1.5 °C of global warming looms.

In 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of the United Nations that evaluates the risks of human-induced climate change, published the report Global Warming of 1.5 °C.1 According to this report, global warming is likely to reach 1.5 °C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. It is common knowledge that this can have far-reaching consequences for human and natural habitats. Some of those consequences may be long-lasting or irreversible, such as the loss of ecosystems.

For the Academy, this was reason to launch the Beyond Peak Indifference lecture series last year. In this series, speakers from all over the world and from different disciplines and angles shed their light on the consequences of the climate crisis and discussed what climate change actually means and how architects, urbanists and landscape architects can, should or must position themselves. Many tasks related to the climate crisis are complex spatial challenges. They touch upon the way we organize our countries or landscapes, on the way we continue to construct our cities and on the way we create sustainable buildings.

The Academy aims to train spatial designers who understand ‘the art of changing direction’ now that changing direction is necessary, designers who can initiate new perspectives and who can build a different future even though we can hardly imagine such a different future today.2 We can imagine more, or less, of what we already know, but we can imagine little, or nothing, outside the present structure. We need stories, images, maps of a ‘new world’. This is where the power of imagination comes in, and this is what we try to teach our students: to imagine possible futures. That is why the Academy organized the winter school Planet Paradise, led by Artist in Residence Bruno Doedens, in which students learned to conceive and represent stories, especially long-term ones.

It is important to act quickly now. We cannot wait any longer.

Fortunately we, as an Amsterdam design school, are not the only school embracing this challenge. During a Dean’s Summit in April 2021, the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE) endorsed the Pledge for a Sustainable Future. In it, the participating schools see it as their responsibility to promote conditions that support quality of life and dignity for future generations and our planet, promise to align their curricula and research to confront this problem with urgency, recognize equality and diversity in their communities as significant factors for good, and commit themselves to document and disseminate the progress they make. This Annual Newspaper is a modest contribution to this cause.

So it is together that we look for the steps we need to take – I cannot say ‘today’, because we actually should have taken them yesterday.

Time is running out.

Madeleine Maaskant, Director 1 Global Warming of 1.5°C: An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty (IPCC, 2018).

See: ipcc.ch/sr15/download 2 Floris Alkemade, De toekomst van Nederland: De kunst van richting te veranderen.

Uitgeverij Toth (2020)

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PLANET PARADISE In 2021, land artist and landscape architect Bruno Doedens was the Artist in Residence at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, which was made possible by the AIR programme of the Amsterdam University of the Arts. He sees the Earth as a unique and miraculous paradise, and calls on everyone to cherish that paradise. His most important questions are: ‘How do we reinvent ourselves and how do we become a clean species once again?’

Text Editing

BRUNO DOEDENS GERT HAGE

FOREWORD Planet Paradise is a personal quest to find out how I, as a designer and as a human, can relate to the larger context, the Earth. All my working years, I have allowed myself to be swept along by the stream that is called progress. As with almost everyone who grew up in the post-war Western world, that stream provided me with a prosperous, pleasant and optimistic life. I recently came to realize that there’s a high price to pay for that progress; much higher than I thought.

The progress of humankind is at the expense of the miraculous, ingenious and beautiful Earth system that we call Gaia. We deplete her and neglect her. For a long time, I took part in that unconsciously. I can feel guilty about it, but at the same time I know that a feeling of guilt solves nothing. And how guilty am I? Just like everyone, I was trapped in the system that was blind to the negative consequences of our way of life. I am part of a progress machine that has brought many benefits, but has placed a heavy burden on the Earth. Too heavy, I realize now. It is high time to reinvent myself, as a citizen, as a landscape architect and as an artist.

But how do you do that? In my case, by delving into the topic thoroughly. I read piles of books in which academics look back on, and look ahead to, the ecological consequences of our actions. Books about the creation of the cosmos to the future of our planet, and about the collapse of nature to concrete guides for a new, sustainable way of life. They rubbed my nose in the fact that the situation is urgent and worrying, and reinforced the already dormant feeling that action is required.

For Planet Paradise, I have been grateful for the insights of academics from various fields, from philosophers to biologists. However, I realize only too well that the topic is so big and wide-ranging, and that it has been written about, researched and argued about to such an extent, that it is actually impossible to sketch an objective, all-encompassing picture of the situation. Nevertheless, I have tried to do so, while fully aware that the choices I have made reflect my personal attitude and preferences.

I have always been close to nature and refer to myself as a dreaming realist. I believe that healthy doubts

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and the ineffable are of great value. And I am an optimist. I believe in the opportunities that the future offers, whatever direction that may take us in. Even a tragedy offers opportunities. Of course, it is hard not to be depressed sometimes when you see how carelessly we treat the Earth. However, what’s the point in waiting in a dark corner, consumed by feelings of guilt, until all the pessimistic scenarios come true.

It is late, but not too late. Let’s roll our sleeves up.

There’s so much we can do and there’s so many of us. What we need is a new story, a story that encourages us to act differently and to relate differently to each other, the natural world and our unique Earth.

THE EARTH AND US, US AND THE EARTH THE MIRACLE GAIA Somewhere in a remote corner of the infinite empty universe, floats a small blue-green, ingenious ball of miraculous beauty. Life can be found on that ball. As far as we currently know, there is only one such ‘planet-ball’ . And we are living on that very ball.

We are part of the amazing story of the Earth system that we call Gaia.

Over the course of 4.6 billion years, the evolution of the Earth has spawned all life in an extraordinary process of natural forces and matter, with the sun as an energy source. A uniquely cohesive, complex and miraculous series of intertwined ecosystems, which are constantly changing over time. Complex feedback mechanisms connect and stabilize the four atmospheres of the Earth’s system: geosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. Together, they create and determine, to a large extent, the possibilities for all life forms. The four Earth systems are fluid; nothing remains as it was. We understand the very slow process of plate tectonics (shifting continents) and the equally slow limestone and rock cycle. We understand the evolution of single-cell organisms into multi-cellular organisms, the current complex biosphere, an irreversible and unpredictable unique process.

In the past 10,000 years, we have been living in an interglacial period: the Holocene. This period has

been marked by a climate that is exceptionally stable and favourable to humankind. During the long period in which life has existed on Earth, many species have preceded us and there will be many more long after our existence has ended. Humankind will soon prove to be a footnote in the history of the Earth. The Earth will live on without us, but our continued existence is inextricably bound to the Earth. It is worth realizing that the 4.6 billion-year-old Earth will continue to change and it, too, is finite. It is beyond our imagination, but in a similar period of time the Earth will be scorched by the increasing force of the sun that will ultimately explode, while new solar systems will probably arise in other places in the universe.

YOUNG AND SUCCESSFUL We humans are a very young species. A small branch on the tree of evolution. The thickness of the layer of paint on the top of the Eiffel Tower. Homo sapiens, more akin to all other living organisms than we often think, has only existed on the 4.6 billion-yearold Earth for 200,000 years. Converted into length: 20 centimetres in relation to 4.6 kilometres. In the past 10,000 years – the last centimetre – we have developed from hunter-gatherers, living in and with nature, to settled people much further removed from nature. The development of language, tools, imagination and technology have been of major importance to the transition process.

Following a very gradual growth of the global population over centuries, our population has doubled spectacularly in the past 50 years: from 3.5 to almost 8 billion people worldwide. The favourable climate, the extermination of our natural enemies, the development of healthcare and last but not least technological developments have been important factors for the success of the human species. Due to the rapid population growth, which has gone hand in hand with rising levels of prosperity, the consumer demand for nutrients and food products, materials and items has increased tremendously.

The direct consequence of this has been a gigantic seizure of raw materials and of the cultivated area of the Earth’s land surface, at the expense of the natural ecosystems.

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NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey

Iceberg A-74 splits from the Antarctic ice shelf on 1 March 2021. At 1270 km2, this iceberg is more than twice the size of the American city of Chicago.

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THE ANTHROPOCENE With our intelligence and talents, boosted by science and technology, humanity has spun an immense ‘human web’ around the Earth in the last 200 years – and the last 50 years in particular. We have ended up in a new epoch, the Anthropocene. We have added a new, wondrous artificial world, a new biotope – a technosphere – to the living Earth. It is a cohesive and intricate, complex layer of rapidly expanding urban developments and industrial and agricultural areas, connected with each other by a high-quality infrastructure. It is a wonderful layer in which human activities and physical laws merge, a layer in which humankind has created its own miraculous world, which seems to be completely separate from nature, with the aid of technological innovations and developments. It is also a world of blurring national borders and of intertwined, cross-border networks that result in countries becoming increasingly dependent on each other. Because of this dominant web that is developing ever more rapidly and ever further – which physically covers more than 50 per cent of the surface area of the continents already – humanity has become a significant geological force in the evolution of the Earth. And all this takes place in the outermost thin layer around the Earth, only a few kilometres thick, which was called the critical zone by philosopher Bruno Latour. The Earth’s system must respond to our dominant actions and is becoming more and more volatile. You could say that the Earth has gone from a stable dance floor to an active dance partner.

With this growing human web, we appear to be pushing the Earth beyond its limits. However, the opinions about this are divided. For some people, the process is irreversible and we are wilfully heading towards an ecological disaster that we ourselves have caused.

Others wonder whether this period may just be a logical intermediate step in the evolution of the Earth.

In the future, it is likely that humans will be having to seek shelter from the unstable natural world. This is nothing new. In the past we sought shelter from the erratic interglacial period and soon we may need to do the same from the erratic greenhouse period.

CARELESS AND INDIFFERENT There are more and more of us, we have more and

more things and we want even more – for the past 50 years in particular, we have been living in top gear.

This will continue until all of us, quite unintentionally, spin out of control, slogging away and partying. In our desire for progress for the sake of convenience, we have overlooked the fact that we still have to deal with something like an Earth, too. It was never our intention to damage the planet, of course, but intentionally or not, everyone knows the consequences of our thoughtless, unsustainable actions: the enormous pollution of air, water and soil, the rapid loss of biodiversity, the depletion of natural resources, the loss of woodland and nature conservation areas, desertification, and so on. The result has been global warming and an increasingly changing climate. Would we accept it if another species treated the Earth this way?

It’s not as if we didn’t know what was coming.

Almost 50 years ago, scientists and experts were already warning us about the consequences of excessive compulsive consumption.

In the meantime, it seems very likely that we have arrived at a point where the complex Earth system has been pushed over the threshold of self-regulation due to our actions. And that brings with it major, irreversible risks for humanity. We appear to be slowly realizing how unique and how vulnerable our planet Earth is, how special it is to live on that small, bluegreen ball. And at the same time, we could also be the last generation that can do something about the destructive effects of our careless, irresponsible and indifferent relationship with the Earth. That brings with it great responsibility. It’s difficult to constantly be aware of our day-to-day negative actions and impact on the larger Earth scale, partly because a big part of this impact is hidden. We are swimming like a fish in bowl in the ocean; our view is very limited.

And in the meantime, we cheerfully continue polluting. But suppose that we want to do the right thing for ourselves, for our fellow inhabitants of Earth and for the Earth itself. What are the steps to be taken?

Things have to change, but how? Do we need to embrace technological developments and innovations?

Is a clearly recognizable form of urgency needed for everyone, such as a pandemic or a flood? Do we need to learn to look at the Earth differently perhaps, in order to be able to treat it differently?

THE BUTTERFLY AND THE HURRICANE It is late, but not too late. New technologies can make a major contribution to solving the big problems we are facing, such as developing new forms of sustainable energy, making all production processes ‘clean’ and converting waste flows into raw materials by separating these in biological and tecnological cycles.

We can and must also contribute to the transition ourselves. With almost 8 billion of us, increas­ ingly connected with each other, humans repre­sent a gigantic social capital together. The chal­ lenge is to actively use this capital for the required transition.

In addition, there is an even larger and more essential question to be considered: How are we going to relate – anew – to nature and the Earth, with the knowledge that we have? What is our new role in the greater whole, in evolution? The answer to these questions will be a determining factor in terms of how we think and therefore how we act! The core of the problem and of the solution may lie here. The miraculous transformation process from caterpillar to butterfly is an appropriate metaphor in this regard.

Imagine that we are the cells of the caterpillar that is going to pupate. In that case, we could see the world as a world in decline, destructive and without expectations for the future. However, we could also see it as the start of a new world – the new expectant world of the butterfly. Just as death is necessary for life and spring follows winter, a caterpillar is necessary for a butterfly.

Let us stay with the butterfly for a moment longer.

According to the standard story, we as individuals are small and insignificant in light of life’s major events, a minor link in the series universe, biosphere, society and individual. But is that actually correct? Can’t a butterfly also cause a hurricane? Doesn’t the system work in both directions?

Or rather: Are we passive and do we merely endure what life throws at us? Or are we active and do we partly influence the direction of the future? ‘Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire’, as a saying goes. Translated freely, you could say that whoever manages to convince one person, convinces the entire world.

With almost 8 billion people who live on planet Earth, increasingly connected with each other, humans represent a gigantic social capital together.

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Anyone can do this, just as anyone can make the world poorer, but also richer, with his/her talents, creativity and intelligence. Or as James Lovelock argues, each species partly determines its own living environment. That sounds abstract just like ‘searching for connection with nature, with the non-human and with the Earth’. But if we look further, it proves to be very concrete. Numerous links can be discerned between humans and the universe: without the iron atoms that arose through planetary processes, we cannot absorb oxygen in our body; if the bacteria and later the plants had not learned to convert CO2 into O2 via photosynthesis, we would not have had any oxygen; and with our miraculous and creative mind, we can keep creating unfamiliar connections that add new ideas and colours to the world. Our creativity can open new worlds and imagine that which we don’t know yet. That offers opportunities for the future. We may have intuitively known that everything is connected with everything else, but this is being increasingly substantiated by scientific research in the field of physics. It appears more and more clear, for example, that the building blocks from which we are built (atoms) are constantly exchanging.

That matter and energy are actually the same. We eat, drink and breath. In this way, we are constantly refreshing ourselves. What was once a plant becomes part of our body and something else again later. We are the Earth and the Earth is us. And that also seems to apply to thoughts and consciousness.

There are more and more signs, among other things through quantum physics, that everything is much more strongly connected with everything else than we actually already knew unconsciously. It seems that science and various forms of age-old spiritua­ lity are not that far apart and are increasingly coming closer together. That will, of course, influence our view of the Earth. It is an interesting and encouraging thought that new scientific knowledge will reinforce our deep connection with all life and planet Earth.

THE POWER OF STORIES Humans are a linguistic species. We tell stories, listen to stories, believe in stories: we are stories. Sto­ ries provide structure to our lives. We can change our attitude with regard to nature and the Earth if we acknowledge that our actions are determined by stories to which we lend credence. It is just a few centuries ago that we thought that the Earth was flat and at the centre of the universe, that the same Earth was just a few thousand years old instead of 4.6 billion years old. We also thought for a long time that the Earth was inexhaustible, until the ‘Earth-rise’ photo from Apollo 8 in 1968 showed that the Earth is small, lonely and vulnerable. Again and again, new discoveries have resulted in new stories that have changed the way we see the world, and that will continue to happen. The stories in which we believe – deeply rooted in our present-day culture – determine our behaviour.

We believe in the story of God and Allah, in the fairy tale of economic growth and unfettered consumerism and – until recently – in the inexhaustibility of fossil energy. We believe in the omnipotence of data, social media and artificial intelligence, without considering the downsides. We believe in the short term, individualism and in self-interest. We believe in all of that because we have been told by the high priests of blind progress that it will make us richer and happier. What we weren’t told is that everything has a flip side, or at any rate we were unable to believe the story that the limits of the self-regulating Earth system have been reached. What is needed to learn to feel, understand and recognize the true value of nature and the Earth, and the limits of the self-regulating Earth system?

TRANSITION A change is underway little by little, the transition has been set in motion. The impetus was given by the Club of Rome almost 50 years ago. Things remained quiet for a long time following the publication of their alarming report The Limits to Growth, but in the past decade agreements were finally laid down by international institutions, such as the Inter­gov­ ern­mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and also the Sus­tainable Development Goals, which strive for change in terms of poverty, education, equal rights, clean energy, climate, peace and cooperation. Not to mention the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, in which 194 countries are cooperating to combat further global warming, and the very recent New Green

Deal of the European Union to make the economy and society more sustainable. In addition to these great endeavours, there are thousands of other bodies, organizations and companies that are working actively to ensure that the transition is a success.

An increasing number of citizens, especially young people, are also showing their willingness to change their behaviour. They no longer believe in the story that ever-growing wealth and prosperity leads to more happiness and equality, and are more and more convinced of the necessity of a sustainable life.

However, the transition is going slowly, too slowly.

How can you speed up this process? How can we stimulate the desire for a stable future? We know the list of social and individual forces that can drive change, such as fear, anger and injustice, temptation, self-interest, innovation, imagination and also idealism. They are consciously and unconsciously used to influence and to accelerate processes. Technological developments and innovations, listening even better to nature – our only example – and the physical laws also help us with the process of change; as does listening to and learning from each other. There are more than enough examples. In many countries, the transformation from fossil to clean, renewable energy is taking place. Deserts are being made liveable again through planting and regeneration.

There are also specific examples. Costa Rica is stimulating rewilding. Singapore is anchoring nature in the city. On the other hand, there is a long list of factors that are slowing down the transition, due to a lack of interest, ignorance or enlightened selfinterest. The intertwined interests of politics and the business sector, bureaucracy, the fossil industry lobby, the lack of understanding and awareness among citizens – the not knowing. All these things together are responsible for a major delay in the transition from ‘dirty’ to ‘clean and sustainable’. Everyone is actually in the same boat at the moment. You can call all countries developing countries: rich countries want to maintain their standard of living and must reduce their ecological footprint; poor countries want to raise their standard of living without increasing their ecological footprint. What can they learn from each other? Things need to be done differently and faster, but how? Apparently, the urgency is still felt by too few people. Do we need a big crisis to convince people? Or can we perhaps put people on a different, sustainable track with new stories before we reach that point. What kind of stories will help us to achieve a more just and fair distribution of resources, opportunities and chances?

WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE DON’T KNOW Objective truth does not exist, let alone objective knowledge. And that definitely applies also to the field of sustainability. Our planet is big and extremely complex, there’s still so much we don’t know. Such as how the Earth’s systems – geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere – with all of their feedback mechanisms, and the technosphere that has been added by us, move and influence each other, even if the young field of earth system science (ESS) has made significant progress in a short time span. Or about the precise functioning of the Earth, and about the physical and biological laws in nature.

We don’t know the extent to which technological innovations will make it possible to live together with the Earth, with 8 billion people (or more) in a ‘clean’ non-harmful way. And our senses are also extremely limited. The light that is visible to us, for example, is only a small part of the entire spectrum from radio waves to gamma waves. We don’t know what we don’t see. We don’t know what we don’t know. We only know for certain that the prevailing opinions will soon be superseded by new discoveries and developments over time, by new stories. What things will change once we have mastered the technology of nuclear fusion? What if it is scientifically proven that all things non-human – a river, a mountain range, a tree, a stone – also possess consciousness and are also given the right to speak? What if it turns out that intelligent alien life exists, benevolent or malicious?

What if it turns out that we are part of the caterpillar that will soon turn into a butterfly? The many unknowns demand a respectful and cautious attitude with respect to the wondrous nature and the Earth as a whole. We must listen and learn, fall down and get back up, and above all continue to marvel at the unparalleled beauty and power of Mother Earth, which we are allowed to be part of temporarily.

CHANGE FROM EGO TO ECO Nature is richness and transformation. Our main and most important task is not to do further damage, but to make a positive contribution if at all possible.

It is a task that transcends discussions, for example, between those advocating and those opposing action to combat the climate crisis. We need to zoom in further and gain insight, zoom out further and gain an overview, in the course of which nature – from small to big – can serve as an example and source of inspiration to us. It is about a different, clean and sustainable basic attitude, one that strengthens the ecosystems, just as plants, animals and organisms do. Can we change our consciousness from ego-consciousness to eco-consciousness, from human-thinking to Earth-thinking? That requires a multidimensional, intuitive and inclusive approach. It is also worth making a distinction between what we can do personally – a loving, respectful, sustainable attitude and way of acting towards our own living environment without negative impact – and what we are able to do collectively – not destabilizing the self-regulating Earth system, with the most important example being climate change as a result of accelerated CO2 emissions through the burning of fossil energy. The former requires a different personal attitude, a different mindset, while the latter requires a transformation of the current economic system.

In a democratic society, everyone must take his/ her responsibility: citizens, members of the business community and politicians. The major shift from negative to positive impact on nature must come from politicians who persuade and/or force companies to undergo that transformation, as that is where most gains can be made. Citizens have a dual task. On the one hand, they must themselves want to be inhabitants of Earth without negative impact, who care for their living environment, while on the other hand the citizens jointly determine and influence the course of politics. How do we mobilize and activate that communal power from the bottom up? How do you become, in addition to a convinced inhabitant of Earth, part of the collective force that can stimulate the actual transition on the scale that is necessary, the Earth scale? The temptations are great to continue on the current, often matter-of-course, path. Because yes, we are hypocrites, we want to do the right thing and at the same time we remain in the comfortable state of consumption on a daily basis. Globally speak­ ing, we use more than one and half times what the Earth can support, in the Netherlands more than double. There is a slowly growing awareness that our urban biotope, our human web, with all its technological ingenuity and also beauty, is also part of that all-encompassing nature, even if it looks different and is currently far from ‘clean’. We are not separate from nature. With everything that we build and create, we are an inextricable part of the whole. We are nature!

We only have to become ‘clean’. That awareness is beginning to germinate.

EARTH ROMANCE The transition process must be faster and more ambitious if we do not want to exceed the threshold value of the self-regulating Earth system even further.

That requires decisiveness and courage from all parties. But also imagination, new stories, creativity, the mobilization of social energy, the stimulation of innovations and technological developments, the ability to make unexpected connections and the activation of concrete imitable and persuasive examples. These are all keys to opening the various doors to a life in harmony with nature and planet Earth. We will have to make use of all these options. The power of new stories and the effect of our imagination can help with that.

However, simply changing our personal attitude and our behaviour is not sufficient. We need the collective power of all people, the global population, and the power of creativity and technology to accelerate the processes of change. One thing that we as humans have in common with animals is that deep down our motives are not rational, but intuitive and emotional. Consciously activating our intuitive, emotional brain could strengthen the connection with each other and with all aspects of nature and the Earth. Seen in this light, we can still learn a lot from ancient Eastern wisdom. Perhaps we can develop a collective Earth romance, with Gaia in the starring

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role. A new story in which deep pieces of wisdom, both old and new, from all over the world come together; wisdom about beauty, harmony and equality, about the richness of nature and what we can and must do in order to strengthen Gaia instead of neglecting and disregarding her.

8 BILLION PEOPLE We can, as a collective of 8 billion people, be of inestimable value to the transition process. Past experience has shown that our combined social energy is a revolutionary force. Seeing as we are increas­ingly better educated, have amazing technological developments at our disposal and are connected with each other more and more through communication networks, we can also form a big part of the solution, in spite of being the biggest part of the problem. And I am especially thinking about the female half of the global population in this regard. Because hasn’t the world been dominated by men for far too long? Would the development of the world have gone differently if women had taken the lead? Are women by nature better at inclusive and intuitive thought and action?

Let us give the female in society more space and priority. Give women a starring role in the creation and dissemination of new stories.

The fast-growing urban conurbations – within the space of a few decades, two thirds of the global population now live in a city – are the hubs of the human web. They are important spots where talent and creativity gather, where new ideas are born. They can be the drivers of the transition to a ‘clean and sustainable’ life, to a new symbiotic balance between nature and culture, between biosphere and technosphere.

In order to accelerate the transition process, it is necessary that we make optimal use of and deploy our human capital. This is central to the change required. Consciousness is an important key to this. But it is not the only one. Guiding policy and enforceable political goals, and active participation from the business sector are just as necessary, as well as stopping the current exponential growth of the global population by reducing poverty and inequality. It is a game of chess on several boards simultaneously.

THE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION NEW STORIES An important pawn, if not the most important, in this game of chess is a new, inspiring story, a story that attracts, convinces and challenges us. The visual power of stories – and of art in general – opens new worlds. Art offers prospects, insights and perspectives. It confronts and offers solace. It arouses anger or curiosity. And that is precisely what we need if the transition is to have any chance of success – new, alluring and convincing prospects that make us aware not only of the necessity for the transformation in our way of thinking, but also of the beauty of that step.

Stories can mobilize the social capital and thus speed up the transition process. We need new examples that teach us to relate to planet Earth respectfully. Mesmerizing stories about the power and the beauty of nature, stories that dare to dream and think about another future. Stories that also teach us to recognize our exceptional situation and have respect for all that is non-human. Enticing stories that teach us to see the complex human web as an inextricable part of the broad concept of nature – we are nature. Stories that offer room for doubt and intuition, that help us to understand that humankind and the cosmos are one, that everything is interdependent, that the smallest building blocks and the infinite universe are inextricably connected. The concept Gaia introduced by James Lovelock is a beautiful example of this. It is a serious attempt to radically shift our perspective and change our view of the Earth.

But how do we ensure that these stories manage to convince a broad audience? Which requirements does a good story have to fulfil? A good story captivates and is relatable. It broadens your outlook, pushes boundaries, makes you doubt, makes you uneasy or pacifies you and invites reflection.

Why is the Bible the most widely circulated book in the world? Because the stories are appealing. And the institution that is the church has cleverly responded to this with rituals, hymns, gatherings and the use of symbols. New stories must be stories that reassure us in a playful way that we can reverse the negative effects of our treatment of the Earth into something

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positive. They should also be optimistic, empathetic, hopeful and challenging, without being blind to the sizeable and far-reaching task ahead of us. A good story is something you want to pass on and a good story spreads lightning-fast, especially with the current social media. A good story is an expression of your desires, makes a lasting impression, touches the heart, and moves you emotionally. A good story is a work of art in itself. What else does a story need in order to connect us in our superficial times with the Earth and the larger time cycles of our planet? To transport us from our humdrum existence? Which new words and images are needed for this? Which new language or new form of expression can help us with this?

THE STORYTELLERS For us to learn to look at planet Earth with new eyes, artists and creative minds from all disciplines are very much needed. They are specialists in telling new stories in a playful, challenging and enticing way and in devising accompanying images and rituals.

They understand the art of reading, the underlying and often dormant spirit of the times and making it palpable. Numerous recent books and films have fuelled the desire for change. Allow all creative minds, from all cultural disciplines, including music, dance, theatre, poetry, literature, film, architecture, visual arts, together with scientists and pioneers from the practice, to dare to think big and even bigger. Give them the space for imagination and the intuitive thinking in order to radically reassess our current values and our actions. Allow them to develop new languages, new stories and create images that help us to change. Not less, but more, not poorer, but richer, is the message. But then ‘clean’, en route to an Earth that is stable and symbiotic for all people and fellow inhabitants.

MENTAL BRIDGES We need new stories that help us dare to believe that things can be done differently, that we can become a ‘clean species’. To achieve that, it is enormously helpful if we can learn to think on the scale of the Earth and get to know its fascinating, complex laws better. And because we cannot grasp the hidden impact of our actions, and the big stories about the Earth system are logically abstract, we need new ‘bridges’ in the form of, among other things, ‘space bridges’, ‘time bridges’ and ‘knowledge bridges’.

‘Space bridges’ connect our day-to-day living environment with the big Earth system. Powerful, invisible connections between the small and the large, between local and global. The concept should not be ‘Think Global, Act Local’, but rather ‘Think and Act, Local and Global’. Combine the earthly and the Earth, in our hearts and in our heads. To ground oneself as a verb, therein lies a major challenge. Examples of this include the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock, the Critical Zone of Bruno Latour, but also for example the book Hidden Impact by Babette Porcelijn.

In addition, we need ‘time bridges’ that connect the present day with deep time, which teach us to deal with different time scales and types of time: the fast human time and slow time of the Earth with its ‘flow time, cyclical time and pulse time’. That teaches us to see the logic of the constantly moving slow Earth processes in the perspective of deep time. The Deep Time Walk app is a useful example of this. You experience the evolution of the Earth through an instructive walk of 4.6 kilometres, each metre being a million years. Additionally, ‘bridges to the future’ are necessary; bridges that dare to put long-term thinking above short-term thinking.

And we need ‘knowledge bridges’ that capture the imagination and connect the knowledge of experts, philosophers and scientists and make it accessible to normal citizens. The recent film of David Attenborough A Life on Our Planet is an impressive example of this.

The three types of mental bridges help us to ground ourselves again through practice, to position and reinvent, enable us to be sustainable and naturally connect, to intertwine, with everything that sur­rounds us, from small to big. The main task is to broaden our day-to-day focus from the here and now to the there and later. Both are necessary, in harmony, supplemented with knowledge. It helps us shift our perspective and consciousness, and as a result our way of thinking and acting will fundamentally change.

And in this way we may also regain our feeling of freedom that we have been deprived of due to the increasing feeling of guilt.

PLANET PARADISE Planet Paradise nurtures a desire for a stable future for all inhabitants of Earth. For a world where under­standing, connection, equality, diversity, richness and also beauty and amazement occupy centre stage. A world in which the economy is only one of the aspects, instead of the most important goal. It is up to us – and the young generation in particular – to build new bridges, to find new appealing words and images for the creation of new stories that activate the desire for change. A change that makes the miraculous world of nature, the value of human and non-human relationships, and the connection with our unique planet Earth. The human web is part of this nature. Because nature includes all of us – farmer, urban dweller, Asian, American, manager, informal caregiver, minister, biologist, student and artist – we are all connected with the Earth and therefore with the cosmos. Indigenous people have already known this for centuries. They look seven generations ahead and wish to be good ancestors for future generations.

Let us make their story our own in a new appealing modern language with new images, supplemented with our modern scientific knowledge, in the awareness that our present-day world is totally different, but also actually precisely the same: one big miracle!

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING — Floris Alkemade, De toekomst van Nederland: De kunst van richting te veranderen. Thoth (2020) — Bert Amesz, Aan de knoppen van het klimaat. Fontaine (2012) — David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future. Ebury (2020) — Philipp Blom, Das große Welttheater: Von der Macht der Vorstellungskraft in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Paul Zsolnay (2020).

Dutch Translation: Het grote wereldtoneel: Over de macht van verbeelding in crisistijd. De Bezige Bij (2020) — René ten Bos, Dwalen in het Antropoceen. Boom (2017) — Rutger Bregman, De meeste mensen deugen: Een nieuwe geschiedenis van de mens. De Correspondent (2019). English translation: Humankind: A Hopeful History, Bloomsbury (2020) — William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. North Point (2002) — Albert Faber, De gemaakte planeet: Leven in het Antropoceen.

Amsterdam University Press (2018) — Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. Allen & Unwin (2017) — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

Harper (2014). Translated from Hebrew. Original publication date 2011.

— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.

Harvill Secker (2016). Translated from Hebrew. Original publication date 2015.

— Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Jonathan Cape (2018). Translated from Hebrew. Original publication date 2018.

— Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

John Murray Press (2018) — Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays. Graywolf Press (2017) — Roman Krznaric. The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World. Ebury (2020) — Bruno Latour, Face à Gaïa: Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. La Découverte (2015). English translation: Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime.

Polity Press (2017) — Bruno Latour, Où atterrir? Comment s’orienter en politique.

La Découverte (2017) English translation: Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press (2018) — James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity.

Penguin Books (2006) — James Lovelock, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. Penguin Books (2019) — Stefano Mancuso and Allessandra Viola, Verde brillante: Sensibilità e intelligenza del mondo vegetale. Giunti Editore (2015). English translation: Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Island Press (2015) — Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Consistence. Columbia University Press (2016) — Gunter Pauli, The Blue Economy: 10 years – 100 innovations – 100 million jobs. Paradigm (2014) — Babette Porcelijn, De Verborgen Impact: Alles voor een eco-positief leven. Pumbo.nl (2016) English Translation: Hidden Impact, e-book (s.d.)

— Manuel Sintubin, De wetenschap van de aarde: Van Oerknal tot mens. Acco (2009) — Jaap Tielbeke, Een beter milieu begint niet bij jezelf.

Das Mag (2020) — Merlijn Twaalfhoven, Het is aan ons: Waarom we de kunstenaar in onszelf nodig hebben om de wereld te redden.

Atlas Contact (2020) — Bart Verheggen, Wat iedereen zou moeten weten over klimaatverandering. Prometheus (2020) — Peter Westbroek, De ontdekking van de aarde: Het grote verhaal van een kleine planeet. Balans (2012) — Peter Wohlleben, Das geheime Leben der Bäume: Was sie fühlen, wie sie kommunizieren – die Entdeckung einer verborgenen Welt. Ludwig Verlag (2015). English translation: The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. HarperCollins (2017)

8

NASA

Taken aboard Apollo 8 by Bill Anders, this iconic picture, titled Earth Rise, shows the Earth peeking out from beyond the lunar surface as the first crewed spacecraft circumnavigated the Moon, with astronauts Anders, Frank Borman, and Jim Lovell aboard.

9

VALUE FOR MONEY Special Envoy for International Water Affairs Henk Ovink makes out a case for the integration of long-term value in both design processes and investment decisions.

Text MARKUS APPENZELLER AND THIJS VAN SPAANDONK

During the past academic year, the Academies of Architecture in Amsterdam and Rotterdam offered their students a joint lecture series for the first time.

Entitled Beyond Peak Indifference, the series was organized by the heads of Urbanism of both Academies, Markus Appenzeller and Thijs van Spaandonk respectively. They invited a large number of national and international speakers, which was possible by the fact that all of the lectures took place in the digital domain. These included Gyorgyi Galik, designer and lead advisor of the Cities Programme at the Design Council in London; Marina Dubova and Pierce Meyers, who are both associated with the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow; Diederik Samson, chief of the cabinet of European Green Deal Commissioner Frans Timmermans; Laura Burgers, climate lawyer at the University of Amsterdam; Scott McAulay, activist architect and founder of the (online) Anthropocene Architecture School; Wong Mun Summ, director of the Singaporean architecture office WOHA; and Roman Krznaric, author of The Good Ancestor.

One of the speakers was Henk Ovink, Special Envoy for International Water Affairs for the Netherlands. His glowing speech occasioned a more detailed conversation in the form of an interview with Markus Appenzeller and Thijs van Spaandonk. Subjects included the strength of design in the light of the climate crisis, the connection between practice and ideal, and how to avoid cynicism.

MARKUS APPENZELLER AND THIJS VAN SPAANDONK What is our role, as designers? That’s the question that keeps coming back in relation to the climate crisis. One of the aspects you mentioned in your lecture was the need to fill a pipeline with good projects. What do you mean by that and why is it important?

HENK OVINK If concrete projects have properties that can demonstrably contribute to the solving of problems, then they become easier to finance. It becomes possible for investors to invest in them. The more projects of this kind that are in the pipeline, the better. The projects in the pipeline have to ensure upscaling and reproducibility. This in turn will create a kind of ripple, which allows real change to take place. The financing of this type of project is an interesting topic, because it increasingly raises questions – and so it should. In the past, financing was always focused on making money in the short term. It’s very important that investors are not only out to make a fast buck, but also want to add value in the medium and long term. Then they’ll find that social, cultural, ecological and economic value can be combined with financial value.

MA and TvS

How do we make these different values concrete in the context of working on the city, in which land values and property values dominate?

HO That’s the strength of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: all 17 goals are about concrete agreements, promises and values. They are not primarily about money. They aim to ensure that people don’t die prematurely, that the planet is not destroyed and that we don’t bash each other’s brains in. Although these goals involve costs and proceeds, they start with something quite different. They start with a goal you want to achieve together and to do that, you invest in that goal together. That’s an entirely different way of valuing than one based on money. An exclusively financial starting point always leads to a shaky result, because that result is judged by monetary proceeds rather than value.

This is tricky in a society that’s based on money. It’s an issue with which the entire world is struggling. Money is the dominant factor in society, while a financial loss can sometimes equal a win in terms of health and happiness. The Covid-19 crisis is fascinating in this respect. At present, it seems money is no object to our problem-solving governments. They no longer weigh up every decision against its short-term financial and economic implications, because the world population has to regain its health, fast. The underlying idea is, by the way, that those investments have to first and foremost lead to profit maximization, rather than to a sustainable future for everyone.

MA and TvS

How much longer before the urgency that is felt leads to a new kind of commission from our clients?

Idealism among designers can turn into fatalism before you know it.

HO Of course it’s great that Joe Biden made John Kerry his climate envoy. At a summit in the Netherlands Kerry said, and with conviction: ‘One and a half degrees is the maximum, we are going to fulfil the promises we made to the Global South and it all has to happen this year.’ But that’s also something you can get very cynical about. This is the umpteenth time that leaders of this calibre have said that this or that is really going to happen this year. Will it really happen this time? The Paris Climate Agreement was concluded six years ago. How much has changed since then?

What you do see around the world – and that’s the difference from, say, five or ten years ago – is that the number of initiatives for change has multiplied. True, not all of those initiatives have led to concrete results, yet, but they are getting a lot more political and financial support. The way someone like Mark Carney, the former head of the Bank of England, labours for the cause of the next climate conference is impressive. His words show that the financial world is really starting to look at these values in a different way.

Designs play an important part in many of these initiatives, by the way, because designs make all of the data transparent and understandable. That is one of design’s amazing strengths. This transparency also makes it crystal clear that money that is invested in the wrong way can cause suffering to other people and to systems such as biodiversity and climate. This means transparency facilitates decision making. Transparency allows dialogue and accountability and so it can also be helpful in elections.

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MA and TvS

In one of his essays, Billy Fleming of the University of Pennsylvania states that rather than trying to pioneer in sustainability, designers should be putting their skills at the service of activists, thinkers and politicians, in other words: of the real social innovators.

HO Billy likes to provoke. What I don’t like about his provocation is that it pigeonholes designers. I think everyone has a certain responsibility. Designers have the knowledge and expertise to say, on the basis of a meticulous analysis and across complex issues: ‘Guys, this is going wrong!’ They know how to present alternatives in an accessible and inspiring way that does justice to the complexity of the issue and the relationship to the set goals. It’s a form of activism in its own right. This approach is just as important as that of designers who place themselves in the service of politicians. I’m sure it’s quite nice to work with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most progressive members of the US House of Representatives, but it’s not enough. It takes a lot more to bring about change. I think it would be a pity if designers just tagged along with activists and politicians.

While analysing designers are important, practising designers are just as important – after all, plans do need to be carried out. These are the people that ultimately solve the problems of cities, industries, economies or infrastructures.

Designers can come into their own in both capacities. Also, different designers have different talents. One is more of an activist and the other more of a specialized implementer. Both are needed.

Educational institutes play an important part in this respect. They have to provide designers with the right tools to enable them to make the choices that suit them best. Some designers want to be on the implementing side. Working towards the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Climate Agreement, they can look for concrete alternatives to sources of pollution. Others want to be on the agenda-setting side and weigh as many interests as possible.

Together they cover the entire range, from data collecting and storytelling to the realization of the strength of design and the subsequent evaluation. This neither means that designers are some kind of superheroes, nor that they are soloists.

But they do make an important contribution to achieving the goals set.

MA and TvS

Isn’t the fixation on the building as a product also part of the problem? Shouldn’t we change the curricula to ensure that students learn to critically reflect before they even consider making a design? Their reflection would have to focus on the question of what it would take to meet the set objectives. Is it really necessary to make something? Or should we do nothing? Or take an entirely different approach?

HO That is very nicely put. Many people, especially from the design disciplines, are quick to choose a three-dimensional solution, any one whatsoever, whereas the question they should raise is: What is the problem?

What is going on? How can I as a designer add value? These are extremely important questions. Considering the problem in context is different from saying: There’s a question and I’m going to answer it. Unravelling, contextualizing and placing the question in a larger timeframe is becoming increasingly important.

Take, for example, a commission to design a means of transport between place A and place B. The client will say: Designer, come up with a solution. But matters of transport raise social questions. Why does the client want mobility, anyway?

How does the commission relate to future developments that the client might not be taking into account? So rather than immediately come up with a readymade solution like a road or a railway line, you have to find out what exactly is going on, first. It’s up to the Academy to teach designers this attitude.

It’s not just design students who need to learn this attitude, incidentally, it’s all students. This is a major task that schools and universities face. How do you integrate such basic issues into your study programme? It all starts at secondary school. I sometimes wonder whether the current preparation for design educations is robust enough. Does secondary school suffice, or do you need something extra? I don’t really know. In that sense, I do follow Billy Fleming when he says: ‘Don’t get your hopes up on the designer.’ Obviously, I believe that the designer plays a crucial part. But if you don’t help the rest of society to change, there is no point in the designer changing, either.

One of the speakers that gave a lecture in the series was Gyorgyi Galik from London. Her point of view, and so her action perspective, is that climate problems are first and foremost behavioural problems.

Following her reasoning, shouldn’t we become much more activist, through the products we make, and say: We just won’t do it anymore?

HO I would say: you have to demonstrate that things can be done differently. That is the beauty of the operational context of design. You can set an agenda as well as be an activist. You can show how something that looks exciting and complicated at first glance is actually perfectly doable. There are alternatives to everything we do. Designers can come up with alternatives that may create greater happiness than we believed possible. In that respect, designers have a wonderful part to play. But they do have to recognize and claim that part.

Especially for students at academies and universities, it would be nice if those institutes were willing to support them in this respect, because the incentives to leave things as they are can be considerable. If you enrich academy students by providing the most terrific lecturers, speakers and fellow students, but still have them work at an office that does stupid things, how can you make that student strong enough to help change that office’s practices? And not only that particular office’s practices, but also those of clients, civil society and investors? As an educational institute you could show them how you would do things, activistically and enticingly, while demonstrating that there really are alternatives to the way things are done at the same time. Not by looking for a solution in technology, but by changing behaviour.

MA and TvS

We’ve noticed that many students are somewhat tense about the relationship between the Academy and their work environments. Will they dare to address the agenda of a design office, if there’s any room for something like that at all?

HO But tension can be productive. There are two extreme ways of dealing with tension. One extreme is that you behave like your mind is split, cut yourself in two. At the Academy, you’re critical and excel at that attitude; at work, you pretend not to remember any of that, concentrate on the technical side of your work and do exactly what they ask of you. The other extreme is that you feel helpless, cry out that you’re at your wits’ end and lose yourself. But there is a middle ground. If you want to teach students how to find the middle ground, the question is: Can you, as an Academy, support students in making the connection between ideal and practice? How can you help them when the tension becomes too much for them? And if the tension is actually productive, how can you intensify it?

MA and TvS

The Academies of Rotterdam and Amsterdam have put the climate crisis on the agenda and are exploring ways we as designers can and should act. What other part can the Academies play in accelerating action to mitigate the climate crisis?

HO An Academy of Architecture – a different kind of institute than a university – has a direct link to professional practices. Students can bring the things they learn at the Academy to their work environment the next day. And these professional practices help to make the Academy’s study programme successful. How can you make maximum use of this strength?

Make no mistake: it’s not only the students who are wrestling with the question of how designers should act in light of the climate crisis. The offices and organizations they work for do, too. They really don’t have a clue. The Academy can mean a lot in this respect, and not only to students. They can also help professional practices to determine their position.

This will require direct interaction with the students’ places of work. Such contacts can also make the abstraction of the climate crisis much more manageable.

The whole world has to change and that is quite the challenge. But you can talk to professional practices right now, in a practical way. There are six Academies of Architecture in the Netherlands. They are strongly embedded in the regional context and well-informed about regional problems. They can make big problems small by looking at concrete practical challenges together with students and their employers. Just sit down together and see if things can be done differently, step by step.

Academies can help with that. Every time you look at the Sustainable Development Goals and the Climate Agreement, you think: ‘This is too hot to handle, I’d better look for a ready-made solution.’ But if we just keep looking at this difficult challenge and continue to invest in an answer that does justice to the complexity of the problem, with all the objections and hiccups that go with it, and if we do that together with students and professional practice partners, then I’m sure that together, we can make great strides.

MA and TvS

Henk Ovink is being interviewed by Markus Appenzeller and Thijs van Spaandonk.

11

DESIGNING FOR CHANGE

In the past year many project studios offered design assignments that, one way or another, had links with climate change. While the second semester was still in full swing, five student projects were selected from the first semester (P3a, P3b and P5). Boris von der Möhlen designed a neighbourhood based on the sharing economy, reducing the cycle of production and consumption, Marleen van Egmond addressed the retention, transport and infiltration of rainwater, Jana van Hummel proposed the introduction of wetlands in Amsterdam, Abigail Mac Phee produced a design that deals with rising sea levels and the city’s subsidence, and Shahaf Strickmann devised a ‘water machine’ that captures rainwater on rooftops for toilet and laundry use and that cleans grey water via natural processes.

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From the traditional economy to the sharing economy.

The commons are created as tree structures, with roots in the central market.

A collectively harvested cultural landscape embraces the communities.

Urban plan.

Section of a common.

Section of the connecting landscape.

The market hall serves as an exchange hub.

The commons are surrounded by green spaces.

Common Ground Student Boris von der Möhlen Project P3a Tutor Mathias Lehner

Authorities are in agreement: climate change and the depletion of the Earth are serious threats to our way of life. We are too many people on too small a planet. But isn’t there enough, or are we rather using too much?

Our prosperity allows us to have all possible amenities under the same roof. Every household has a washing machine, one or two cars and its own garden: enough for a small com­ munity. This lifestyle has saddled us with a huge ecological, material and spatial footprint and a culture in which having possessions is the standard. Can we change this? Suppose sharing becomes more accessible, could it become the standard once again?

Common Ground opts for this sharing economy. Small-scale communities based on a sustainable group size freely allow for sharing. We call such close-knit and safe groups ‘Commons’.

They have courtyard gardens fringed by balconies, galleries

and collective amenities that connect the community; com­ munity members regularly look in on each other.

The sharing economy makes room for amenities that are not normally found in the city. For example, the space between the communities is designed as a pick-your-own park land­ scape; the foundations of the former Food Center provide this landscape with playful height differences. The market hall, which is central to the plan, is transformed into a place of exchange with supra­local amenities such as a market that sells local pro­ ducts and flexible work spaces.

The business acumen typical of Amsterdam and in particular the Food Center resonates in this redevelopment project. The exchange benefits both parties. Nietzsche wrote: ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.’ What he meant to say is: solitary people living in villas can never grasp how good life is in the Common Ground.

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Waterscapes, a New Way Student Marleen van Egmond Project P3b Tutor Ruwan Aluvihare

Masterplan.

The project location is the Centrale Markt in Amsterdam West.

Formerly, this was the site where food that needed to be deliv­ered in the city’s grocery shops would be collected, stored and dis­ tributed. The site is now largely derelict. My goal is to turn it into an attractive neighbourhood with intimate green streets and squares and a strong hierarchy between the main axis and the narrow streets leading off it. The area should have greenery, water and public space as its most important elements and it should be functional and attractive.

In order to achieve this, I have developed four different public space typologies, leading to an intricate green and blue land­ scape. My main quality requirements were a marked difference between green and blue areas, attractiveness in different seasons and conditions, radical greening and an intimate public space, including streets and squares.

During the design process, I had to tackle various problems.

Currently, the city’s water management policy is to collect and

drain rainwater as fast as possible, leading to overflow at times of large amounts of rainfall. This problem will most likely exacerbate over time as climate change will cause more frequent and heavier rain showers. Also, the high groundwater level and the large amounts of pavement make it difficult to infiltrate the rainwater appropriately. On top of that, strips of green are often planned in the wrong way.

Based on these current shortcomings, my ambition is to make enough green and blue spots for rainwater to be retained, trans­ported and infiltrated and to make this process visible.

This means I have to go against policy and work with the ground­ water level instead of against it. I also want to give a new blue and green quality to the public space and to create natural air conditioning by letting the water stay on the surface. The archi­ tecture and lay­out of the houses influence the design of the moats around them.

Waterscapes.

Permanent wet zone.

Floodplain zone.

Stormwater rain garden.

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Cross section dike house typology.

Drought in summer.

Heavy rainfall in winter.

14

water 2 m

deep pond

water 50 cm

reeds and rushes

Plots can be developed by one initiator, multiple initiators or a collective of initiators.

water 30 cm

shallow water marshland

water 30 cm

sedges, herbs, alders and pioneers

bald cypresses and water soldiers in shallow water

wet meadow with singular trees

Pixels form framed pieces of wetland.

Master plan.

A pixelated landscape with a gradient from high and dry to low and wet …

A building grid offers flexibility and sustainability.

Within the frames, the plants grow wild.

… that allows different marsh biotopes to flourish and for different experiences throughout the district …

… and functions as a rainproof urban air conditioner, buffering the rainwater and cooling down the district.

The rainwater is first collected in the deeper ponds and then overflows into the next levels.

As a variety in the urban wetlands, there are the two levels of ‘reeds and rushes’ and ‘bald cypresses’.

Urban Wetlands Framed Student Jana van Hummel Project P3b Tutor Ruwan Aluvihare

Urban wetlands framed.

In reaction to Amsterdam’s current housing climate, I proposed a plan to turn the Centrale Markt area into a DIY district for nonconformist Amsterdam locals who want to shape their own living environment, but often fall by the wayside today.

What if we clear the entire area and create the opportunity for a flexible design layer to be built there, a green-blue ‘carpet’ with designated development areas for alternative and more inclusive self-build projects like housing co-ops? I introduced a grid as an ordering principle. The flexible layout provides ample opportunity for sustainable building. This way, the new district is adaptable to both changing human demands and climate requirements.

At present the Centrale Markt is not only a heat island, but also a rainwater bottleneck. The redevelopment creates a lot of room for improvement. Due to the urban context, soil conditions and high groundwater level, there’s potential for an exciting new landscape that will benefit the city of Amsterdam.

I wanted to do more than just add water and a marshy park to the site. My goal was to actually introduce adventurous land­scape qualities into the city; to make an architectural trans­ lation of wetlands, with enough room to really wander around, to inter­act with it. To achieve this, I studied the ‘target plant community’ of wetlands. As it turned out, alder and meadow­ sweet groves are suitable for this location.

15

Layers of the Markthallen Student Abigail Mac Phee Project P3b Tutor Ruwan Aluvihare

Amsterdam has long been kept afloat by the thousands of wooden piles underneath the city and the stretches of impressive canals that keep the water at bay. Today we see the decay of the quay walls and the rotting of the wooden piles, causing various buildings to tilt and shift. The foundations that Amsterdam is built on are sinking and breaking. Can we learn or use these elements in the future?

I want to use the site of the Markthallen to create an exper­i­ ence of Amsterdam’s past engineering genius with a gesture that looks to future solutions. We see two main challenges at the moment: rising sea levels and Amsterdam’s subsidence. In other words: the water is rising and Amsterdam is sinking. What if we let more water in to the city? Can we challenge the ideas of drainage and a plan with new interventions that exhibit these ecological processes happening under our feet and in the water?

Canals were originally dredged through the polderscapes to reclaim land, in doing so creating Amsterdam. In the P3a I sug­ gested dredging a canyon for the purpose of testing the limits of Amsterdam’s underground structures. So instead of digging a canal, dig a canyon. It would have been a canyon that uses the reclaimed materials of the breaking old canal walls for its own

existence while simultaneously exposing the underground skeleton and world beneath the city.

Unfortunately, this concept would not be physically possible in the Dutch landscape. The water would seep through and would need to be constantly pumped out. Therefore, the next step was to redesign the urban plan and better understand the Dutch landscape conditions. The layers of the Markthallen show the history of the Dutch landscape and how it has been trans­formed over time, and how we can use these original natural structures and processes to look to the future. With a focus on peat formation and stormwater management to cata­ lyse land­scape succession, small architectural interventions explore the boundaries of material reuse, recreational elements and urban clusters.

Architectural and landscape analysis led to the small crucial elements as clues to the layers of context and the site. The built environment would be used to frame and tell the story of the landscape. The project explores where new interventions can take place in a unique and playful way, including expanding biodiversity, water retention, cultural awareness and regenerative systems while responding to climate crisis.

Landscape phasing and succession. From left to right: helophyte terraces, swamps, peat meadows and low peat forest.

Plan.

Natural water retention and drainage. Middle: peat forest sponge infiltration. Left and right: retention pond absorption and runoff.

Section of the peninsula, showing frame pier and filtering terraces.

Built environment storm water management. From left to right: green roofs absorb and reuse water, water retentions ponds, peat and helophyte terraces clean water, peat forest sponge infiltration seeps into inlets, water retentions ponds, and green roofs absorb and reuse water.

Section of the filtering helophyte terrace system.

Elevation of the frame pavilion.

Plan peninsula, showing a canal wall promenade, frame pavilion, retention pond, peat forest, boardwalk and filtering terraces.

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Forest entrance boardwalk.

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Mix sewage (brown area, 30% of Amsterdam) and wastewater treatment plants (brown dots).

Amsterdam imports 91 million litres every day.

38.25 million litres (40%) is for toilets and laundry.

Water cycle. From left to right: source, pre-filter, natural purification, main purification, client, wastewater treatment and surface water.

Problems related to water management. From left to right: pollutants in surface water, city flooding, polluting nature, use of energy, dry soil, and plants and water scarcity.

Buildings follow water.

Storing and using rainwater.

Capturing rainwater.

Wastewater treatment.

New ‘water machine’.

Natural principles of wastewater treatment.

Experiencing the ‘water machine’.

Rain is captured on the roofs and stored in water towers.

Water in Motion: Transition to Sponge City Student Shahaf Strickmann Project P5 Tutors Dana Behrman and Maike van Stiphout

As a result of climate change, water plays an increasing role in the way we design our cities. Many countries around the world deal with challenges regarding water such as water scarcity, water pollution and floods. In recent years, we experience more events of extreme heavy rainfall along with long periods of heat and droughts. Especially cities are under pressure of water stress.

In Amsterdam, water has always been an important element and an integrated part of the city. Its economy, culture, transpor­ tation and aesthetics thrive thanks to the water in and around the city. However, already for many years the way water is being managed in Amsterdam is unsustainable. Every day the city im­ ports more than 90 million litres of drinking water to the city for household uses. 40 per cent of this drinking water finds its way directly to toilets and washing machines. After using the water, it is exported to several conventional wastewater treatment plants through an underground sewer system. When the capacity of the sewer gets full after heavy rainfalls, water is discharged into the canal with all its pollutants, and streets flood.

Is there a sustainable way to deal with the water system?

If we create a local and circular water management, we can

improve this system and change peoples’ perspective on water.

In my pro­ject, located at the Marineterrein, I created a water machine that captures rainwater on rooftops for toilet and laundry use and that cleans grey water by using natural pro­cesses.

I use the con­cept of a sponge city, which means that the city deals with its own water sources for a more sustainable and waterresilient urban environment. The water machine I designed imi­ tates prin­ciples of nature and develops an ecosystem to clean wastewater by using soils and plants to purify water from pollut­ ants. After the wastewater is purified through a system of con­structed wetlands, bioponds and biofilters, it can be used for irrigation in dry periods.

Moreover, my design invites people to experience this water experiment and educates a new generation about sustainable water solutions in our urban environment. The future residents of the Marineterrein will form a community that will be respon­ sible for this water machine. They will build it, maintain it and they will give tours for educational programmes. I hope that this project can serve as an example in the process of changing the larger water system.

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The school in Lutkemeer was built in 1936.

HARVEST HOME In this year's design and research studio P4O4, Jo Barnett, Richard Proudley and Jos de Krieger tutored students who produced a harvest map from a disused school building in Lutkemeer, Amsterdam. Jo Barnett reflects on the midterm presentations.

Text JO BARNETT

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The act of harvesting generally carries with it ideas of abundance, of bountiful yields and maturing crops in sunlit and dappled landscapes. Looking into the possibilities of ‘harvesting’ materials for reuse from an abandoned, used building perhaps requires a greater leap of faith and imagination. However, its yield can prove to be just as rewarding.

Abandoned buildings bring with them their own sense of former inhabitation. Use and misuse is readable in the surface of walls, doors and floors, throughout the deserted building shell. In order to successfully reuse as many building materials as possible. we have to look past these previous uses to find new and other imaginative material exploitations.

This year’s P4O4, the ‘Harvesting For Reuse – Work­ing (Away) From Home’ project took as its starting point an abandoned school on the edge of the city, in Lutkemeer, originally built in 1936 in the Amsterdam School Style. A place that sits between the farmed, ‘harvested’ landscape and the highly dense built city environment. The students (Paulina Dominiak, Azat Dzhunushev, Mehmet Hizal, Niccolò Rimoldi, Yangwook Kang and Iris Zoon) used the materials from the existing building for our new studio designs to be placed at the same location.

We designed new individual and collective work places that exploit the very best this location has to offer. A place that allows people (in times of Covid) to work together ‘apart’. This proposal forms a connection between the inside and the outside of the city, which can be of benefit to both: a worthy replacement for a school that once stood at the heart of the local ‘rural’ community. An investigation of the site harvested ideas, while attention to the existing building harvested our building materials.

In order to begin we needed to develop an understanding of what it is to reuse existing, pre-used materials, sometimes from materials that initially appear neither extraordinary nor inspiring. The goal was achieved in our studio by developing an understanding of the harvesting of materials on three different levels.

To begin, the school building was dissected architecturally, in order to discover the different elements it was composed of. A design was developed that reused the available materials. The new proposal incorporated new volumes and textures redefined by our new programme.

It is necessary to really understand the materials of the building. This means measuring, drawing, counting, calculating and observing the existing building and in so doing, understanding how things were built and used in the first place. Then we have to investigate how materials might be taken apart. Which part of a window frame is demountable and which part is not? What do we have that’s possible to reuse, perhaps not necessarily in the same configuration?

Our second exercise was continuous waste observation. Each student took a walk in their home local­ ity (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague) and made an inventory of abandoned materials that they encountered. Not surprisingly, in just a short walk a variety of materials were identified that had been ‘thrown away’ and could potentially be exploited in a building project. Each student was invited to ‘gather’ these for their personal studio design palette.

Finally we visited existing projects that share the same ambitions. Due to Covid restrictions these were timetabled throughout the run of the project. Up until the midterm, we made a visit to Blue City, a former subtropical swimming pool in Rotterdam that is now a circular materials hub. Another visit was planned for Hof van Cartesius, in Utrecht. Hof van Cartesius accommodates a community of artists, entrepreneurs and builders who are currently engaged in creating their own shared work environment. These examples demonstrate successful and imaginative approaches to the reuse of materials. The students were also invited to ‘gather’ extra materials for their palette during these visits, in order to develop their studio design project should that prove necessary.

Working as a group, we created a comprehensive harvest map of the existing school building to make clear what we had at our disposal to exploit for our new designs. The original building, for example, is predominantly brick (how much?) with a large pitched terracotta tiled roof (how many tiles, what profile?) and has chimneys and fire places. The building is heated by a distribution system contained in a dado in the hall walls that are made of a terrazzo-like material. Assuming most of this is demountable, where might we exploit these in our new design? What parts of the building might remain and be reconfigured?

All materials were measured and collected together into a harvest file. Individually, each student was also asked to create a graphic harvest map, which became their own personal palette. The design project had to accept and work within the limits of the materials available, imaginatively reconfiguring where necessary. Tiles, for example, could become screens, brickwork could radically alter depending on how the bricks were laid and placed. Floors could potentially become walls and ceilings could become floors.

Ultimately, we wanted to be able to show how much of the existing materials were used in each design, but also what had been deemed unfit for reuse.

This opens up a whole new perspective on which materials are reusable from existing buildings, while also creatively reconfiguring a local public building into a modern and usable work space.

Students measured the building inside and out.

big thank you to Leon de Weerd and Bewaakt & Bewoond A Amsterdam, who allowed us to use the Lutkemeer School building as our study example.

Models showing different components of the school building.

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‘THE GREAT THING ABOUT CITIES IS: THEY RARELY DIE’ Roman Krznaric, author of The Good Ancestor and founding faculty member of The School of Life in London, was one of the speakers in the C4C6 lecture series Beyond Peak Indifference. In this interview, he discusses the ideas behind his book.

Text

DAVID KEUNING

On 19 May, philosopher and author Roman Krznaric gave a lecture at the Academy in the C4C6 lecture series. With students, he discussed the topics covered in his book The Good Ancestor, in which he writes about the possibilities of giving future generations a voice in current policy decisions, in order to achieve sustainability. Prior to the lecture, he talked about the ideal city, the importance of long-term thinking, the potential of citizen’s assemblies, and possibilities for rewilding in a densely populated country like the Netherlands. Krznaric: ‘We need artists who are dreaming.’

bank. We need all of that. We need artists who are dreaming. I write in my book about the Scottish artist Katy Paterson, who’s doing a 100-year art project. In the Netherlands, you have the eco cathedral, which began in the 1970s and has a constitution for the coming 1,000 years. That works for some people, but other people say: no, I want to stop an airplane taking off. As a writer, one of the best ways to write a book is to have a certain ambiguity, or an openness recognizing that you have different kinds of readers. There are always ideas that I find personally interesting, like the citizen’s assembly, but I think one should not be too dictatorial.

DAVID KEUNING

DK

Your book is an appeal to man’s moral responsibility. It deals a lot with large systems and less with practical, everyday decisions that could be made on the basis of personal responsibility. You mention things in passing but the book is not a to-do list. Is that because you think that the reader should decide for him or herself how this responsibility should be given shape, or because those decisions depend on the particular circumstances in different parts of the world?

ROMAN KRZNARIC This question makes me think about my grandmother, actually. My grandmother was a member of the communist party in Australia. In the 1930s, progressive people – many on the centre-left – drifted towards communism. It provided an answer: a one-size-fits-all solution to global problems.

Now, I don’t have the view that there is a one-size-fits-all solution. I do believe that ideas can change societies.

It’s true that my book doesn’t list solutions in the way that many books do. At its core is the idea of the good ancestor. There’s a whole, unseen nation of people in the future. I borrowed that idea from Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction writer. Future generations are like a great nation who have no voice, whose views are not represented in our economic systems.

When it comes to taking those future generations into account, there are a lot of ways to do it. There’s the structural and the individual level. An example on a structural level is legal reform. In the United States there’s a movement to give legal rights to future generations. It’s called Our Children’s Trust, which I write about in the book. In some ways, the Urgenda case is a bit like this too. It’s trying to establish rights for young people and future generations to get their nations to reduce the emission of carbon dioxides, for instance. In the United States, I was talking to the head of Our Children’s Trust. We were discussing the fact that some countries are pursuing rights for the living world, like the Embassy of the North Sea in the Netherlands. She said that in the United States, that approach is probably not going to work. You need to ground it in individual rights there. When it comes to structural change, there are all these different approaches that you could take. It depends on the configuration of the country.

As far as the individual level is concerned, we’re all different. Some people are introverts and want to write poems about climate change. Others are extra­ verts and want to go on a direct action protest and lock themselves onto a

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What do you think the role of architects, urban de­ signers and landscape architects is in giving concrete form to this responsibility? You write about cities as city-states and about regenerative or circular design, but both descriptions are fairly brief. What do you think the ideal city of the future looks like?

RK There’s always a frustration in writing a book where you can only go into things briefly. I’m very interested in the idea of the Renaissance city-state, or the Hanseatic League, or the C40 cities network. When you look into the history of long-term thinking and long-term planning over the last 5,000 years, so much of it comes out of the rise urbanism. In 479 BC the inhabitants of the ancient Greek city of Miletus made the first grid plan, that’s two and a half thousand years ago! That’s an excellent example of long-term planning. The Segovia Aqueduct is another example. All of the great cities had planning for sanitation and so on. You can particularly see that in the nineteenth century with the rise of the great public works projects. The Haussmann boulevards in Paris and the Bazalgette sewers in London are all great examples of cities taking the long view.

The great thing about cities is: they rarely die. Ancient cities like Istanbul have been around for thousands of years while nations and empires have risen and fallen around them. One of the reasons – not the only one – is their capacity to plan.

Just this morning I was reading about the National Planning and Environmental Strategy of the Netherlands [Nationale Omgevingsvisie NOVI] and the Leipzig Charter about the urban development for the European Union. The interesting thing about the NOVI is that it explicitly talks about future generations. In meeting the needs of the current generations, policymaking should not side-line future generations.

I have no expertise in architecture, unfortunately. But it’s clear that urban designers and architects have such a huge role to play in determining the livelihoods of future generations. There’s the Netherlands with a quarter of the country below sea level. People say: the future is unpredictable. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Well, we don’t know if 2049 will be like Blade Runner 2049 and the machines will have taken over. On a technological level we know very little, but we know a lot about the ecological future. With business as usual we are heading to 3 to 4 degrees heating and 1 to 2 metres of sea level rise. That means that the architects and planners of the world are going to become more important than the economists.

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DK

Do you say that because they have to mitigate the consequences or because they have to do what they already do in a responsible way?

RK I guess both. The responsibility is growing at an exponential rate. When you look at a map of global sea level rises in the next 50 or 100 years, is the world’s urban centres, which are often coastal, where the action has to happen. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140, Manhattan is under 50 feet of water. It’s all about: What happens to the buildings? What happens to the streets? How do people get food? This morning I was watching a TEDx talk by Tim van Hattum. He’s part of a team at Wageningen University developing a new map of the Netherlands and thinking about natural carbon solutions.

That’s partly about thinking what you build buildings out of. For instance: building them out of timber or bio-bricks that have been grown from microorganisms.

DK

When you walk through the city of the future in your mind, in 2050, what do you see?

RK Well, the first thing I would see is governance structures. I would see, for instance, a town square where everybody is wearing these orange coats from the Future Design movement in Japan, which I write about in my book, where they dress up and imagine themselves 40 or 50 years into the future. I imagine an ancient Greek square where people are gathered dressed up in the robes of their town or city, making decisions. What investment are we going to do into our water infrastructure? What action are we going to take on the climate crisis? I would also see kids on street corners looking at their phones and instead of clicking a buy-now button, they’re clicking a buy-later button. People would have hacked technology for the long term. When they click buy later, there’s a drop-down menu that says: buy in a month, buy in a year or borrow from a friend. I know someone who’s developing that app, it’s called mindfulcart.com.

I would see a public building – a ministry or council for the future – where there are legal cases going on where a river is being represented and defended. Spaces would of course be for the long term too. I would see biomimicry everywhere.

I would see timber skyscrapers.

There’s a beautiful book by Calvino, called Invisible Cities. It’s about Marco Polo describing Venice to the great Kublai Kahn. It’s like 30 years since I’ve read it – I can’t remember it in detail – but somewhere it describes how you walk into this city and there are these invisible lines of connections between people – relationships – which you can’t see but that are there. When I think about that city of the future, I’m seeing invisible lines of connections to future generations. The demos, who we are as citizens, is expanded.

DK

A page from the book The Good Ancestor by Roman Krznaric.

Invisible Cities is of course in a very long tradition of texts about ideal cities. They can be helpful in imagining a better future.

RK You can pick up a millions books about what the ideal city looks like, but what’s often missing is the politics.

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Good that you bring that up. In your book, you stress the importance of citizens’ assemblies. You mention them as an alternative to national governments and as a possibility to come to good decision making that takes into account the interests of future generations and the Earth itself. But who says that these citizens’ assemblies make the right decisions? I find your trust that they do commendable, but I have my doubts. We have just had elections in the Netherlands in March and far right-wing parties have gained seats in parliament. Apart from that, citizens have very diverse and opposing interests. In the Netherlands, this is clearly visible in the nitrogen issue. The Dutch countryside suffers greatly from nitrogen emissions, much of which come from intensive livestock farming and also from building projects. Following the Urgenda ruling, the state is obliged to ensure that these emissions are reduced. As a result, many housing projects have come to a standstill, with negative conse­quences for the already enormous housing shortage and the consequent skyrocketing house prices. Farmers are potentially being forced to reduce the size of their herds, leading to recurring protests in The Hague and elsewhere. The measures to reduce nitrogen emissions are necessary, but they have many harmful side effects for families and their livelihoods. In this context, I do not see people making decisions that negatively affect their own existence. In my opinion, this is only possible if there is a government that compensates for the negative consequences as much as possible.

And this brings us back to a national government that takes the initiative. What is your opinion on this?

RK That’s a big question. First of all: what’s happening to democracy today, is that it’s dying. We’re seeing the rise of far-right populism across Europe and elsewhere, in Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, etcetera. There’s waning faith in democracy, in traditional parties. I was looking at some data today, showing that 75 per cent of United States citizens who were born in the 1930s think it’s important to live in a democracy, while only 30 per cent of those born in the 1980s think it’s important to live in a democracy. The figures across Europe are similar. In other words, there’s something big going on. There’s a declining faith in democratic institutions, which I think is a bad thing.

That’s partly why there’s this movement for citizens’ assemblies. It’s one of the ways to revive democracy when there’s declining trust in traditional politics for dealing with problems, whether it’s long-term unemployment, or the climate crisis, or immigration. So then there’s the question: are citizens’ assemblies a good idea? It’s fair to raise this question, because we’re very inexperienced with this. The ancient Greeks were very good at it, but of course they had a very narrow constituency of people who were included. I recently took part in a citizens’ assembly as an expert witness. It was in the north of England, in North of Tyne.

It’s traditionally quite a poor area, about a million people live there. They have a climate assembly, and there are 50 people chosen from across different socioeconomic, gender and age groups. It was really fascinating. It’s hard work because nobody is an expert. They have people like me coming in to talk about intergenerational justice, for instance. They’re expensive to run and hard to do well.

Of course, we’re used to the idea of a legal jury. We’ve accepted that idea.

This is an idea for a jury for policy decisions. Now, this doesn’t mean that the citizens’ assembly is always going to be right. One of the dynamics we see, is that citizens’ assemblies are better at taking a long-term view than current politicians, who think in short-term election cycles. And yet, of course, this doesn’t mean that they’re going to be perfect. My general view is that they need to be one among different kinds of voices. Citizens’ assemblies are pretty good at representing a plurality of futures. The problem with thinking about the future as it’s done by Silicon Valley futurists is that they have a very narrow view of what matters. Someone who’s been involved in the Black Lives Matter movement will say that the future that matters is a future that doesn’t pass on racial injustices from generation to generation. Somebody else is worried about artificial intelligence. Somebody else is involved in climate change. So we need all these different futures.

Going back to the specific topic of Urgenda, nitrogen emissions, the housing crises and farmers’ interests: one thing that’s going on is that there’s a winwin ideology, which has become increasingly pervasive in the last two or three decades. The idea that you can have change without anybody losing out. It’s an unwillingness to accept the idea of sacrifice. That comes through economics, marketing and all sorts of different intellectual ideologies. They say: you could have it all. But the reality is that there are costs to change. I remember being in a meeting with someone who was a candidate to being the mayor of London. He was sitting next to me. He said to me: people just don’t want to pay for climate change. They don’t want to pay higher taxes. I said to him: it depends on what question you ask. If you ask people: do you want to pay higher taxes, of course everyone says no.

An anecdote: in Japan, there’s a small town called Yahaba with 30,000 inhabi­ tants. In the beginning, nobody wanted to pay higher taxes for new water infrastructure. They started a citizens’ assembly, where they basically said: if we invest in the water infrastructure now, it will help your children and grandchildren. And then people agreed to a 6 per cent increase in taxes. It’s not a big amount, but it’s real. We need to make an imaginative leap and, yes, there’s a cost involved, in the same way that Sir Joseph William Bazalgette, chief civil engineer of the London sewers, built an expensive infrastructure that has lasted until today.

One of the things we have learned from Covid is that states and governments can do anything. In Britain, a right-wing government has paid the salaries of millions of people. It’s absolutely incredible. So it’s inevitable that when we’re talking

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about economic transitions – and we’re going through the fastest economic transition in history – you’re going to need to subsidize stuff. People will lose jobs. If farmers are going to be unhappy, you need to find ways to help them through the transition period. I don’t think there’s any easy way around that. But I also don’t think there has to be a contradiction between national government and power to the people, in the form of citizens’ assemblies or any other form. Citizens’ assemblies can inform governments to take action.

DK

In your book, you also discuss the possibilities for rewilding. The Netherlands is a densely populated country, but it does have some experience with rewilding. The Oostvaardersplassen is a nature reserve of about 56 km2. It was the most important Dutch attempt at rewilding, but it has failed. In the winters, animals died of starvation, leading to culling and subsequent protests. People started feeding the animals.

Of course, the Netherlands is an extreme example, considering its dense population and the fact that large swaths of land are manmade anyway, but to a lesser extent this problem is also present in other densely populated European countries. Is rewilding even possible in Europe?

RK This goes back to the one-size-fits-all thing. My instinct is that for somewhere like the Netherlands, what’s important is not necessarily rewilding itself, but nature-based climate solutions more broadly. How do we switch people to plant-based foods, so that we don’t have all this livestock and therefore all this nitrogen runoff? How do we restore wetlands or plant more trees, which can sequester carbon? All of these things are maybe not necessarily rewilding in the sense of the classic Yellowstone park where you bring a wolf in and there’s a trophic cascade and suddenly the deer go away and the beavers come back. But it’s about the same thing: find solutions using the living world and embed those in society. Of course there are always challenges where there are highly dense, urban societies involved. Tim van Hattum’s research group is very into nature-based solutions to all of these things and I think that’s the way to go.

Rewilding is a subset of these broader solutions. Clearly it makes more sense in some countries than in others.

Going back to what I was saying in the beginning, this is really about the core question: How can we be good ancestors? It’s about a kind of consciousness of the possibility of chance. In the UK, until the early twentieth century, the idea that women should be given votes didn’t even occur to people. Today we’re in a situation where the idea of giving representation to future generations seems like mad. Well, one day it won’t look mad. It won’t feel mad, it won’t sound mad.

The same with the idea of giving rights to a river. The Whanganui River in New Zealand now has the rights of a person. I recently spoke to Dutch environmental lawyer Jan van de Venis and he’s involved in some of these legal cases and rights for the living world. Maybe 50 years from now there’ll be a law against ecocide and a case at the international criminal court in The Hague. These things look a bit crazy now, but we’re in a transition period. It’s about the imagination of possibilities for a better future.

Photo Kate Raworth

DK

Roman Krznaric: ‘Today we’re in a situation where the idea of giving representation to future generations seems like mad. Well, one day it won’t look mad.’

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DEAR FUTURE, For the sake of nature’s beings, we write to you today. We grew up with big dreams about you, but now it sounds like fiction: to have enough water and to breathe clean air.

There are constantly reminders that time is running out …

Say no to that purchase, don’t you dare travel by plane, or watch the straw you are putting into that margarita, it might end up deep in a turtle’s nose. Someone in the newspaper even talked about us the other day. They call ‘eco-anxiety’ a mental disorder and said that we, ‘ambushed by uncertainty and blame … are our hope to save our species and a million more’.

There is no denial, this is a call for us to act now, and how we do so will be key to winning this race. There is no time to waste anymore by being craven; we don’t want to fear, we want to be strong and compassionate, as we dare to dream once again. Whatever happens, history must be on our side.

Our drive in the present cannot be spoiled by the mistakes of the past. We choose to reject our inheritance, whose leaders and systems have failed to care for you. You will see us working hard and making you brighter, we trust you will be brighter.

Dearest of futures, it is decided. When we pedal our bikes, when we choose the fair-trade salad, when we fix, and twice fix and three times fix our worn-out jeans, we are rebelling in a new lifestyle. Every action will be a statement that prepares us for the moment we finally meet you. You shall embrace us then, with open arms like a long-expected friend. Until then, we will be simple beings, though highly knowledgeable and aware. We are looking forward to meeting you then, when experience turns into grey hairs.

Truly yours, The Sustainability Student Group Amsterdam Academy of Architecture

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FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Gavin Fraser wrote his O5 paper on the possibilities of recycling Amsterdam food waste and its use for the building industry.

He was tutored by Jeanne Tan. This article is a summary of a much more extensive research paper.

Text

GAVIN FRASER

In Amsterdam, much of the current food system is broken and the city’s relationship with food is environmentally unsustainable. On a global scale, food production constitutes 25 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions, primarily created by the use of manure as fertilizer and the energy required for food production. The Netherlands imports approxi­mately € 61.4 billion worth of food annually,¹ wraps it in 26 bil­lion pieces of plastic packaging a year² and then wastes 30 per cent of all food.³ The import of food results in a significant carbon impact on the planet, as does the production and disposal of plastic food packaging. Unsurprisingly, these environmental impacts are compounded further when food is wasted, with energy inputs required for the refrigeration, trans­port, sale, packaging, preparation and delivery of food also being wasted if the food is not consumed.

The scale of the food waste problem becomes clear when considering that in the Netherlands alone, 6.21 billion kg of food is consumed each year (about 1 kg per person per day)⁴ and between 1.77 to 2.55 billion kg of food is wasted annually.⁵ In addition to the environmental damage this waste produces, there is also an obvious and important moral dilemma involved with this food waste; with food scarcity being a very present affliction. Worldwide, 1 in 9 people do not get enough to eat.⁶ A city like Amsterdam requires a sustainable food system to survive in the coming years. Amsterdam’s food culture, therefore, needs to change. In that vein, local food initiatives are a growing phenomenon in the city, with small-scale communal efforts raising awareness and contributing to a rich research body in the context of urban food production, sale, logistics and waste. Supporting this is the City of Amsterdam, with its ambitious plans for a regional food solution, as detailed in the Amsterdam Circular Strategy 2021–2025.⁷ It is clear that the city has lofty goals for urban agriculture and local food systems, but concurrently has high amounts of food waste. To create this regional food system, urban agricultural practices must be increased, meanwhile decreasing food waste, repurposing any waste for beneficial purposes and finding potential solutions to common food culture woes in the process. Indeed, in this paper, I will ask if there is

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a way to develop these sustainable urban food ambitions, meanwhile reducing food waste, high fossil fuel energy dependence and plastic usage.

population of Amsterdam (1,132,000 inhabitants in 2018) the numbers equate to 109 million kg and 149 million kg per year, respectively.¹³

AMSTERDAM’S CURRENT FOOD SYSTEM A food system is any entity touched by food along its process from production to consumption.

Although the current Amsterdam food system is unsustainable, efforts are being made to change this.

According to the City of Amsterdam and its urban farming tracking map, there are 131 kitchen gardens, 16 herb gardens, 21 petting zoos, 15 city farms, 4 food cooperatives, 5 vertical farms and 5 food forests.⁸ The city has high long-term ambitions to create a more circular food system. In the Amsterdam Circular Strategy 2021–2025, it reads: ‘The ambition is to initiate a system change in which Amsterdam (together with the Metropolitan Region Amsterdam) strives towards a robust regional food system.’⁹ As these urban food initiatives start to garner results, fulfilling a circular food system that the city desires, numerous challenges will be faced. Finding ways to power urban food systems will be a continual challenge, especially as more people move to the city and more energy is required. Additionally, the unsustainable food culture we currently entertain does not necessarily erode upon the realization of a regional food system. Evidently, the city desires having a circular food system by 2050,¹⁰ but will it be formed solely of private initiatives?

WHY IS FOOD BEING WASTED? So just why is this food being wasted? In our homes, food is wasted for several reasons. Sell-by dates on labelling were reported by 30 per cent of consumers to be the reason for disposing of food, with a further 28 per cent reporting that they throw away food because keeping food would result in leftovers that would not be consumed. From a municipal level, the lack of availability to dispose of food properly – for example, green bins – leads to food being paired with other non-recyclable waste. Therefore – and rather damningly – purely the absence of choice precludes the option to treat food waste in a more sustainable way. According to Het Parool newspaper, the reasoning for this lack of waste separation is that around the turn of the century, most Amsterdam areas concluded that it was not possible to have separate waste bins for organic waste, with the lack of space in dense urban neighbourhoods, the smell and indiscriminate waste incineration of the AEB being cited as the primary reasons for this failure.¹⁴

WHAT IS THE SCALE OF THE FOOD WASTE PROBLEM? Notwithstanding these advancing efforts, the city has a food waste dilemma. That being said, it is a dilemma that is hard to quantify, with most figures being on a national level. As quoted before, according to the Netherlands Nutrition Centre, on the national level, it is estimated that between 1.77 to 2.55 billion kg of food is wasted each year.¹¹ This figure is inclusive of food waste in the average household and looks at the total food industry. Figures from the University of Wageningen for food waste in 2018 place the amount of food waste as between 96 kg and 149 kg per person per year.¹² Applied to the metropolitan

THE CONSEQUENCES Now that we have ascertained the quantity of food waste, its origin and the reasons why it is being wasted, the question arises: Why is this a problem?

Beyond the moral element that many people do not have enough to eat, seven in ten Dutch people questioned also cite money as another strong factor in their opinion that food waste is unacceptable. In the Netherlands, 2.5 billion euros worth of food is wasted each year by household consumers alone.¹⁵ Furthermore, the loss of energy from food waste due to the intense energy requirements involved in getting food from farm – the production – to fork is a major consequence. Despite our very best unsustainable efforts, the Netherlands is still a global leader in sustainable food production. Indeed, National Geographic touted: ‘At every turn in the Netherlands, the future of sustainable agriculture is taking shape.’¹⁶

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WHERE DOES THE FOOD WASTE GO? Certainly, the way in which Amsterdam deals with food waste must change and this brings us to the Amsterdam energy company AEB. Almost all the food waste in Amsterdam is incinerated, with the primary reason for this being a current lack of municipal waste separation options for residents. The AEB deals with 15 per cent of Dutch national waste plus imported waste from overseas.²¹ According to the AEB, this total waste equates to 1.4 million tonnes of waste processed each year in Amsterdam.²² Indeed, according to Het Parool: ‘Currently, 70 per cent of all waste that the Amsterdam waste processor AEB burns is organic, such as biomass, to produce “green” energy.’²³ Of the total waste, 59 per cent is incinerated for energy production, with 70 per cent of this being food or of organic origin.

THE SMALL SCALE It is not all bad news, however. Besides the larger municipal strategies, food waste is being dealt with on a smaller scale. Although a small proportion of the total food waste treated in Amsterdam, these initiatives provide opportunities through composting and the reuse of food to eat. Around Amsterdam, in addition to personal at-home composting bins, there are already over 80 community composting points.

In addition to composting, there are additional initiatives to deal with waste in other ways, with a focus on consumption. Additionally, as previously discussed, a considerable portion of food waste originates from restaurants and supermarkets. Taste Before You Waste is an organization that collects 250 kg of food waste each week from supermarkets and grocers, with the aim to redistribute this waste to charities and people in need. Although these measures contribute to the repurposing of food waste, they are also undeniably on a small scale compared with the overall food waste situation in Amsterdam.

Photo Amy Barkow courtesy of The Living

The Mushroom Tower was built in the MoMA PS1 courtyard in 2014.

It was designed by David Benjamin of The Living.

Photo Colt Arup SCC

However, having a more efficient system serves little purpose if the food is wasted and with it the inordinate quantities of invested energy and water.

Indeed, according to the Dutch Ministry of Economic affairs, in the Netherlands alone, it is estimated that with each kilogram of food wasted, 1.3 litres of petrol is also wasted.¹⁷ Using the already established food waste figures for the Netherlands, this results in 3.3 billion litres of petrol a year.

Beyond the mere energy consumption in the production of food, greenhouse gases emitted from the processing of food waste also contribute to our growing climate catastrophe. Generally, food waste in Amsterdam is incinerated for energy – approximately 1 per cent of the total Dutch output (this is included as a sustainable energy source). Waste-toenergy incineration plants emit a greater quantity of CO2 per kilowatt hour than traditional fossil fuelbased energy plants – such as coal and gas.¹⁸ In addition, the lack of efficiency in waste-to-energy plants, which is only 30 per cent in Amsterdam¹⁹ and high energy inputs into sorting and processing waste result in some cases where waste-to-energy plants use more energy than they produce.²⁰ Lastly, the growing prevalence and reliance on these waste-toenergy incinerators is being criticized for the possibility in which it will impart complacency and discourage recycling, wasting less and managing waste in more sustainable ways – such as composting.

Built in 2011-2013 for the Internationale Bauaustellung in Hamburg, the Algae House has façade panels filled with algae, contributing to a net-zero energy building. The façade was engineered by Arup.

WE CAN DO BETTER Looking forward, how can we materialize the circular food system ambitions of Amsterdam? We should work with what we are already doing, while reiterating that we can do better. Many local initiatives in Amsterdam to combat food waste have an emphasis on the redistribution of edible food. While this is com­ mendable, it is important to remember that, according to the Netherlands Nutrition Centre, edible and still packaged food comprises a minority of the total food waste. Approximately 5 kg of food waste per person per year is still packaged or consists of unpeeled fruit and vegetables.²⁴ Therefore, we can say that most of the food waste is from spoiled foods, or food that has passed its use-by date; so let us focus on that.

As we now know, there are some small-scale compost units around the city and the idea has wider potential to be implemented on a municipal scale.

Composting is a natural process that has been used for a considerable period to deal with waste through

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natural decomposition of organic material, gleaning useful by-products in the process. Compost piling is an apt example of this, wherein the concept is as rudimentary as ‘piling’ waste outside in a well ventilated and wet enough location. Once you scale aerobic compost piling up to a municipal level, it is possible to also compost meat, fish and bone waste, which is not traditionally possible in personal domestic compost piles. The process of the open compost pile also applies when the same waste is placed in large containers that are porous enough for oxygen penetration, which also allows for composting to happen year-round. Because of the scale of this process, it is not appropriate for dense urban areas with little personal outside space. Alternatively, anaerobic composting does not rely on oxygen. The Bokashi composting method relies on fermentation to produce a nutrient-rich slurry of food waste and is small enough to fit in any kitchen. Beyond the household level of advantages, dealing with food waste in our own homes carries with it some key positives. Primarily, dealing with food waste on a small-scale level with these systems could remove the burden from a larger-scale municipal composting system, such as the aerated composting system discussed before. By dealing with most of the waste in the home, the speed of composting on the municipal level becomes less of a detriment and reduces the required size and costs of municipal influence.

This division on a household and municipal level can also stimulate greater responsibility for waste and thereby reduce the quantity of food waste that we generate. In Amsterdam’s current model, all food waste is grouped indiscriminately with other waste flows and therefore, it’s impossible to appreciate the scale and the destination of the waste. Indeed, according to the Netherlands Nutrition Centre, most people believe they waste less food than they do, with the lack of contact and visibility with waste on a household and metropolitan level likely a contributing reason for this.²⁵ This out of sight-out of mind approach to food waste can create a rift between the actual waste volume and city dwellers’ perception thereof. It is reasonable to say, then, that if they start placing waste in a specific Bokashi composting container in their homes and in the process apply a certain ritual of placing waste into this process, then the awareness of food waste and its management as a personal responsibility could become habitual and an everyday part of life in the city. This is not unrealistic as, in the Netherlands, 80 per cent of people say they are willing to take personal action to prevent food waste.²⁶ And rather conclusively, people who show personal commitment by being proactive with composting and sorting waste, also waste less food.²⁷ The by-product from this composting and processing of food waste is, of course, compost. If Amsterdam were to switch to this methodology of waste processing, large quantities of compost would start being generated. Because food waste could be managed on both the individual and municipal level, this compost could be widely available in Amsterdam,

providing high-quality topsoil. Additionally, large-scale composting generates heat. This heating could also be widely available at low cost to the consumer.

BEYOND COMPOST Beyond the composting initiatives, physical products can also be produced. Widely applicable to many functions, we shall explore food waste as construction material, new forms of plastics, fabrics and other useful household items.

It is now possible to create construction materials from various forms of food waste, allowing the creation of physical infrastructure for the production and maintenance of an urban circular food system.

The importance of finding new and degradable materials for construction is important, as according to Arup up to 30 per cent of waste in the EU is from the construction industry, primarily from demolition.²⁸ Additionally, creating construction materials from food waste has financial benefits. Once food or organic waste is converted to building material, its value increases. According to the Urban Bioloop report, the increase of value is over 500 per cent, from 0.85 euros per kilogram for food waste as incineration material, to from 5 to 6 euros per kilogram as a construction material.²⁹ It is now possible to use rice waste to create building blocks and even corn and peanut waste to create a sheet material like plywood as well as insulation material.

Besides construction materials, we can do much more. Seashells and fish skin are continually and indiscriminately placed with other wastes, although growing evidence and case studies suggest their potential to address many of today’s issues, singleuse plastics for one. Coffee and tea waste, which few people consider useful, can find a home in the production of new fake leathers and fabrics.³⁰ Waste that is not composted or recycled through these means can still be used at the table: dishware can be manufactured from food waste. Kosuke Araki, an artist and designer who lives in Japan, has created a set of individual dishware pieces composed entirely of food waste, using fruit and vegetable waste to create ash and fish and meat waste to create an adhesive agent.³¹ The significance of creating dishware from food waste is a perfect conclusion to this analysis of food waste as a possible answer to the challenges of a circular food system in Amsterdam. The significance of personally transforming food waste into something as apparently trivial and mundane as dishware highlights the seemingly broad scalability and range of applications that food waste retains. Food waste has potential on a municipal scale to power, heat and educate stakeholders in an urban environment, support local initiatives and contribute to a local food system.

But it is also clear that there are many more opportunities, from creating architecture and homes with food waste materials, to facilitating interventions in the urban fabric of our cities, to the humble bowl.

Food waste is a blight, but it is also a tool. With great waste comes great opportunities.

TômTex is a leather alternative made from waste seafood shells and coffee grounds. The material was developed by Vietnamese designer Uyen Tran.

1.5 °C

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Kosuke Araki conceived the Anima table ware collection. The cups, plates and bowls are made by combining carbonised vegetable waste and glue produced from the bones and skin of animal offcuts.

1 M. Dolman, G. Jukema and P. Ramaekers, De Nederlandse landbouwexport in 2018 in breder perspectief (Wageningen Economic Research, 2019), 12, edepot.wur.nl/468099 2 Plastic verpakkingen in de voedingssector: Zes manieren om de plastic puzzel te lijf te gaan (ING Economisch Bureau, 2019), 5, ing.nl/media/ING_EBZ_de-plastic-puzzel-in-devoedingssector_tcm162-180782.pdf 3 ‘Netherlands Throws Away 5 Million Kilos of Food Every Day: Report’, NL Times, 5 February 2019, nltimes.nl/2019/02/05/ netherlands-throws-away-5-million-kilos-food-every-day-report 4 Food Consumption in the Netherlands and Its Determinants: Background Report to ‘What’s on Our Plate? Safe, Healthy and Sustainable Diets in the Netherlands’ (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, 2016), 5, rivm.nl/ bibliotheek/rapporten/2016-0195.pdf 5 C. van Dooren and F. Mensink, Consumer Food Waste Fact Sheet (Voedingscentrum, 2018), 1, voedingscentrum.nl/ Assets/Uploads/voedingscentrum/Documents/Professionals/ Pers/Factsheets/Factsheet%20voedselverspilling.pdf 6 2019 – Hunger Map (United Nations World Food Programme, 2019), wfp.org/publications/2019-hunger-map 7 Amsterdam Circular 2020–2025 Strategy (City of Amsterdam, 2020), 36-54, assets.amsterdam.nl/publish/pages/867635/ amsterdam-circular-2020-2025_strategy.pdf 8 Stadslandbouw (City of Amsterdam). Accessed 1 November 2020 at maps.amsterdam.nl/stadslandbouw 9 Amsterdam Circular 2020-2025 Strategy, op. cit. (note 7), 36.

10 Ibid., 17.

11 Van Dooren and Mensink, Consumer Food Waste Fact Sheet, op. cit. (note 5).

12 Monitor Voedselverspilling Update 2009–2018 (Wageningen University and Research, 2020), 1-2, doi.org/10.18174/522604 13 World Population Review. Accessed 29 March 2021 at worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/amsterdampopulation 14 B. van Zoelen, ‘Voor Amsterdam is gft scheiden een enorme overgang’, Het Parool, 2 February 2016. Accessed 29 March 2021 at parool.nl/nieuws/voor-amsterdam-is-gftscheiden-een-enorme-overgang~b035e3f5/ 15 Facts and Figures on Consumer Food Waste in 2013: How Much Food Is Wasted by Consumers? (Ministry of Economic Affairs, 2014), 2, government.nl/binaries/government/ documents/publications/2014/01/30/facts-and-figures-onconsumer-food-waste-in-2013/factsheet-voedselverspillinghuishoudens-december2013-gov.pdf 16 F. Viviano, ‘This Tiny Country Feeds the World’, National Geographic, September 2017. Accessed 29 March 2021 at nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/hollandagriculture-sustainable-farming/ 17 Facts and Figures on Consumer Food Waste, op. cit. (note 15), 2.

18 S. Muznik, ‘9 Reasons Why We Better Move Away from Waste-to-Energy, and Embrace Zero Waste Instead’, Zero Waste Europe, 27 February 2018. Accessed 29 March 2021

The Carrelé wall tiles are produced from discarded eggshells. They were created by designer Elaine Yan Ling Ng.

at zerowasteeurope.eu/2018/02/9-reasons-why-webetter-move-away-from-waste-to-energy-and-embrace-zerowaste-instead/ 19 For a Clean Society (AEB Amsterdam, 2015), 2. Cf. Martin J. Murer et al., ‘High Efficient Waste-to-Energy in Amsterdam: Getting Ready for the Next Steps’, Waste Management & Research 29/10, supplement (2011), 21, doi.org/10.1177/ 0734242X11413334 20 ‘Facts about “Waste-to-Energy” Incinerators’, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (2018), 1. Accessed 29 March 2021 at no-burn.org/wp-content/uploads/GAIA-Facts-aboutWTE-incinerators-Jan2018-1.pdf 21 R. Koops, ‘Niemand wil het Amsterdamse afval hebben’, Het Parool, 9 August 2019. Accessed 29 March 2021 at parool.nl/nieuws/niemand-wil-het-amsterdamse-afvalhebben~b7103e77/ 22 For a Clean Society, op. cit. (note 19), 2.

23 V. de Kok en F. Savini, ‘Amsterdam circulair? Vooral mooipraterij van de gemeente’, Het Parool, 26 April 2020.

Accessed 29 March 2021 at parool.nl/nieuws/amsterdamcirculair-vooral-mooipraterij-van-degemeente~b4b17525/ 24 Van Dooren and Mensink, Consumer Food Waste Fact Sheet, op. cit. (note 5), 7.

25 Ibid., 3.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 The Urban Bio-Loop: Growing, Making and Regenerating (ARUP, 2017), 7, arup.com/-/media/arup/files/publications/ u/the-urban-bioloop.pdf 29 Ibid., 22.

30 J. Hahn, ‘TômTex Is a Leather Alternative Made from Waste Seafood Shells and Coffee Grounds’, Dezeen, 22 August 2020. Accessed 29 March 2021 at dezeen.com/2020/08/22/ tomtex-leather-alternative-biomaterial-seafood-shells-coffee/ 31 G. Yalcinkaya, ‘Kosuke Araki Turns Food Waste into Tableware’, Dezeen, 25 May 2018. Accessed 29 March 2021 at dezeen.com/2018/05/25/kosuke-araki-food-wastetableware-homeware-design/

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COURAGE

Architect and philosopher Jetske van Oosten was an external member of the jury that selected the Archiprix nominations of the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. On the occasion of the Graduation Show she gave a lecture, of which this article is an edited version.

Text Photos

JETSKE VAN OOSTEN JONATHAN ANDREW

EDUCATION

2020 has been a crazy year for all of us, and especially for this years’ graduates. After months of hard work they are now ready for their next step as professional designers. The world lies at their feet.

However, the world has drastically changed from the world as they knew it. What can they expect to happen next?

We don’t know what the future will bring. The uncertainty about the future is tangible in every aspect of our society. And yet, based on the work I have seen of the graduates of 2020, I’m convinced that if anyone can cope with the uncertainty that the world is facing today, it’s them. Based on their graduation projects I’m certain that they will manage to find their way in the world, and in the field of architecture, landscape design and urbanism in particular.

In fact, I would like to put it even stronger. I believe that society as a whole can benefit from the way the complexity of the world in its current state and uncertainty about its future was addressed in the graduation projects. Therefore the question I would like to raise and answer here is not so much what the students have learned about the world, but what the world can learn from them. In a time in which the future is perhaps more uncertain than ever, what can we learn from the graduates of 2020?

We all know and feel that things have to change.

The way in which we build our cities, produce our food, travel around the world and provide for our energy has a great global environmental impact. Natural resources are not inexhaustible. Are we making the right choices today, for the future of tomorrow? A striking feature in the work of the graduates of 2020 is their profound involvement in urgent societal issues. Opportunities of a sharing economy, communal housing typologies, reinterpretation of cultural heritage and water management are just some of the angles of approach explored to address them. In many ways, the graduates of 2020 did not choose the easy way out.

Addressing these urgent and complex topics of inquiry takes courage. Aristoteles once said: ‘Anyone

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who risks too much in frightening situations is reckless, or perhaps naive. Anyone who is overly frightened is a coward. When it comes to feelings of boldness or fear, bravery is the right medium.’ The student projects are daring but not reckless, optimistic yet not naive. It is precisely in this middle ground, according to Aristotle, that man’s excellence lies. It’s also the source for optimism. And we are certainly in need of that. The ambition, courage and optimism sets an example for all of us.

The graduates showed ambition and courage in the choice of their topics. Furthermore, they took a critical stance towards their own design proposals throughout the project. Many projects were explicitly presented as processes of design research, exploring different angles and possibilities, not knowing beforehand what the outcome would be. Some of them even thematized the methodology itself.

By using memories, dreamy images and games they questioned and broadened the methodology of design research.

As an architect I was trained myself to do research as a starting point of the design process. I learned to first raise questions and conduct research and then to come up with proposals based on my findings. I was taught that the research would serve the outcome. However, studying the graduation projects of 2020 made me realize that we can no longer rely on linear processes of change. The sequence of researching the present, designing alternative futures and carrying out proposed changes has become obsolete. The complexity of the issues at stake demands working on all levels at once: conducting research, developing new perspectives and taking concrete actions. The research precedes the proposal, but it is just as much the other way around. The research serves the proposal, just as the design proposal serves the research. For each proposal gives rise to action, but it also serves as a new starting point for further investigation.

Some of the most inspiring projects were the proposals where the research led to unexpected new perspectives on the nature of the issues at stake.

Where unexpected design challenges were articu­ lated and accompanied by sensitive design proposals. For instance, where technological developments in wind energy gave rise to the design of a landscape for marine life below sea level. Or where the battle against forest fires led to the design for a productive landscape. In doing so these projects taught us how design can not only search for solutions to the current and given context. A designer’s approach can, and in its best moments does, shift focus further into the future by unexpectedly putting an alternative question on the agenda.

What can we learn from the students of 2020? They have shown bravery in the face of the complexity of the topics of inquiry, inspiring methods of research, compelling future perspectives, and great creativity in putting the design challenges of tomorrow on the agenda. In short, they have taught us not only how to cope with the crazy world we live in today, but also how to actively participate in the creation of a better world for tomorrow. I can only be grateful they did.

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At the close of the Graduation Show 2020, director Madeleine Maaskant announced the four nominations for the Archiprix Netherlands. The four nominated graduation projects were: A Fire-Scape by Hanna Prinssen (Master Landscape Architecture), The Doggerland by Ziega van den Berk (Master Land­scape Architecture), Poku Oso / Suriname Con­ servatory by Lindsey van de Wetering (Master Archi­ tecture) and Test#1: The Island by Jacopo Grilli (Mas­ ter Urbanism). Additionally, the Audience Award 2020 was awarded to Re-Space by Laura Rokaite (Master Architecture).

The Archiprix award ceremony took place online on 19 June. The jury consisted of Florian Boer (urbanism), Jana Crepon (landscape architecture), Joep Esseling (interior architecture), Kirsten Hannema (theory) and Gert Kwekkeboom (architecture). Three of the four awarded prizes went to graduates from the Amster­ dam Academy of Architecture: Hanna Prinssen and Ziega van den Berk won the two shared first prizes and Lindsey van de Wetering won one of the two shared second prizes.

ARCHIPRIX NOMI­NATIONS The Amsterdam Academy of Architecture nominated one architecture project, one urbanism project and two landscape architecture projects for the annual Archiprix Netherlands competition.

EDUCATION

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A Fire-Scape—A new form of a fire-resilient landscape Student Hanna Prinssen Master Landscape Architecture Graduation date 29 June 2020 Mentor Yttje Feddes Committee members Joyce van den Berg and Gert-Jan Wisse Additional members Nikol Dietz and Ruwan Aluvihare Archiprix Ex-aequo first-prize winner

Fire has always been an important part of the natural process in the forests of North America. The Native Americans played an important role in intentionally starting these fires. Controlled fires contributed to the openness of the landscape for better hunting and gathering. A ‘pristine’ wilderness was created, which was a result of occasional, managed fires that created a mosaic of grasslands and forests across North America.

With the arrival of English settlers in 1850 and the con­struc­ tion of houses, roads and tracks, fire was no longer desired as part of these forests. Over decades, the ecosystems in these forests changed dramatically, creating dense stands of trees without diversity. Combined with the change in climate, this leads to extreme wildfires. In California, houses are built in or near forests that are susceptible to fires. This means fire threatens our lives and has literally become a ‘hot topic’ in the news.

These programmes, aimed at protecting the surrounding urban environment from fire, are counterproductive, but what if there was another approach? A parallel can be drawn with the Netherlands, where we defend ourselves from water by building dikes, seawalls and dunes. Nowadays, new ideas are also being tested, to give the water more room. This leads to new land­ scapes and new forms of resilience. So instead of strengthening the lines of defence, we may need to address fire similarly to how we deal with the water issue.

This project harks back to the modified fire-scape of the past and seeks to combine knowledge of fire and the Dutch approach to flooding. Reintroducing a productive fire-scape, in which lumber is produced, creates economic support and an adapted mosaic landscape in which fire is part of the ecological process.

Not only the forest structure is addressed, but also water, housing, recreation and how fire is approached. This creates an integrated plan designed to make room for fire while ensuring the safety of the residents.

To create safe residential areas, the so-called ‘fire dam’ was designed. It is strategically located along the edge of the moun­tain ridges. On the ‘fire dam’, the 1- to 2-m-thick topsoil layer is removed, exposing the (granite) rock. This ensures that no combustible material can grow in this zone and fires from the fire-scape are stopped. Besides this safety function, it is a beautiful element in the landscape, reinforcing the contrast between safe and unsafe. From here one can enjoy the excitement of fire.

The goal of the project is a new approach to fire as part of the landscape. In the future, due to climate change, fire will become a more prominent part of the landscape. In this change of land­scape, landscape architects have a prominent role in designing new resilient landscapes and preparing society for a life with fire.

Integrated master plan combining the water system, forest structure, recreation and fire safety in a mosaic landscape designed to handle fire.

Subdivision Mi-Wuk village, where residents will live in a humid hilly landscape in contrast to the dense fire forests.

On the ‘fire dam’ between the safe residential area and the exciting fire-scape.

Concept of Native American landscape, the present challenges and a vision for the future.

Theme map of the water system, in which water retention plays a major role.

Route to Yosemite National Park over the ‘fire dam’, through the wilderness.

System drawing of the sub-elaboration of Mi-Wuk village, showing the different landscapes designed.

Theme map of the forest structure. The forest changes into a mosaic structure based on the relief and the sun's direction.

Theme map fire layout, in which landscaping interventions such as firebreaks are designed according to the relief and wind.

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Old and new treasures of the ancient Doggerland. A journey of discovery in this new landscape.

A typology of windmills leaves behind a new habitat.

Dogger Bank: a drowned landscape and shallow sand bank located in the middle of the North Sea, an area as large as half the Netherlands.

The hard substrate of this designed windmill base provides new habitats for marine life.

The wealth of sediments from the ancient glacial landscapes are coming back to the surface as a result of the rollout of this wind farm. The more diverse the habitat, the greater the biodiversity.

Who are the (future) inhabitants of the North Sea? What do they do?

What are their wishes? What does their day look like?

The manufacturing processes of the two different wind turbine foundations create a new underwater landscape.

A set of design parameters resulting from research into the wishes of marine life for a new offshore wind farm design.

The Doggerland—The nursery of the North Sea Student Ziega van den Berk Master Landscape Architecture Graduation date 25 August 2020 Mentor Marieke Timmermans Committee members Bruno Vermeersch and Philomene van der Vliet Additional members Saline Verhoeven and Pierre Alexandre Marchevet Archiprix Ex-aequo first-prize winner

EDUCATION

A wind farm as a nursery for the North Sea.

The North Sea has been exploited by fishermen since the early twentieth century. One result of this has been the almost com­ plete disappearance of the hard substrate; the breeding ground for marine life. The bottom of the North Sea is now largely com­ parable to a barren desert. The plans for the energy transition as projected on the North Sea and necessary to meet the climate targets are enormous. By 2050, 15,000 wind turbines must be built in the North Sea, of which 8,000 would be on the Dogger Bank.

The Dogger Bank is a shallow sand bank located in the middle of the North Sea, with an area as large as half the Netherlands.

It is an area of choice for offshore wind farms due to its shallow depth and high wind speeds, ensuring the highest possible yield.

This thesis plan investigates what it could mean for the Dogger Bank if you approached the design of an offshore wind farm from the perspective of the landscape and marine life itself.

The hard substrate of a wind farm offers an opportunity here.

For this, one must first look at the sea as a landscape and get to know this landscape with all its inhabitants.

Who are the residents of the Dogger Bank? What do they do?

What are their wishes? What does their day look like? Some animals like to sit in the lee, others like the current. Where one

needs a large hiding place, others prefer to look for a crack.

One animal likes the shade, the other prefers light. One has very specific needs and another feels at home anywhere. Whatever the case, hard substrate is needed as solid ground under the feet of marine life.

By immersing myself in the lives of marine animals, I got to know them better, exploring their interests. This way, I arrived at a set of design parameters that influence the design of a wind farm. From the scale of a wind turbine foundation to that of a massive wind farm across the entire Dogger Bank; every design choice is influenced by the needs of marine life.

So far, relatively little is known in science about the specific requirements and desires of different species. Therefore, the consensus is: the more diverse the habitat, the greater the biodi­ versity. That is why the proposed cycle of design, construction, research and adaptation of this wind farm represents an oppor­tu­ nity to get to know the landscape with its marine life even better.

When our energy transition is complete and the wind turbines have been phased out, the beginnings of an underwater nature reserve will have been left behind, a nursery of sorts, that can contribute to restoring the health of the North Sea.

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Poku Oso / Suriname Conservatory—A sound environment in which cultural heritage is exhibited in the form of music made by humans and animals Student Lindsey van de Wetering Master Architecture Graduation date 26 August 2020 Mentor Frits van Dongen Committee members Machiel Spaan and Maike van Stiphout Additional members Jolijn Valk and Ira Koers Archiprix Ex-aequo second-prize winner

Poku Oso is the home of the Suriname Conservatory in the Culture Garden, a new typology of an open-air school. An acces­ sible, musical sound environment, which creates bonding, spaces to learn from each other, to stimulate creativity, curiosity and movement and develop a stronger community. Music is a great social and educational activator for everyone.

Conservatory students learn about Surinamese music and culture. From colonial times, all cultures brought their own music that is now part of Surinamese culture. Those who know their roots can develop and grow quickly.

A location suitable for the Suriname Conservatory, Poku Oso, is the Culture Garden, a place in the midst of society. This Culture Garden, also called the ‘Cul’, is a currently ignored musical land­ scape, in the middle of the capital Paramaribo, with many hidden treasures. This experimental botanical garden was created in 1898 to experiment with indigenous and exotic plant species, trees and cultivated plants from almost all parts of the world. The special trees attract special birds that provide the current music in the garden. The ‘sixi urus’ provide the daily orchestra punc­tu­ally at six o’clock. The rushing wind cools the walking paths through the forests and the rain pours down on the canopy of the trees.

With the addition of the Suriname Conservatory, Poku Oso, the Culture Garden is a sound environment in which cultural heritage is exhibited in the form of music made by humans and animals. The Conservatory consists of an ensemble of Surinamese

music buildings. All of the music buildings function as a kind of instrument on their own, like a woodwind instrument or an apinti drum, sounding different at every moment of the day. Between the orchestra of buildings, a sound route emerges in a piece of tropical forest in the middle of the city.

The Conservatory’s new music buildings are related to the unique traditional wooden folk houses. All the houses, large and small, belong to a family, but in addition they each show their own personality – defined by the type of music they make. Titei Oso, the string house, is a sound box in which the strings along the walls vibrate with the music, rain and wind. Winti Oso, the woodwind house, is composed of funnel-shaped blowing parts that contribute to sound propagation to the landscape.

The addition of this music village makes the garden come alive, with its sounds and textures, like a kind of performance art.

The entire garden makes music! Every place has its own sound, Surinamese sounds reign in this city garden of Paramaribo.

The design is an impulse to tackle the forgotten aspects of the Culture Garden, so that it becomes accessible again as a whole and is once more incorporated into the hearts of all Surinamese.

Music is the language that everyone can speak …

Tutu Oso. The façade of the brass house con­ sists of many architectural ‘mouthpieces’ that propagate sound through the landscape in multiple directions.

With the addition of the Suriname Conservatory of Music, Poku Oso, the Culture Garden is a sound environment that showcases cultural heritage in the form of music made by humans and animals. The garden comes alive with its sounds and textures.

Winti Oso. The woodwind house is composed of funnel-shaped blowing parts that contribute to sound propagation to the landscape.

Apinti Oso. This drum building consists of sound boxes. It is a stage, a gadri, that opens to the landscape.

At any time of the day, the music buildings, which function as instruments of sorts, sound different each time.

All music buildings, large and small, belong to a family, but each one shows its own personality – defined by the kind of music they make and specific locations where they take root.

Titei Oso. The string house is a sound box in which the strings along the walls vibrate along with the music, the rain and the rustling of the wind.

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Year 1996. The urban ideal consists of an urban cell morphology, where the urban fabric surrounds and protects an agricultural and natural core. A transition between nature and culture is enhanced by a new system of cultural centres.

Year 2020. The imagination of the island takes form. The con­sis­ tency of the flood and the relationships within the existing cities is explored with a focus on the functions of the urban cell of the Randstad (hyperloop, central garden).

Year 2200. The borders are defined. Dikes and locks are designed for a controlled flood. A renewed and a conscious Metropolis will arise. The symbolic space where nature and culture coexist and protect each other will be an island.

The first imaginative step assumes that the societal and urban growth need a new agreement between nature and culture. The urban cell idea is a human settlement constituted by an urban fabric on the edges and a protected inner natural area.

The second imaginative step is the test of the first idea in the reality of the Randstad. A hyperloop will connect the main existing cities. At every station a new urban development will arise and symbolize the limit with the Groene Hart.

The Randstad Metropolis is connected by the hyperloop. A new super dike protects and shapes the island. The Groene Hart is the central garden and new water villages show how to live on the water.

Urban border (Gouda) – Every city with a hyper­ loop station will shape the border between nature and culture. Even a small city famous for cheese production can have a dense urban area with a business district.

The super dike (Oosterdijk) – This dike is 175 km x 400 m long and 20 m tall. The super dike can be turned into every facility the metropolis needs, for example a new linear city.

Test#1: The Island—Translating an urban ideal into an urban design Student Jacopo Grilli Master Urbanism Graduation date 27 August 2020 Mentor Ton Schaap Committee members Iruma Rodríguez Hernández and Billy Nolan Additional members John Westrik and Herman Zonderland Archiprix Nomination

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This project is an attempt to create a work methodology where imagination is considered to be the main design tool. This meth­ od­ology (image-based design) can be related with the work of Yona Friedman, Piero della Francesca and Constant Nieuwenhuijs and suggests that the power of an image is able to inspire design projects. The idea is to introduce imaginative drawings as a more consistent tool for guiding the process of designing the city.

Since about 15 years ago, throughout my education, I elab­ orated and implemented a personal intuition for the city, which I now tested in reality for the first time. I explored the idea through a selection of drawings that summarize the imaginative process.

Subsequently, I confronted the imagination with the urgencies of today that underlie the relationship between human life and the city, such as: growth of the urban population, urban densification and sprawl, overproduction and waste. This has resulted in a dramatic absence of nature and an ‘unaware’ growth based on the economy of our society.

Furthermore, I investigated the concepts of nature and culture in a theoretical framework. The studies by Kevin Lynch, Cedric Price and Richard Weller were helpful in motivating a switch of the current urban paradigm: the coming together of nature and culture in a spatial and ethical agreement. This ana­ lytical phase provided input for the imaginative part of the project that led us closer to reality. The result is a city shaped by geography and culture that relies on its natural resources, and enhances them as the principal reason of existence.

Water village (Nieuwe Polsbroek) – If the construction of the dike excludes some villages or cities from the island, a logic system will support a new lifestyle on the water, by water mobility, research centres and mobility hubs.

The selected urgencies and the examined theory contributed to the elaboration of an urban model called Urban Cell, ready to be tested in reality. I chose the Randstad as the geographical location to be reshaped in order to test the urban model. In regard to population density, dimension, geography and climate adapt­ ability, the Randstad has all the qualities to be a metropolis in which nature and culture can coexist.

The final proposal is to shape the metropolis as an island: capable of facing the climate issue of rising water levels and en­ abling the coexistence of nature and culture thanks to the presence of the Groene Hart. Along the design of the regional strategy, the island needs important and crucial interventions as well, such as: A hyperloop system to connect the existing urban centres (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague).

A defensive system in order to design with nature (a multi­ functional super dike).

A design proposal for the ultimate urban boundary, between existing centres and the Groene Hart.

An urban system that allows rural villages to live on the water.

The final result is depicted in a panoramic picture of the re­ newed metropolis that enhances its qualities and might rep­re­sent a relevant approach to balance nature with our living cul­ture.

The project methodology and the image-based design represent the way I would like to work in the field of urban design.

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Re-Space—Re-Set, Re-Think, Re-Start Student Laura Rokaite Master Architecture Graduation date 20 April 2020 Mentor Saša Rađenović Committee members Machiel Spaan, Abdessamed Azarfane Additional members Marlies Boterman, Miguel Loos Audience Award Winner

Re-Space is a building for those who are starting up in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. It is a building for refugees, migrants and also for Lithuanians. It is for young starters, but also for those who have not worked for a long time or would like to start over.

Finding a job is never an easy task, let alone in an unfamiliar country far away from home, with a totally different culture and unknown language. Re-Space facilitates this new beginning – it is this missing link, this first and sometimes very difficult step into working life.

Re-Space offers an immediate start, as it is crucial for working-age adults to enter the workforce as soon as possible to further their integration. There is no waiting, since everyone is welcome to join in from the very first day in the new city.

Here everyone can do their job whatever their profession may be. The flexible structure easily accommodates diverse profes­ sionals: from barbers and hairdressers – who only need a chair and a pair of scissors to do their job, to carpenters who work with industrial machinery. It is about starting from the potential of the people and using their talents, skills and experiences.

It is a place that facilitates the creation of social networks, it is for

Model, scale 1:200.

sharing stories and making new intercultural connections as well as for meeting people with similar interests. Together with the Municipality of Vilnius, Re-Space offers professional training courses and work­shops for improving different skills and ob­ taining qualifications as well as learning the Lithuanian language.

In addition to that, it is possible to get support from Caritas, which takes care of and supervises refugees in Vilnius, and the public employment services that can help with finding a job in the city. It is a building for working, learning and receiving support in relation to jobs.

Re-Space is about inspiring everyone to be open to people with any background and to contribute to their integration. By being a part of this concept and a user of this building, one can significantly contribute to a more accepting and inclusive society.

Whether that is by getting a haircut from a man from Syria or buying a piece of jewelry from someone from Eritrea, because even the longest journey starts with a single step. Social and economic independency is crucial for everyone and what can be better than working towards it together in a relaxed environment in the heart of Vilnius?

Model, scale 1:200

Sections showing different levels and how the building sits in the landscape.

View from the restaurant to the courtyards.

Ground level.

Flexible working and learning spaces.

Re-Space: street view.

Subterrain level: communal spaces.

Façade fragment.

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ALEPPO TO AMSTERDAM

Every year during the graduation show, one alumnus of the Academy of Architecture holds a lecture about their work. This year we heard from Bengin Dawod. He talked about the events that led to his graduation design for the reconstruction of the Syrian city of Aleppo.

DAVID KEUNING JOËL PLATTNER

At the graduation show weekend, Academy alum­ nus Bengin Dawod gave the annual Kromhout lecture.

He delivered his lecture online because of Covid-19, but was accompanied by a small group of people who, at a mutual distance of 1.5 m, formed an audience so he would not have to talk in a vacuum. Dawod graduated as an architect in Damascus and as an urban designer from the Academy of Architecture.

His graduation project, entitled The Soul of the City, won the AHK Graduation Prize in 2018. In it, he examines ways to rebuild the war-ravaged city of Aleppo.

He currently works at architecture office Common Affairs and advises the city of Amsterdam on development strategies for refugee camps in Jordan.

Dawod was born in 1982, the year in which the Syrian city of Hama was largely destroyed. In 2006, still living in Syria, he became a member of a team that was investigating the reconstruction of a historical part of this city. For three years, he worked on the translation of a master plan into architectural plans and constructional details. The input of survivors from Hama was of great importance to this reconstruction since all official sources of information about the site, including the land register, had been destroyed. The input of people who had lost everything had a great impact on the process. Once word got out about what the team was doing, survivors began to contact them to share stories and photographs. The designers sketched the lost streets on paper while the survivors, some of them wearing blindfolds, called the images back to mind. This inspired Dawod’s ideas about the soul of a place.

After moving to Amsterdam in 2013, Dawod started studying at the Academy of Architecture. He wanted to study urban design to be able to continue his research on the rebuilding of destroyed cities. In 2015, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked the city of Amsterdam to make up a team to answer a question from the UNHCR regarding the layout of refugee camps. Dawod joined this team. The reason for the UNHCR’s question was the situation in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. This camp, roughly the size of the city of Amersfoort, had been set up quickly to accommodate a suddenly growing number of refugees. The original layout was based on a rational,

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rectangular grid, aimed at keeping the residents under control. Within a few years, an informal economy developed in the camp, with tents converted to small dwellings. The team designed development strategies to replace the emergency response. The new grid offers great flexibility in the long term, similar to the grids in cities such as New York and Barcelona. In the camp, infrastructure such as roads and sewers is more important than tents or buildings. Dawod introduced adobe as a building material. After all, adobe is circular, biobased and easy to use. A Dutch journalist published the achievements made and the building activities were subsequently abandoned because the local administration was not happy about the exposure. It taught Dawod that politics is an important factor in this kind of development.

In 2016, Dawod gave a lecture at Het Nieuwe Instituut entitled ‘Reconstruction and the Soul of the City: Rotterdam and Aleppo’. This was the first occasion on which he publicly talked about the topic and he received a lot of criticism from the audience. One critical attendee said: ‘How dare you think about rebuilding at a time when war is still raging there?’ This is a moral question. Dawod answered: ‘Once peace is proclaimed, there is no time left for urban design because at that time, reconstruction will irrevocably start.’ This was the case in all of the cities he studied: Mostar, Pristina, Berlin and Rotterdam. If plans are not already in place, things can go wrong quickly. In addition, it is a way to draw attention to the problem.

Once he had decided that he wanted to graduate on the rebuilding of Aleppo, Dawod had to figure out how to access information and the right data. In 2017, artist collective Power of Art House invited him to participate in a manifestation about Aleppo that was held on the Museumplein in Amsterdam. The event comprised building a model on the basis of the memories of survivors. It allowed Dawod to collect a large number of stories and was his main source of information about Aleppo.

After four years of research, it was time to graduate. He first had to convince a number of people that the rebuilding of Aleppo could be a graduation topic; fortunately, he succeeded. Hans van der Made, Hanneke Kijne and Jaap van den Bout became his

supervisors. Dawod carried out thorough research into Aleppo’s population, energy supply and buildings, among other things, and used this information to design a structural plan at different scales, based on the former buildings. He drew street profiles and subdivisions using scenario planning, to show that interventions, each with their own possibilities and risks, can be made in all stages of a reconstruction.

Once he had graduated, the question was: What is next? In June 2019, he held a lecture entitled ‘How Do We Materialize Peace?’ in the series Architecture of Peace Dialogues at Stroom Den Haag. In November 2019, he spoke at the Spaces of Peace: Architecture as Contextual Diplomacy conference in Brussels.

And in January 2020, he participated in the Basel Peace Forum. This was an impressive experience: there were many stakeholders present, there was sufficient time and there was a lot of drawing and thinking. He felt a little like a lobbyist selling a product rather than a designer. Reconstruction takes a long time. Dawod: ‘I hope I will live long enough to see the outcome of this project.’

Photo Joël Plattner

Text Photo

At the Basel Peace Forum in 2020, Bengin Dawod had the opportunity to discuss future plans for the city of Aleppo with many stakeholders.

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OFF THE BEATEN TRACK

Since 1 June, Marlies Boterman has taken over the position of morphology course coordinator from Henri Snel, who has become education manager. Boterman has been working for years as a guest lecturer and coordinator of the minor Architecture at the Academy of Architecture.

Additionally, she has her own business as an architect, interior designer and furniture maker.

Just before this change, Snel talked to Julie Vegter about the way he developed the Academy of Architecture’s morphology course.

Text Photos

JULIE VEGTER MARJOLEIN ROELEVELD

During a walk along only the sunny sides of Am­sterdam’s Sporenburg and Borneo islands, Henri Snel talks about the Academy’s interdisciplinary morphology course. This course takes the Academy’s first- and second-year master’s students to places they have not gone before. Together with the lecturers, Henri Snel invites the students to let go of what they already know and begin to learn on the basis of the idea that the search for form is better than form in itself. ‘If you force yourself to take a different route – like we’re taking the sun route during this walk – things become exciting.’

DISCOVERY The first year of the morphology course starts with Body [SPACE], an exploration of space through one’s own body – the ideal measuring instrument – and ends in the second year with a journey through future spaces in Virtual [SPACE]. Other themes are Material [SPACE], Inter [SPACE] and Graphic [SPACE].

The morphology course revolves around the learning process rather than around form. Students who are accustomed to a result-oriented society may need some time to get used to this approach. At the start of the course, there is usually some confusion, with questions about its usefulness and necessity being raised. ‘What’s this then? This is weird. How is this useful?’: Snell has heard it all. ‘It takes time, that’s the crux of the morphology course. It’s new, the students need to get used to this different type of class. We work with artists who have singular, often critical attitudes. They ask questions and then more questions and students can experience this as confronting.’

‘It takes confidence to postpone making the right decision,’ says Snel. ‘We try to give our students confidence. Rather than the results, it’s the preceding processes that are most important. I can sometimes feel the tension draining; the idea that their work has to be good, aesthetically pleasing and other presuppositions ebb away. This brings about the joy of discovery, of daring to make mistakes, of starting all over again and of growth.’

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SEARCH FOR A NEW LANGUAGE It doesn’t all have to take root instantly,’ says Snel.

‘I can imagine that two or three years from now some student will think: “Oh yes, of course, I think we covered something similar in the morphology course!”

That they remember that conceptualization, reflection and a slow approach to assignments can result in entirely new ideas. I want them to develop their own, biobased materials and get to work, rather than first study the catalogues to see if a certain material is available. I wish that was the general attitude. That’s what we’re looking for.’

It’s important ‘to not run straight from A to Z, but to also touch all the letters in between. One way or another, students have to relate to this and choose their own path. I always like it when they do that. Being questioned by lecturers is a good thing but at the end of the day, students have to develop their own language to be able to answer those questions.’ It is the letters in between that challenge, chafe and lure you into a new language.

For Snel, the discovery of other linguistics and their layering is a continuous process. As a teacher at the Nola Hatterman Institute in Surinam (2011), for example, he discovered a new meaning of the word ‘quiet’ as an unexpected answer to the question: ‘How are you?’ This, too, is a form of ‘enrichment’, as Snel calls it – a term that he uses several times during our conversation. It illustrates the way in which he advocates a free and open attitude: not necessarily operating from your own discipline or frame, but ‘giving free rein to free thought’.

CONCEPTUALIZATION Many students consider Inter [SPACE] the most difficult part of the morphology course. This year, it was clear from the outset that Inter [SPACE] would take place online. A brainstorming session with the artists involved yielded the idea of using a moving box as a metaphor for in-between space. A moving box is an excellent example of something that is reusable. It represents an ‘in-between’ life. It’s a box that you take with you on a journey, to your next place.

All students received a webcam and a moving box.

Rather than their faces, like during a Teams meeting,

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the computer screen displayed the students’ moving boxes so they could literally see each other’s processes develop. They created beautiful things in those 30 × 40 × 50-cm frames. Rather than moving boxes, you’d see very beautiful new worlds that each told their own story and that were eventually captured in two-minute films. ‘This approach was key to stimulating interesting online conversations. The in-between space, the unknown, became a little familiar after all. And that is what we wanted.’

REFLECTION Presentation was a part of it, but reflection was the main part. ‘I wanted that time of reflection to last as long as possible, I wanted the students to reflect for eight weeks without even mentioning the end result.

The lecturers are being selected for their ability to stimulate this continuous reflection: they’d ask questions and then more questions. Not because they know it all, but to develop students’ curious, critical attitude. They are finding out things together, it’s an exploration to the artists/lecturers as well. That’s the basis of good education.’

‘In those eight weeks, we made as much time for discussion as possible,’ says Snel. ‘Looking back is taking a step forward as well. Not “and then I did this and then I did that” – that’s not interesting, you’ve done that before – but in the sense of: looking at your own work like a critical journalist and then writing an essay about it.’

ENRICHED SPACE Snel is interested in the sensory aspects of space.

‘When your brain activity looks deep red, that means you have to work very hard,’ he says. ‘I see the same thing when I visit buildings with students, for example Kollhoff and Rapp’s Piraeus building on KNSM island and the adjoining, small Mien Ruys park. You walk underneath and wow, there’s so much going on there. Colour, material and space are not separate.

The former strongly influence how you experience space. If there’s one thing that inspires me, it’s an enriched space. It’s a building that makes you look back. That excites you, that makes you start asking yourself questions – actually makes you trip over the questions you have. There’s an architect that’s done very well.’

Snel also sees this in students, when he reads their comments. ‘In the beginning they think: “What’s this all about, I don’t understand.” And then, at a certain point, you see that they start to feel it and get it. Get that there is much more than the repertoire bubble they’re in. And get that opening up will allow them to suddenly discover new layers. And get that with these new layers, they can enrich themselves and make better, stronger plans!’

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BLOCKBUSTER In the lecture series C3C5, entitled In Conversation with …, eight students spoke with sociologist Richard Sennett on 29 November. The following is an abridged version of that conversation.

Text

DAVID KEUNING

MARKUS APPENZELLER I’ll ask the first question, and after that it’s up to the students. We have entered the urban age. The majority of people are now living in cities. But recently we see forces gaining traction that are driving people out of cities again. Urban housing has become unaffordable for many people. The diverse society that’s characteristic of the city is being rejected by a growing part of the population, most notably by those not living in cities. Misinformation is replacing knowledge, as can be seen in the rejection of facts regarding Covid-19. Where are we heading? Where will we be in 20 to 30 years, when it comes to cities?

RICHARD SENNETT You have to distinguish which cities. Emerging cities in the developing world wouldn’t recognize this characterization. There are masses of people being driven into the city in Latin America, Africa and parts of Southeast Asia, because of changes in the countryside. Industrialization of agriculture is destroying huge swaths of rural land and most people become involuntary migrants to cities. Similarly, people who are suffering from desertification of rural land – and this is particularly true in Africa – are driven into cities.

They have no choice. So the notion that the city is a lifestyle choice is a very privileged idea, if I may say so. Most of the work we’ve been doing in UN Habitat is based on the question: How should people live in cities who have no choice but to be there? That’s a very different kind of problem. For instance, when people say: Covid-19 will change everything, people will work from home, they will stop commuting, that’s really a kind of metro privilege. If you’re a manual worker, you have no choice but to be in the city. You can’t collect garbage online. You can’t nurse somebody online. I get very uneasy by a lot of predictions about the end of the city, because they seem to me to be very narrowly focused on people who have the economic or political power and privilege to live in places where they

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Photo Ot

Richard Sennett was born in 1943 and grew up in Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project, a notorious and now largely demolished high-rise district that acquired a bad reputation for crime and decay in the twentieth century. He now lives and works in Great Britain, where he is professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Sennett is the author of a large number of books that are of interest to urban designers. At the beginning of his career, for example, he wrote The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life (1970). More recently he published Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City (2018) and Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City (2020). Frank de Boer, Luuk Koote, Roelof Koudenberg, Phuong Dao Duy, Hannah Liem, Arthur van der Laaken, Lorena Navarrete and Stephanie Ete had read some of his texts in preparation and put their questions to him. The discussion, hosted by Markus Appenzeller, took place via Zoom and was streamed on Facebook. It was attended by some 500 virtual attendees, including people from Toronto, Vancouver, Moscow, St Petersburg, New York, London, Tiblisi, Cairo and Berlin.

Richard Sennett: ‘You can cooperate with someone without identifying with that person.’

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have alternatives. The questions you are posing are real for a certain tranche of society in certain places, but I don’t think that’s how we want to frame what’s happening to cities more generally.

MA

Are you saying that this is a first-world phenomenon we’re seeing, resulting from a lack of real problems?

RS As an ex-American I can say that cities are not the cause of this turn to the right that you mention. The United States is a country that’s deeply, deeply racist. Underlying all these notions about getting away from the city and all of its problems, is getting away from black people. Until very recently, that was the unspoken assumption under ideas about the virtues of the suburbs, or going back to nature. You have to be very suspicious, I would say, of where these anti-urban discourses are coming from. I don’t know so much about elsewhere, but certainly in the United States, this is the elephant in the room. It’s an elephant that Trump made visible. He showed that all these discourses are racialized. I often think that the city is used as an envelope of something else that’s being discussed.

ROELOF KOUDENBURG In Building and Dwelling, you write that social life can be carried out through ‘unsocial sociability’, which briefly means that people can tolerate other people but do not have to identify with them. So people should be indifferent to difference. When I read that, I thought: Do you think a socially cohesive city is possible in this way? Taking this idea to the extreme: will tolerating other people result in a cohesive society or in various parallel societies?

RS That’s a very good question. What it poses is: What is the social glue between people? Is it solidarity or is it cooperation? As a social thinker, I always want to privilege cooperation over solidarity. You can cooperate with someone without identifying with that person. That’s what this idea of unsocial sociability is about. If you think about the history of cities, for instance, the cities that really have grown, that worked well, are not the cities with large concentrations of people who are the same. In terms of markets, for instance, you get a lot of diversity. You have interactions between people who are competitors or selling things. This results in something that economists call agglomeration: they’re all together, they’re interacting, and the whole gets to be greater than its parts. In a solidary situation, there’s nothing like that. The only places where the whole gets to be greater than the parts, are symbolic phantasies of ‘us’. That’s very static. To me, the whole question of planning is: How can we create the conditions where people who are different can interact? That’s why in UN Habitat, for instance, we put so much emphasis on informal markets, as places where different kinds of people can interact. They’re communal spaces, in the normal sense of the word, and they’re spaces without communal identities. That’s my sense of where we should be. We should want cooperation rather than solidarity.

LUUK KOOTE

I have a follow-up question. It’s on your most recent book, Designing Disorder, with Pablo Sendra. In the second part, Pablo writes about structures for disorder. He also addresses big topics like climate change, circular economy and citizen participation. I was wondering: Aren’t some of these challenges too big to handle in a disorderly system? Don’t these challenges sometimes ask for top-down measures? In the Netherlands, for instance, we’re now reducing the gas production, to make way for an electricity-based energy supply. Another example are the norms for social housing, to make sure that people from different income groups can be housed in new developments. So what I’m asking, is: Don’t some of these big-scale challenges ask for big and ordered gestures, or do those gestures lack the refinement and detail that’s necessary to tackle these big problems?

RS That’s again a huge question. I can’t speak for Pablo but I can give you my answer. I should say as a background to this that he’s an architectural engineer. He was my student for a while and he’s now my colleague.

We’ve had discussions over the years about how you can provide an infrastructure resource that can be used in different ways by different groups of people.

How do you combine what you’re talking about, which is overall coordination, with a kind of participatory structure in dealing with those resources? It’s a big issue in climate change, because you can’t make a transport system, for instance, that reduces pollution, piece by piece. You need a coordinated system. The same thing is true in an area that UN Habitat has been working on: water resources.

As you say, the resource has to be furnished in a top-down way. But then, how people act, and how they use that resource, can be something that can be more participatory, once they know what they have to work with.

I’ll give an example of this. It’s a very complicated one, but it shows how you can do this. In Brazil, we have been working in São Paulo, with what we call energy budgets for favelas, so that there is a just and equalized energy distribution among the favelas. That’s very top-down, right? That’s something that a team decided. They made a calculation based on algorithms that nobody in the community actually participated in. But then, once you have the energy budget, it can be spent in very different ways. Some favelas spent it largely on air conditioning.

Others spent it on different kinds of electrification uses, such as wells, pumping stations and sewage stations. All very prosaic, right? But at that level you have a kind of bottom-up participation using something that’s furnished top-down.

That’s basically Pablo’s idea.

LK

I find it admirable that you’ve been talking about the topic of disorder since 1970, when you published The Uses of Disorder. There’s a sentence that’s quoted quite

often: ‘The jungle of the city, its vastness and loneliness, has a positive human value.’ This is of course about the suburbs. Now, 50 years later, these suburbs are not so popular anymore. The middle class often works and lives in the city today. You published Designing Disorder earlier this year. That makes me wonder: Is the disorder of 2020 still the same disorder of the 1970s? In other words: How would you say that the challenge of order has changed in the last 50 years? Is it possible it has moved from the physical to the digital domain? And how will it change in the coming 50 years?

RS Please ask me a simpler question! [laughs] I grew up in a housing project, a slum, actually. When I wrote that book, I was just writing up what I, and any other kid growing up in a poor community, learned. Life was in one way very tough, but in another way we learned some very basic things about life. What’s lurking in your question, although you didn’t say it, is whether the political economy has changed from the way it was 50 years ago, and whether the terms of order and disorder are different now. I don’t really think it has. The technical means are different, but there’s now as much monopoly capitalism as for instance General Motors was. All those technologists like to say that the Internet is user-friendly and bottom-up, but that’s nonsense. The truth is that four or five firms control the online world, just as in my day you had four or five multi­ nationals that controlled the manufacturing of automobiles. The power structures and hierarchy of capitalism haven’t broken down. The consequence of that in terms of hierarchy in cities is that the richer you are, the more isolated you can be from people unlike you. That was true 50 years ago, in terms of suburbs, and today we’re seeing it in the dichotomy between manual labour that has to be done face-to-face and the isolation of working from home online, which we just talked about. Maybe I’m wrong about it, but it seems to me that inequality under capitalism tends towards monopoly and it tends, in cities, towards isolation.

That’s my sense of where we’re at.

In the ensuing conversation, Sennett answers questions on topics ranging from architectural determinism versus the open city (Hannah Liem), building communities (Lorena Navarrete), disagreements between Sennett and Jane Jacobs about urbanism (Stephanie Ete), the role of Jacob’s small-scale neighbourhoods in gentrification (Arthur van der Laaken), the redevelopment of Amsterdam suburbs such as the Bijlmer and Nieuw-West (Frank de Boer) and the relationship between the verbal and the physical in crafts (Phuong Dao Duy).

Almost one and a half hours into the conversation, Sennett gently signals that the interview has to come to an end.

MA

Can I ask you one final question? We have about 500 people that are listening. It’s almost a blockbuster. Is there anything you can recommend to starting designers? Some wisdom based on your experience?

RS Gosh. Well, what I try to teach my students is the notion of this very loose fit between form and function. You don’t generate a design, but you generate a design that can give birth to a lot of different designs. That’s what open planning is all about. That’s what planning as a process is about. That you generate forms that sometimes generate new forms that are occasionally very surprising. he full conversation can be viewed at facebook.com/avbamsterdam/videos/ T in-conversation-with-richard-sennett/438708027128090/

Richard Sennett’s book Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City appeared in 2018.

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Practice, SeptemberDecember 2020

C3 C5

Researchers, designers and entrepreneurs shed light on the different aspects of their professional practice and theory.

methodology Hanneke Kijne

Markus Appenzeller

Jan-Richard Kikkert

Harma Horlings

Berno Strootman

Tom Frantzen

Michiel Akkerman

Ute Schneider

Dana Behrman

Nadia Nilina

Perry Lethlean

Floor Arons

Marlies Boterman

Paul Kuipers

Tobias Goevert

Martijn Slob

Nyasha Harper

Véronique Faucheur

Klaus Overmeyer

Marc Pouzol

Martijn de Wit

Frank Karssing

Bart Prince

Slawomir Ledwoń

Olga Aleksakova

Julia Burdova

Rolf Bruggink

Jean-Francois Gauthier

Richard Sennett

Thijs van Spaandonk

Sjoerd Soeters

& EDUCATION

strategy 42

Beyond Peak Indifference Wednesday, 8 pm January - June 2021 @ Facebook Live

Online conversation series on climate crisis with students & experts

#1

27.01.2021

Introduction

#2

03.02.2021

Anthropocene Architecture School

#3

10.02.2021

To Bury - The Sky

#4

17.02.2021

Water as leverage

#5

24.02.2021

The Rights of Nature

#6

03.03.2021

The Rigorous use of common sense Matthias Rammig

#7

10.03.2021

Change before behaviour

#8

31.03.2021

Saving the Planet By Design

#9

14.04.2021

Transitioning Urban Environment

Rosalea Monacella

#10

26.04.2021

Breathing Architecture

Wong Mun Summ

#11

12.05.2021

European Green Deal

Diederik Samsom

#12

19.05.2021

The Good Ancestor

#13

26.05.2021

Water Weapons

#14

02.06.2021

Debate

Initiated by Academy of Architecture Amsterdam & Rotterdam

curators Scott McAulay

Marina Dubova & Pierce Myers Henk Ovink Laura Burgers

Gyorgyi Galik Mike Wells

Roman Krznaric Ameneh Solati curators

Curated by Markus Appenzeller Thijs van Spaandonk

C4 C6

43

THICKER THAN WATER Under the title ‘The New Challenges for Water Edges’, landscape architects Eva Radionova and Lauri Mikkola organized the EMiLA Summer School 2020. In spite of the limitations of online learning, the event turned out to be a success.

Text

EVA RADIONOVA AND LAURI MIKKOLA

In a rotation system, the five EMiLA partners in Versailles, Hannover, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Edinburgh take turns to organize the EMiLA Summer School, which is run at the end of August each year. The summer schools always involve local actors at a site, such as local authorities and potential commissioners.

Due to the restrictions imposed on travel and group gatherings following the global spreading of Covid-19, the EMiLA Summer School 2020, titled ‘The New Challenges for Water Edges’, took place as a virtual event. In spite of the initial fears of the organizing team, the summer school was successful in achieving the ambiance of an energetic workshop and a shared experience of meaningful exchanges. Students and teachers worked from Scotland, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain, which created a truly pan-European, even if virtual, atmosphere.

The participants were at once aware of the scorching urban heat of the late-summer days in Barcelona, the arrival of storms on the coast of the Netherlands and the bright, early autumn light of Oslo. The projects allowed the participants to delve into a diverse array of European landscapes linked to the topic of the summer school. The students, who had already learned to work at a distance during the past semester, when European countries had retreated into a lockdown, were fluent and mostly at ease with the digital and online tools put forth for the event. While the constraints of working at a distance and having to fabricate project proposals without being able to gain a physical impression of the site remained evident, the summer school has arguably been an enriching experience for all, forcing the participants to look and consider the experience of nature and landscape differently and through novel tools.

For the students, the work on the summer school was divided into two main phases. First, they were to work as a commissioner, putting together a competition proposal for a site they had chosen and were able to visit individually. In the second part of the summer school they responded with a design to the competition proposal put together by one of their fellow students. In this way the students formed working groups of two, exchanging ideas with each other throughout the nine-day event.

EDUCATION

In the course of the summer school, the students developed their own position on a landscape problem and defined a design assignment. This enabled them to understand the role of the commissioner and learn about the local actors’ obligations in regard to rules and laws. They also learned how to communicate future changes to other stakeholders, making those changes acceptable for them.

Under the circumstances, and especially considering the fact that the students had to design without being able to see the place, the event progressed exceptionally well. In order to be able to produce a design, students had to rely on the eyes and opinions of the classmates who acted as commissioners.

Based on the process and the final results, the format of the workshop fortunately turned out to be a success. he five EMiLA partners are the École Nationale Superieure T du Paysage in Versailles, the Fakultät für Architektur und Landschaft at the Leibniz Universität in Hannover, the Academie van Bouwkunst at the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, the Escola Tècnica d’Arquitectura de Barcelona at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and the Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh.

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EGO TO ECO

Due to Covid-19, this year’s Winter School was cut into halves. The first part took place in January; the second in July. Journalist Gert Hage reports on part one.

Text

GERT HAGE

The journey to Planet Paradise began on the morning of 15 January. It was cold; it looked like snow. Tour guide Bruno Doedens and head of the travel organization Hanneke Kijne prepared the students for a different trip than usual. Traditionally, the Winter School trip stands for closeness and collaboration. It is a joint reconnaissance into new, unexplored areas.

But everything was different this time, there was no closeness, no (physical) joint search for the boun­ daries of the discipline. The new reality is keeping back and working and studying from home. The students therefore set out for Planet Paradise, a trip cut into halves, via Teams. The first, short part took place from 15 to 17 January. The second part will take place from 3 to 9 July: the WinterSchool@summer.

Not everything was different on that cold January weekend. Like every year, there was an Artist in Resi­ dence who determined the theme of the trip. This year, that was landscape architect and artist Bruno Doedens. His essay Planet Paradise provided direction and food for thought. It was up to the students, this year including some from other AHK programmes, to translate the theme into images and stories.

Planet Paradise started with Bruno Doedens’s personal quest for a new foundation for his work, or rather: with the question of how he could relate to the major social issues of our time, issues such as climate change, pollution, urbanization and the decline of biodiversity. He read a hefty stack of books in which scholars looked back and ahead at the ecological consequences of our actions, books covering subjects from the genesis of the cosmos to the future of our planet and from the loss of nature to concrete guidebooks for new, sustainable ways of living. They pressed home the fact that the situation is urgent and alarming.

Although progress has brought us much good, the wondrous and ingenious system that is Earth is paying too high a price for it. It is high time, Doedens concluded, to reinvent ourselves as clean earthlings. This requires a new paradigm. From ego-consciousness to eco-consciousness, as Doedens summarizes.

To take that step collectively, we need new stories.

Stories that show and facilitate an honest, sustainable and respectful future. Stories, also, that centre on the long term. Who are our new storytellers? They are our artists, our cultural sector and therefore also our students at the AHK. Power to the imagination!

The digital Winter School opened with a film, followed by the ‘Deep Time Walk’, an award-winning BBC podcast. Students were asked to take a 4.6-km walk as they listened to the podcast in which each metre stands for 1 million years of evolution. With 200,000 years of history, homo sapiens is nothing but a tiny footnote in the history of the Earth. Converted to length: 20 cm in 4.6 km. In that short time, we have nevertheless managed to shake the planet to its core.

Doedens’s main goal for these two days was to show the major connections, the underlying system, and to subsequently build bridges to a new paradigm, a new story. It was up to the students to give direction to this new story and to visualize it. The result was on display on several Miro boards for all to see.

That the message of the films, walk and lectures had come across was clear from the students’ contributions. They appeared fully aware of the fact that things have to change and of the part they, themselves will have to play. One of the contributions showed an impressive pile of shoes, accompanied by the rhetorical question: ‘Do I need this?’ Big letters on the bare back of another student read: ‘You are an animal yourself.’ Someone wrote ‘Anthropocentrism sucks’ on the inside of a hand.

And then there were the calls: ‘Treat the earth like you treat your mother’, for example, but also a picture of a stop sign: ‘Stop the sale of the earth.’ Or: ‘Unlearn modernity.’ The Miro boards, in short, presented a motley collection of texts, photographs, installations, images and drawings that made it clear that the message had come across, insofar as that had not been clear before. Also clear was the desire for physical interaction, among the students and between teachers and students, which was partly compensated for by the Miro boards.

In July the second part of the trip will – corona permitting – once again be one of joint efforts, physical closeness and new stories. In preparation, meanwhile, students received Roman Krznaric’s book The Good Ancestor, because that is what Planet Paradise is all about: putting long-term thinking and acting at the heart of our lives.

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INTO THE WOODS The Crafting Wood workshop was supposed to take place at Schaesberg Castle in Limburg in March 2020. Three days in advance, it became clear that the students would not be permitted to travel to the location. Instead, the workshop took place half online and half offline, with surprising results.

Text Photos

MACHIEL SPAAN JONATHAN ANDREW

EDUCATION

46

At the time this article goes to press, five laminated wooden beams sit in the MakerSpace, patiently waiting for better times. Sometime this autumn, we will travel to Schaesberg Castle in Limburg, models under arm, to turn them into a physical structure. For now we can only dream about resuming our joint designing, reflecting and building, sitting around a long dinner table talking about all the discoveries we have made and the structures we have built until the small hours – after all, it is especially at such times of distraction, relaxation and togetherness that the ‘aha’ moment strikes. Then, suddenly, everything falls into place and the work reveals itself in all its beauty and clarity.

In March 2020, we organized an Erasmus workshop at Schaesberg Castle as a part of the Crafting Wood programme. A year and a half before that, we had constructed a roof structure from trusses using traditional and electric tools in Trondheim. Next, we had built seven 5-to-8-m-high towers, each in a specific wood construction technique, in Liechtenstein.

We had investigated the relationship between tools, building techniques and the appearances of wooden structures. During the concluding third workshop, with 40 students from Amsterdam, Vaduz and Trondheim, we wanted to take seven days to build innovative wooden laminated trusses on the grounds of the castle ruins. Using wood from the surrounding forest, we would search for new circular building methods. Three days before we were supposed to start, it became clear that we would not be permitted to travel to Limburg. The Covid-19 pandemic was spreading across Europe. Students were no longer permitted to travel or to physically gather in groups and building a wooden truss together was only allowed from a distance. We were condemned to online learning and making.

During the workshop, on the initiative of architect and lecturer Niels Groeneveld, we would investigate the possibility to make laminated trusses without using glue. We would breathe new life into an old wood construction technique: before the introduction of cast-iron structures at the end of the eighteenth century, there were several attempts to construct large spans using laminated timber, joined using wooden and/or steel connecting materials.

The wooden trusses would form the basis of a small pavilion for the Internationale Bauausstellung of 2021. The original plan was to spend seven days on site to investigate, draw, test and build. In the spring of 2020, when it became clear that a physical workshop was impossible for the time being, we came up with a new plan. We split the workshop into two parts.

During the first part, we would develop prototypes to scale and during the second part, we would build them on site, one-on-one.

The first part of the workshop took place during a long weekend in late August at three locations at the same time: in Trondheim, Liechtenstein and Amsterdam. We worked on proposals for possible truss constructions in small groups of two or three students. It was a strange experience, because some of the students were not in fact present at either of the three schools, but were in their home countries,

from Mexico to Japan, from Denmark to Spain. We investigated form, stacking and connection options.

Together with a structural engineer, we inventoried the forces involved. We built computer models of laminated structures, drew them with pencil on paper and made them from wooden slats, steel wire and small nails. Twice a day, we shared our discoveries in the digital world, which covered a large part of the physical world. We set up a Teams channel, created a collective memory bank, chat groups for exchange and a shared platform for presentations. It was the beginning of a hybrid school that manifested both physically and online. It led to a wonderfully dynamic process, with unexpected physical and digital encounters and wonderful results.

The didactic of Crafting Wood centres on learning by doing. As the process develops, we – not only students, but also lecturers – discover the next step.

We leave things to chance and then adjust. This also applies to the sudden necessity of online learning.

Making is a physical and slow process. You do it with your hands. Through the physical activity, you master the tools and materials. Making something together is crucial to the learning experience. Making is a social process, you learn from each other, you watch and listen while you are on the side lines, catch something, copy yourself and each other intentionally and unintentionally. Presenting the work created is something else altogether. It requires accuracy. What do you show? Which image? Which drawing? And what do you say about it? Short and to the point. It helps if there is some distance between you and the work and the slow process of making it. The digital discussion of the work frees you from the physical act, it allows you to reflect on the work from a distance.

This way, two workshops developed as a matter of course: a physical workshop in which the hands do the work and an online workshop in which the head observes, exchanges and reflects. In the MakerSpace, the two parallel worlds come together sublimely a number of times. Computers and hand tools are effortlessly used alongside each other, now the one, then the other. The distinction between analogue and digital disappears. Students making models casually observe the presentations of work by students from other countries. A collection of wooden joints that serves as inspiration for construction hangs next to the screen that shows the results from the other countries live. Students can follow a lecture by an expert from anywhere in the world. The online-offline workshop opens doors to hybrid global collaborations, building, watching, listening and learning with each other and from a distance.

47

The students arranged the tree slices on the forest floor, from small to large. This gave a good impression of the stretch of wood that a tree can yield.

ONE TREE

During the minor in Architecture, Bachelor students followed a course at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. Together with organizer Marlies Boterman, they built a shelter for birdwatchers in a nature reserve.

Text and Photos

MARLIES BOTERMAN

EDUCATION

48

All of the trees on Earth were recently counted for the first time. The data show that there are more than 3 trillion or 3,000 billion trees on the planet.

That may seem like a lot, but the data also show that the number of trees has decreased by 46 per cent since the beginning of human civilization and that the rate of tree felling is increasing exponentially. Trees are among the most important organisms on earth: they can store carbon dioxide, recycle nutrients and improve water and air quality. They can be used as building materials and appear to be a sustainable alternative to concrete and steel. But is this resource really as inexhaustible and ideal as it seems? What is the value of a tree?

The students that took part in the minor in Archi­ tecture course Material and Design had a specific tree at their disposal. It was the starting point for the design of a shelter for birdwatchers looking to observe kingfishers. They could only use the material of the tree in question for the design. This challenged them to think differently about the material and the design and to consciously consider the origin of materials.

They realized the design using the wood of an American oak. The tree was made available by the Goois Natuurreservaat and came from Section 11 in Hilversum, a piece of production forest planted in the 1950s that consists solely of American oak. One of the consequences of planting a production forest that consists of a single type of tree is that the biodiversity in such a piece of forest is limited. Another factor, besides reduced diversity, is that trees of non-native species such as American oak can only house about half as many living organisms as native species (c. 100 and 200 organisms respectively).

In the coming years, the Goois Natuurreservaat aims to increase its biodiversity. That is why some of the non-native trees will be cut down to make room for more indigenous trees and, in the long term, for more different types of organisms in the area. This will make the forest as a whole healthier and more resistant to changing conditions and diseases.

To create the design, the students cut the entire main trunk of the oak tree into slices so they could use as much of the material as possible. This resulted in a kind of MRI scan (magnetic resonance imaging scan) of the tree. Then they laid out all of the 6-cm-thick slices side by side in the forest, showing the huge surface area of the material. Next they stacked the slices, from large to small, in an upward-undulating shape on the hillside to create a sheltered vantage point from which birdwatchers can observe the kingfishers across the water. A fence woven from leftover branches screens off the nature reserve and protects the kingfisher’s nesting place.

The cut tree slices look like the cross sections of a MRI scan (magnetic resonance imaging scan).

All of the people involved hugged the tree.

49

BACK IN THE BUILDING

On 4 June, some of the final presentations were held at the Academy and the MakerSpace for the first time in a while. After a prolonged lockdown, it was great to see so many people physically together again. This memorable moment was captured by photographer Jonathan Andrew.

Photos

JONATHAN ANDREW

Tools 2 (A) Construction Technique in Room 108.

Photo top: Morphology class V2b in the Balkenzaal.

Photos middle and bottom: Tools 2 (UL) Landscape Analysis in the Hoge Zaal.

EDUCATION

50

Morphology class V2b in the MakerSpace.

Photos top: Research course O4 (A) in the MakerSpace.

Photos bottom: Tools 2 (A) Construction Technique in 106 and 108.

51

OFFLINE? ONLINE? BOTH, AS LONG AS THERE IS A LINE! In the previous Annual Newspaper, Markus Appenzeller made a case for online learning and teaching as a source of innovation. A year later, he reassesses his initial remarks.

Text

MARKUS APPENZELLER

A year ago I asked the question: ‘Offline is off the line, but is online on the line?’¹ Back then – it seems like a generation ago – I made a plea to embrace online learning and teaching as an enrichment to the didactic toolbox. What I did not foresee is how long being together in physical space has not been possible since. Online has become the norm and offline the exception.

And now? To me the question should not be if, post-Covid, we’ll keep learning and teaching online or not. The question should be how we combine both methods in such a way that we have better learning outcomes and ultimately become better architects, urbanists and landscape architects.

In the meantime we can also study the effects of online learning and teaching. My personal conclusion is that there is a lot that we should keep in the future. I’d like to give some examples: Our lectures have seen a lineup of guests that is unprecedented. Not having to undergo the hassle of travelling has made many guests decide to join us for an evening and use the formats we developed.

Teaching and learning have more and more shifted from one-way broadcasting in the form of lectures to real conversations between students and teachers.

We are all learning in this new virtual world and online has levelled the traditional hierarchies. This has led to a much greater involvement of the students.

The final presentations online often are better than their counterparts in physical space. Telling a good story in virtual space needs better preparation and one has to think about the narrative beforehand a lot more.

Online is a time saver. Many of our students – especially those with long commutes – enjoy that they save up to nine hours of travel each week. Time that they feel they can potentially invest in content and social life equally.

Working, designing and developing concepts online has led to surprising and refreshing new ideas in the work of students and the didactic concepts of teachers equally.

Concept boards like Miro and others allow us to structure the design process in new ways with a better overview of the steps taken.

EDUCATION

There are many more situations of the online world being beneficial. Of course there are downsides as well. The lack of informal communication, missing the peer group, the uniformity of work, study and living in one and the same place and the reduced possibilities to explore design in real three-dimensional space all have a negative effect on how online learning is perceived. While some of these limitations will disappear in the future, others will stay since they are inherent to the use of online tools.

I have no doubts that post-Covid we’ll partly keep learning and teaching online. But there is a risk. We were forced into an online teaching and learning environment within days. It was not a conscious decision – it was a sheer necessity. Now, once the Covidrelated restrictions are lifted there is a real danger that the pendulum will swing entirely in the other direction and anything online will be discredited and abandoned for some time in order to celebrate and enjoy the regained freedom to meet. As we gained online teaching and learning knowledge in a short period of time with a steep learning curve, we will lose it again at equal speed. I very much hope that we will not fall into this trap.

The forced online learning has finally put us in a place where other educational institutes already were well before Covid-19 arrived. We were largely ignorant of the online learning world, finding all kinds of excuses why it is not the right thing: ‘we need to touch and see models’, ‘only a hand sketch can convey an idea properly’, or ‘a discipline that works with real space as substance cannot be taught in virtual space’. All these concerns were proven wrong, or at least an excuse for not even having to start trying.

I believe that we should keep experimenting and we should keep using online learning as a substantial and important part of future education. But it should be a conscious choice for tools that deliver the best learning experience.

We are experts on the physical space but with the virtual space becoming more and more important, we should aim for expertise in this world as well. Virtual space knows similar and even more discus­sions than physical space. Increasingly both are linked. It needs advocates for the greater good – people who

understand how to bring the complexities of society, economy and environment together in a spatial form that transcends the traditional boundaries of space.

Online and offline worlds become a singular ‘line’ world where we switch increasingly seamlessly between both. Therefore, ignoring it is not an option anymore for spatial designers.

It is up to us to have a genuine concept and a design language for this line world. Using online and offline learning and teaching gives us the tools to explore it. It will allow us to expand our reach and our impact. For the first time in a long while, we have the opportunity to extend our vocabulary and our role in society. It would be a shame to miss out on that.

1 Markus Appenzeller, ‘Offline Is Off the Line: But Is Online On the Line?’, Amsterdam Academy of Architecture Annual Newspaper (2019–2020), 24.

52

WITH FLYING COLOURS The Amsterdam Academy of Architecture has successfully completed three accreditations in the past two years.

Over the past two years, the Academy of Architecture has successfully completed three accreditations. These accreditations each occur once every six years. In November 2019, a research visitation took place on behalf of the Evaluation Quality Research Committee (CEKO) of the Association of Universities of Applied Sciences. The visitation panel rated the research of each of these three professorships in architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture as ‘excellent’. The panel called the research programmes of the professorships ‘very ambitious, relevant and committed, fed by and focused on pressing social issues that relate to the three disciplines’.

They also noted that ‘due to the quality and nature of the various research projects, these research groups contribute to urgent tasks and issues that are of great importance to society in a very productive way’.

In November 2020, a combined online visitation took place in the context of an educational accreditation of the Netherlands-Flemish Accreditation Organization (NVAO) and an internationalization accreditation by the European Consortium for Accreditation in higher education (ECA). In the report of the educational accreditation, the panel wrote: ‘The committee is impressed by the way in which the Academy has continued to develop its profile [towards] a specific view on the disciplines, a common programme structure, strong integrated research, positioning as a Dutch organization focusing on the international context of the disciplines.’ The committee ‘thinks highly of the course assessment method’ and ‘the final projects demonstrate that the three programmes are of high quality’.

In the report of the internationalization accreditation, the panel wrote: ‘The Academy has developed a robust framework to enhance the internationalization aspects of its three master programmes.’ The panel also noted that: ‘All students – irrespective of nationality or discipline – can rely on a range of relevant services that facilitate their study period.’ The Academy will work with the recommendations of the research, teaching and internationalization accreditation in the coming period.

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INTERNATIONAL ENDEAVOURS The Academy of Architecture has received the Certificate of Quality in Internationalization. It is both a confirmation of what has been achieved and an obligation to further develop internationalization goals in education.

Text Photos

MILDRED VAN DER ZWAN JONATHAN ANDREW

‘During last year’s Winter School, my team mates and I were busy exchanging ideas and working on an installation for quite a few days. And only on the last day did we come to realize that our team consisted of four students from Russia, the United States, Israel and Iran. It was quite a special experience for me and we ended up as friends despite the labels. I think one of the most beautiful things about the Academy is that we not only meet people from different backgrounds, but also get to know them as human beings and that this is something that could deeply impact the world we live in.’ ara Tayyebi Fard, T second-year Master’s student Architecture, Iran

EDUCATION

54

‘From my point of view, the best thing about the Academy is its good mix of people with different cultural and social backgrounds. Firstly, that means that I learn about other cultures not only by looking at reference pictures or reading texts, but also by having course mates who are from these countries and can describe the context better than anyone else.

Secondly, I have course mates not only from countries with world-famous architecture, but also from countries with less successful PR. From them, I learn about the architecture of Poland, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Zimbabwe – architecture that deserves attention too, but doesn’t appear in the headlines of magazines that often.’ dgars Rožkalns, E fourth-year Master’s student Architecture, Latvia

As a result of the latest accreditation, for the first time, the Academy of Architecture has received the Certificate of Quality in Internationalization, issued by the European Consortium for the Accred­i­ta­tion in Higher Education (ECA). But what does this mean?

What are the benefits and challenges? And how do we want to further develop our international profile?

Designers today need to have a global perspective. Local and international architecture, urban design and landscape architecture must express the diversity of people and be able to think and act beyond traditional cultural borders. This is a prerequisite for adding value to life on planet Earth. Rather than striving for a lingua franca, a vehicular language based on lowest common denominators, we aim higher. We want to give room to the individual designer and her or his cultural background. Only then can students develop their own authentic vocabulary and signature.

We are a Dutch organization operating in an international context, offering Dutch and non-Dutch students the opportunity to study at an international school based in Amsterdam and to prepare for both a domestic and international professional practice. Com­bining the local and the international means tran­scending boundaries and promoting our students, teachers and the entire school to a new level.

Becoming an international school is not an overnight event. The international dimension of the Acad­emy of Architecture and the three Master programmes in Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture has been growing slowly but steadily for quite some time. The decision in 2013 to offer the programme in two languages and the appointment of a dedicated international affairs coordinator in 2017 have boosted this process.

In early 2018 an analysis of internationalization at the Academy revealed what had been achieved by then and set out the steps to come. In this inventory we looked at several components clustered around ‘internationalization at home’ and ‘cross-border mobility’. The analysis showed that we could do better at raising awareness of the quality and impact of our international activities.

In our Position Paper on Internationalization we chose four strategic goals: — Provide students with opportunities to develop excellent design skills at the highest level, preparing them for a career in an international environment.

— Integrate internationalization in the curriculum and increase awareness.

— Increase the geographical range of international activities at the Academy.

— Create optimal conditions for internationalization.

In the coming years, our focus will be on these strategic goals. We acknowledge the urgency of the global challenges of climate change as well as the changing educational landscape and digital teaching methods. Our objective is therefore to examine the internationalization goals in relation to those two themes.

The ECA has developed benchmarks for the quality of internationalization. These were applied to assess the Academy in November 2020. According to the panel our three Master programmes fulfil all criteria and all standards of the evaluation framework.

The assessment committee found that our strategic goals for internationalization are clear, relevant and widely supported by management, staff, lecturers and students. Our action plan and its implementation proved sufficiently concrete to monitor our advancements in internationalization in regard to quality of teaching, learning and operating the school.

Being awarded the ECA Certificate for Quality in Internationalization confirms that our programme has successfully incorporated an international and inter­cultural dimension. But it is not primarily the certificate that is important, it was the process we had to go through that triggered discussions and gave us many new insights. We discovered what we are good at and where we see room for further evolution.

Thirty per cent of our students and teachers have a non-Dutch background. Students and teachers at the Academy therefore form a multilingual and multi­ cultural learning group – our definition of an international classroom. This classroom challenges preconceptions, gives opportunities to face real-world challenges in a multicultural learning space with the

goal to craft design solutions that are influenced by broader perspectives.

Every year, our curriculum features a substantial number of projects with an international and inter­ cultural focus: from research to lectures and from morphology classes and summer schools to excursions. Our students acquire international experience and knowledge through these courses. Increasing their number and expanding the geographical and cultural range of activities is an explicit goal. This does not always mean boarding a plane. Last year, for example, we were able to welcome guest teachers and lecturers from all over the world through our online teaching activities.

We want to make the international and intercultural learning skills for students more explicit in our programme. Here we see room in three directions: First, helping teachers to find possibilities to better facilitate intercultural group dynamics: more consciously exploring diversity, appropriately identifying intercultural differences and conflict lines and introducing positive intercultural dialogue driven by curiosity rather than prejudice.

Second, making it clear that an international angle and intercultural competences are an integral part of the learning goals that every student has to meet throughout their study, and ensuring that their teachers meet the same criteria.

Third, using the relatively small and intimate scale of the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture in such a way that our students get more and better opportunities to not only learn, but also teach and celebrate their cultural differences.

What started with a decision to add English as a teaching language almost ten years ago has developed into an exciting and enriching experience for all.

The ECA Certificate for Quality in Internationalization is therefore both a clear sign of what has been achieved and an obligation to further develop what internationalization can mean in educating architects, urbanists and landscape architects.

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CIRCULAR CITY

The lectorate Architecture and Circular Thinking, which consists of lecturer Peter van Assche and researchers Gerjan Streng and Roosje Rodenburg, charts the material flows of timber construction. Its members have used these to design a deconstructable building. As it turns out, circular architecture provides solutions to social problems.

Text

DAVID KEUNING

The lectorate Architecture and Circular Thinking (ACT) got off to a flying start in its first year. In addition to lecturer Peter van Assche and researcher Gerjan Streng, researcher Roosje Rodenburg also joined ACT. She studies architecture at the Academy and works for the municipality of Purmerend where she focuses on new expansion area Purmerhout for two days a week. Purmerhout is projected to become a circular district, its houses built using crosslaminated timber (CLT). It is an interesting test case for ACT. The plans for Purmerhout are still in the early stages in which the entire construction chain – from individual construction components to the role of contractors and supply companies – is being reconsidered.

On the two other days, Roosje works with Gerjan and Peter on similar issues at the Marineterrein in Amsterdam, the study group’s operating base. Here, they address the question of what role timber construction can play in circular architecture. To find an answer, they break down the material chain of solid wood into all kinds of subsections. Where do the trees come from? Which substances are added to this wood? What are the properties of the resulting components? Which components can be recycled after use? The starting point is that it has to be possible to remove the components and reuse them elsewhere. This means individual components remain part of a continuous construction flow and do not have to be burned as biomass after use.

To explore the implications this has for architectural design, ACT designed an eight-storey building on the basis of these principles. The aim was to ensure that all individual building components including columns, floors and fittings could be removed and replaced independently and at different times: that it was possible to replace a façade, for example, at a different time than a floor or installations. This proposal is now in the rough draft stage.

At the next stage, the researchers want to present this design to the parties involved in the construction, such as developers, lawyers and structural engineers. What do they see as the possibilities and obstacles of this construction method? Will the approach urge them to work in a different way? After all,

RESEARCH

even the most beautiful design is only really tested when other parties become involved and obstacles become apparent. The researchers are also thinking about the financial side of things. Suppliers of building materials could perhaps become shareholders in such a building. This would make it possible to arrange the financing in a completely different way than it has been to date: over the years, suppliers would receive a return on their investment, which they would eventually recoup entirely.

For those of you who think this is still in the future: deconstructable buildings whose components are returned to the lenders after use have already been realized on a small scale on several occasions. A modest example is of course the construction that covered the courtyard of the Academy during the past academic year. A more extensive example is the People’s Pavilion, which Peter realized with his office SLA in Eindhoven in 2017 on the occasion of Dutch Design Week. The future is sometimes closer than you think.

RESEARCH GRANT Together with the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Windesheim University of Applied Sciences and a number of partners in the field, the ACT submitted a research grant application to the Taskforce for Applied Research SIA (part of the Dutch Research Council NWO). Under the title ‘Circular Transition in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area’, the three universities of applied sciences and the partners in the field intend to conduct research into the circular transition of con­sumer goods and the built environment in the metro­ politan region in the coming years. Partners in the field include Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions (AMS), Waag Technology & Society, several municipalities in the metropolitan region, housing association Ymere, ABN-AMRO Circl, Pakhuis De Zwijger and the NEMO Science Museum. The SIA will decide on the allocation of the requested research grants this coming autumn.

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ENGAGING STORIES

The lectorate Future Urban Regions has published two handbooks, titled Information Design and Communication Design.

Text

ERIC FRIJTERS

FUR Handbook #01 Information Design

FUR auteur

Introduction

≥ p. 3

Erik van Gameren

Data visualization as knowledge production

≥ p. 7

Joost Grootens

The lectorate Future Urban Regions (FUR) is a research group connected to the six Dutch Academies of Architecture. FUR explores how spatial design can be involved in creating healthy urban ecosystems. To do so, FUR not only investigates solutions for new innovations related to the design of buildings, cities and landscapes, but also explores the process of research by design itself. On the topics of ‘Information Design’ and ‘Communication Design’, FUR hosted two masterclasses headed by leading professionals and scientists, which resulted in two publications guiding us into collecting information and storytelling. Why? Well, both topics play an important role in processes of research by design in informing ourselves and convincing others.

In our book Urban Challenges, Resilient Solutions, we sketched how information gathering leads to shaping knowledge and finally action perspective, by the process of research by design. In this process, information design offers a vital toolset. Noting, organizing and combining different types of knowledge and information in a graphic form will help to gain a wider and deeper understanding and lead to exciting new insights. In the spring of 2019, graphic designer Joost Grootens and information design specialist Erik van Gameren shared their knowledge in a two-day masterclass ‘Information Design’.

In the publication Information Design, Van Gameren takes us on a journey in the world of information design in the media, where graphic choices lead to different conclusions and can possibly have big consequences. He pleads for responsibility and a critical attitude of both the creator and the ‘consumer’ of information design. Grootens argues that the representation of knowledge and data in information design is ambivalent by nature as the conscious use of graphical tools will send the observer in a certain direction.

By embracing this intrinsic ambivalence and giving it room, new possibilities and insights will develop in the field of information design. In his essay, FURresearcher Christopher de Vries elaborates on the role of information design in designing for complex urban challenges. What is the history of this phenomenon and how was it useful for the big leaps that architects and urbanists have taken in urban design?

Complexity and Contradiction in Map design ≥ p. 21

Christopher de Vries

Designing information, informing design ≥ p. 41

Eric Frijters

New Views on Station Island

≥ P. 71

Station Island by Fabrications shows the flipside of these theoretical reflections in an unruly reality. It shows a case in which information design plays a crucial part and leads to new insights and definitions of design challenges.

Spatial design is about much more than making beautiful buildings, urban plans or landscape designs. In a world dealing with climate change, social inequality, the exhaustion of natural resources, a shrinking biodiversity and many other urgent issues, we need interventions of a more systemic nature.

This means that the discipline of spatial design is entering a much wider playing field, which requires a different way of operating: not singular and linear but multifaceted and circular. In order to do so, spatial design helps to organize and shape urban environments to become healthier, socially and economically more successful, better equipped for a changing climate and more sustainable in terms of natural resources and energy production. For this, we need synergies between a diversity of fields like infrastructure, healthcare, food production, nature, energy production, education and more. It requires the effort and commitment of a circle of actors that far exceeds the traditional tandem of client and designer. But how do we reach out to all those parties and people from outside the field of spatial design? How do we get them engaged and involved so we can join forces to work towards an urban environment that functions in new and more integrated ways?

Part of the answer is: by creating engaging narratives. Storytelling offers a powerful instrument with which to inform, engage and involve people and organizations in a wide variety of objectives. How can we use the power of storytelling when working on the wicked problems of our urban environments? How can we combine our ideas and plans in stories that reach as many people and organizations as possible?

The handbook Communication Design shows how to use storytelling in processes of research by design.

Brand strategist Cecilia Martin and advertising director Yani share their insights in this handbook. Yani, for many years one of the most successful directors in Dutch advertising, is a master of telling extremely short, effective and often very funny stories. In an interview he offers an insight into the use of stories in commercial advertising, containing interesting lessons for other fields as well. ‘It starts with the real­ ization that your audience basically doesn’t give a shit,’ he starts. ‘What’s more, they’ve no idea what to expect. You’re totally immersed in your project, but the target group sees it for the first time. So, they haven’t a clue, and you’ve got to grab their attention immediately.’ That’s where Cecilia Martin comes into play. Drawing from examples in advertising, politics and culture, she shares her step-by-step programme.

‘Storytelling is an instrument to connect people and to help them see what you see. That’s why using stories is personal and positive. We need to put ourselves out there and do the opposite of what we were always told in professional environments: be up close and personal and have the courage to tell our own story.’ In short, we can only engage others if we ourselves are engaged.

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Paolo Picchi

Participants discussing how to use a large piece of landscape available in the A1, A9 and railway node in the Diemerscheg, north of the Diemerbos, for RES implementation.

NEW ENERGY

The lectorate High-Density Energy Landscapes organized a masterclass for officials of the City of Amsterdam. It offered participants new insights into the spatial possibilities of the city’s energy transition. Maaike Zwart, programme manager of Sustainable Area Development for the city, relates her experiences.

Text

MAAIKE ZWART

RESEARCH

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THE MASTERCLASS ENERGY TRANSITION The content of the masterclass was decided on in 2019. Prospective participants voted for the activities they thought were most useful to them. Working on site-specific exercises in a social environment was the activity that received the most votes. Covid-19 caused a switch to online lectures in 2020. Part of the group work could still be conducted live, while respecting the Covid-19 safety measures. This allowed us to partly safeguard the masterclass’s social element, which is so relevant for pursuing the learning goals.

The masterclass learning goals can be distinguished in technical and analytical skills. An example of a technical skill is gaining knowledge of renewable energy technologies and the concept of the energy landscape. Among the analytical skills are conducting landscape analysis for the planning and design of renewable energy, and creative design thinking for sustainable energy landscapes (renewable energy technologies as integral part of dynamic socioecological urban systems). The masterclass also stimulates the participants’ interdisciplinary and social skills, such as sharing and communicating landscape values with colleagues from different backgrounds.

Sharing and communicating design thinking for sustainable energy landscapes with colleagues from different teams is yet another skill.

We share with the Amsterdam Academy of Archi­ tecture the belief that a common factor enabling the abovementioned learning goals is an effective social and creative environment.

The creativity of design thinking means stepping out of the mental framework of official land use maps and current planning methods. Instead, participants gain an open eye for spaces that are not officially available, giving them new values and alternative uses for the energy transition. For example: at present, the City of Amsterdam officially limits its solar energy potential to building roofs. During the masterclass participants investigated different interstitial vacant spaces. They opened up new perspectives for harvesting solar energy, for instance in marginal infrastructural landscapes and railway tracks, which cover a huge area if one considers the entire municipality.

Memory Lines by Ries Breek and Maartje Pittery. Historical dikes are ingrained in the collective memory thanks to a system of wind turbines with an oscillating vertical axis. While producing renewable energy, they are a sign of the dike and indicate its age. The cycle path on the image is called Bloemendaal Road and follows a fourteenth-century dike along the IJ.

The expected outcome of the training programme is to create a group of ambassadors inspired and trained in the field of energy transition through ‘mutual responsibility, joint inquiry and shared purpose’.¹ Those ambassadors will encourage interdisciplinary knowledge exchange practices and activate spillover effects between the different municipal teams and their competences, with the final result of increasing capacity building.² This is beneficial to the creation of a group of experts: ambassadors for the municipal teams. In 2020 new insights were generated specifically for the Diemerscheg, yet applicable to the whole metropolitan region.

The case studies enabled a better comprehension of real, everyday landscapes and their potential relevance for the RES plans. Participants envisaged that it is possible to integrate renewable energy technologies with other landscape functions, contradicting the perception that wind turbines or photovoltaic systems are like alien ships landing on a site. The energy transition can be a reason to design new multifunctional landscapes. In the Diemerscheg, the existing infrastructure revealed extensive available space, where nature, culture, enterprise and renewable energy can be planned together. The activation of energy communities appear promising in the future shaping of the energy transition, in line with the EU Directive 2001/2018, which promotes the use of energy from renewable sources.

After this second masterclass edition we can affirm that the masterclass’s social environment contributes to its successful result: sharing new values and meanings and participating in groups stimulate the capacity to conceive design concepts and step out of the framework of current plans and protocols.

1 Helen Holmes et al., ‘Interdisciplinarity in Transdisciplinary Projects: Circulating Knowledges, Practices and Effects’, DISP – The Planning Review 54/2 (2018), 83, doi.org/10.1080/ 02513625.2018.1487646.

2 Paolo Picchi, Dirk Oudes and Sven Stremke, ‘Linking Research through Design and Adult Learning Programs for Urban Agendas: A Perspective Essay’, Ri-Vista – Research for Land­ scape Architecture 18/1 (2020), 198-213, doi.org/10.13128/ rv-9420.

Tramway Botanic Corridor by Heiko Miskotte. Amsterdam has an extensive network of tramway tracks. These tracks could be covered with photovoltaic pergolas, offering a huge solar energy potential. These pergolas could also provide sun shading for carriages. Vertical-axis wind turbines could be installed on top of the tramway poles, complementing the energy supply.

Image Paolo Picchi

Two and a half years ago the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and the City of Amsterdam started an inspirational collaboration. We combined two challenges: the spatial aspects of the energy translation and adult learning. The aim of this collaboration was to teach designers, spatial planners and policymakers about the spatial dimensions of the energy transition, in order to show that energy has always been a spatial challenge and to inspire municipal designers and planners to start designing with the possibilities that the current energy transition offers.

Together we organized a one-week masterclass. In this masterclass we made top-notch knowledge available through lectures, excursions and site-specific design thinking application. The knowledge gained was then used in a current case in the city. The first year this case was the Bretten, the second year the Regional Energy Strategy (RES) in the Diemerscheg, in the southeast of Amsterdam.

Each year the masterclass contributes to answering a research question. In 2020 the research question was set together with RES stakeholders to work on the Diemerscheg, where current plans foresee the installation of a relevant number of wind turbines.

The aim was to operationalize the plans and open possible alternatives. The research question was: Which design concepts can help to realize energy transition targets while, simultaneously, improving spatial quality and unlocking vacant spaces in the linear Infrastructure landscape of the Diemerscheg?

By this approach the city benefits in two ways: officials are trained and we provide an actual site with inspiration.

As programme manager of Sustainable Area Dev­ el­op­ment for the City of Amsterdam, I have been involved in the collaboration with the Academy from the start. The idea of the collaboration made me enthusiastic from the beginning. It was all very new. We started with an open mind. In my view the in-depth knowledge of the energy transition, the enthusiasm and the organizational capabilities of Sven, Paolo and Dirk from the Academy made this whole initiative a great success. What I like most are the reactions of the participants: they are really inspired. Inspired by the energy transition. Isn’t that the best outcome we can have?

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PUBLICATIONS Amsterdam of

Academy Architecture

1 BOOM Graduation Projects 2019 2020

Academie van Bouwkunst Minor Architectuur 2020-2021

1 Tree: Academy of Architecture Minor 2020–2021 Marlies Boterman and Oep Schilling (eds.), Amsterdam, 2020 For the minor in Architecture at the Academy of Architecture, a group of students were given the assignment to build a shelter. For this assignment they had just one tree at their disposal, which had to be used in its entirety in the design. This challenged them to think about the material and the design in a different way and to consciously consider the origin of materials. For the implemented design, the main trunk of the oak tree was completely cut into slices in order to use as much of the material as possible. This resulted in a kind of MRI scan of the tree. The slices were stacked to create a screened vantage point from which to observe the kingfishers on the other side of the water. A fence was woven from the remain­ ing branches to shield the nature reserve and protect the kingfisher’s nesting place.

Architecture Landscape

Urbanism Architecture

Graduation Projects 2019–2020

Building in Landscape

Vibeke Gieskes (ed.), Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, 2020

Charlotte van der Woude (ed.), Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, 2020

This publication features work by students who graduated from the Academy of Architecture in the 2019-2020 academic year. The 35 gradu­ ation projects in the Masters of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture are introduced by Madeleine Maaskant. The heads of the three Master programmes, Jan-Richard Kikkert, Markus Appenzeller and Hanneke Kijne respectively, reflect on the graduation work in their disciplines. The publication accompanied the Graduation Show, which took place on Friday, 6 November 2020 and could be viewed online via a livestream. During the show, titled ‘Looped’, students’ visions, plans and models were highlighted by curator Bruno Vermeersch.

The Dutch government’s legislation Action Plan Ammonia recently made it possible for pig farmers to sell their farms to the state.

In the Province of North Brabant, more than 300 farmers have signed up, which means that many stables and farms will lose their pur­ pose and become vacant. What can be done with all these built elements? But more im­portantly, what effects will this have on the country­side and what will happen to the identity of the surrounding landscape? From March to June 2020, eight first-year Architecture and Land­scape Architecture students from the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture worked on a design proposal for a former pig farm. All plans include an integral and sustainable vision for both the farm and the surrounding plots.

Urban Metabolism: New York, Hong Kong, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Venice Andreas Mulder (ed.), Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, 2020 This booklet shows the urban metabolism of five different cities around the globe. From small, Venice, to extra-large, New York. During the O2a class, 11 Urbanism students took the city as the human body: integral, dependent on multiple organs and based on compre­hen­sive flows. Mobility, typology, nature and history go hand in hand in the total package that shaped each city into what it now is. Each week, the students studied their city from various per­ spec­tives, including metropolitan size and posi­ tioning, the relation between infrastructure and landscape, urban typology, public space, city centres, and history and growth.

Building Conversation Artist in Residence Amsterdam Academy of Architecture

Urban Gaming Rotterdam Klein Belgie

Explore Play Design Reflect

Amsterdam Academy of Architecture

Rewriting Architecture: 10+1 Actions: Tabula Scripta

Urban Gaming Rotterdam Klein België: Explore, Play, Design, Reflect

Floris Alkemade, Michiel van Iersel, Jarrik Ouburg, Mark Minkjan (eds.), Valiz with Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, 2020

David Kloet and Felix Madrazo (eds.), Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, 2020

Rewriting Architecture reflects the research findings of the Tabula Scripta lectorate, led by Floris Alkemade from 2014 to 2019. The book claims that the idea of the ‘tabula rasa’, or creating something from scratch, is no longer a viable option. It considers the quality of the existing urban and social fabric – the tabula scripta – as an inspiration, motivation and starting point for design. How can this context be read, understood, valued and further devel­ oped? Rewriting Architecture enriches the architecture discourse and wider public debate with a series of actions that show how we can respond better to what is already there: elimi­ nate, continue, obscure, reconfigure, repurpose, densify, copy, overlay, reimagine, restart and abstain. These 10+1 actions are illustrated by compelling examples from a broad range of places and design practices all over the world.

The editors relate these challenges to a wide array of makers and thinkers through stimulat­ ing contributions by architects and other specialists working in the arts, biology, fashion, ecology, pop culture, nanotechnology and philosophy.

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Normally, students are given an assignment for a project that includes the programme, the objectives and the site boundaries. There is one client (the tutor) and the level of interaction is rather simple, and most important in one direction. The P5O5 Urban Gaming Studio aims to challenge that by not defining the brief in advance (no programme, no objectives, no site boundaries). Instead, it emphasizes that a client or clients should be sought for, that multiple voices or stakeholders are needed and that a strategy is required to incorporate their needs and desires into the design process. Finally, the Urban Gaming Studio stresses that each student should find a gaming method as a way to negotiate the multiple agendas of the various stakeholders. In this way gaming is seen as a research tool rather than as a design tool, but ultimately the brief of the design assignment is affected by it and by extension the design results. This book is a collection of the work of six students who participated in the studio.

The Architecture of Conversation: Building Conversation Artist in Residence Markus Appenzeller, Lotte van den Berg and Jeanne Tan (eds.), Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, 2020 The 2020 Winter School at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture was a nine-day ex­plo­ ration of the relationship between archi­tecture and dialogue, with artists, students and teachers. During the first two days of the winter school, each participating student joined four different performative conversations in chang­ ing groups of about 20 people. Based on those experiences, the participating students mapped their own fields of interest on the third day, look­ ing for kinship between space and dialogue.

On days four to seven, the participating stu­dents, divided into ten groups, conducted their own ex­ periments. On day eight, visitors were invited to join the experiments. On the final day, 130 par­tic­ ipating students, teachers and artists re­flected on the past nine days through writing, draw­ing and talking. The ensuing publication took the form of a ‘box of uncensored and un­bound series of reflexions’, of which only one copy has been produced. The online version can be viewed at www.thearchitectureofconversation.nl.

The presentation of the physical copy can be viewed at vimeo.com/500949093

Solo Space Anasstasia Smirnova (ed.), Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, 2021 The coronavirus crisis has forced us to rethink the demarcation between the public and private space in the city. Individual homes – stages for domestic life – have become office spaces and places for unusual social interactions.

As people started working remotely en masse, they were also forced to expose their intimate environments during online sessions and use them for new functions. The multidisciplinary studio Solo Space offered an opportunity to investigate a nuanced balance between the private and the public within the framework of an unusual typology: a single-artist museum.

Inspired by famous examples like The Noguchi Museum in New York and The Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo, studio curators invited stu­dents to a small art cluster in the city of Amsterdam. Dutch contemporary artist Berndnaut Smilde became a central inspi­ra­tional figure to the studio. This book not only con­tains the projects designed by the eight par­tic­i­pating students, but also interviews with curators, reflections and museum typology studies.

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TREASURE CHEST The Architecture of Conversation is a one-off tome of offerings.

Photos

The 2020 Winter School was led by artist collective Building Conversation. Gathered in the MakerSpace and in the Academy building, all first and second year students explored the possibilities and impossibilities of verbal communication using conversation.

Building Conversation suggested various conversation techniques, including Timeloop and Parliament of Things. At the end of the Winter School, the students were asked to present their findings in a ‘dia­ logical work of art’ that experimentally illustrated the relationship between space and conversation.

The ensuing publication, designed by Haller Brun, took the form of a ‘box of uncensored and unbound series of reflexions’, of which only one copy has been produced. The online version can be viewed at thearchitectureofconversation.nl

JUSTINA NEKRAŠAITĖ – THE BOOK PHOTOGRAPHER

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TURNING THE PAGE

The publication of Rewriting Architecture: 10+1 Actions/Tabula Scripta marked the conclusion of the Tabula Scripta architecture lectorate. Xander Vermeulen Windsant reviewed the book for Archined. He found it difficult to place. The book is too bulky for a manifesto and its content is ‘too activist’ for it to be called a well-wrought, historically and philosophically grounded academic argument. So, what is it? It is nothing short of an attempt to recalibrate the profession.

XANDER VERMEULEN WINDSANT

© Gerline de Geus

Text

RESEARCH

Rewriting Architecture: 10+1 Actions/Tabula Scripta aspires to bring a long-ignored design attitude back to the attention of practitioners and put it on the intellectual and ethical agenda of the profession. According to Floris Alkemade, Jarrik Ouburg, Michiel van Iersel and Mark Minkjan, this will provide an impetus for the necessary repositioning of the profession.

The bulky book opens with several short introductions that frame the book’s ambitions. In brief (historical) analyses, the editors convey a sense of urgency about the recalibration of architectural design, each in their own way. The current emphasis on ‘(image) production’ has eroded the position of architects.

They are toothless, the authors say, and unable to make relevant, ‘real’ contributions to the solving of today’s social challenges. Making ‘real’ contributions will only be possible again once the architects’ position changes; only then can they regain their lost status.

After the introductions follow 11 chapters in which 11 ‘actions’ are presented and illustrated by interviews, essays and short project reviews. The 11 ‘actions’ form the bulk of the book. Using interviews and essays to sketchily illustrate the actions rather than define them as a methodologically coherent whole, the editors deliberately avoid a ‘closed’ position: they are not telling anyone how to do their job or how to design. They present the actions as colours on a painter’s palette, as actions that have potential, as the ingredients of a design practice that can realize a great wealth of finely nuanced results.

The term ‘tabula scripta’ in the subtitle refers to a different design attitude towards the context than the one we are used to. This ‘different attitude’ is said to feed the 11 actions. The tabula scripta, the ‘written page’ is emphatically set against the tabula rasa or ‘empty page’. According to Alkemade, the empty page is the dreamed-of surface on which the (star)architect – the work of the Superdutch generation is explicitly mentioned as an example – can assert their ego. This empty page not only refers to a physically empty context – Alkemade refers to the building over of grassland – but also and especially to spiritual emptiness; to a lack of sensitivity or to the

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inadequacy of designers to relate to the layered complexity of the existing contexts in which they (now) work. The empty sheet of paper is, above all, very convenient, it has a comfortable emptiness that does not get in the way of the design of cool architecture.

In their book, the editors describe a different attitude – one that focuses on both the context and on ways of designing – rather than a method. They describe a different design practice that fits perfectly with the ‘new’ Dutch architecture that Kirsten Hannema labelled ‘Supernormal’ in A+U 592. She (also) positions this ‘other’ architecture as both the successor and the counterpart of Superdutch architecture. It is no coincidence that this particular issue of A+U presents a large number of recent projects that are all to a great extent ‘dealing with the existing reality’: with reuse and transformation.

The fact that the projects Hannema identifies in ‘her’ A+U have been in the pipeline for almost ten years indicates that she did not ‘discover’ anything new, but that a long-standing design practice is (only) now proving to have a definable coherence. The many examples given in Rewriting Architecture often go back even further and show that this ‘new attitude’ has always been present, albeit not in the (imagerich) foreground. It is another part of the practice that holds the spotlight. Somehow, the comparison with OMA/Rem Koolhaas’s recent (absurd/painful/ alienating) ‘discovery’ that there is a whole world to be found outside our metropolises comes to mind. Is this really a ‘new’ insight, or are people (finally) taking off their (intellectual) blinkers?

The emphasis on a different design practice is not only explained in interviews and essays that describe the actions, but also by exemplary projects set up by kindred spirits. There is a lot of Belgian input: the book includes interviews with architects de vylder vinck tallieu, 51N4E and Xavier de Geyter. As this is supplemented by projects by and interviews with Lacaton Vassal, Atelier Bow-Wow, Sam Jacob, Assemble and Elemental, the editors have managed to assembled a parade of contemporary (but relevant) trendsetters.

The Dutch contribution is limited and consists largely of projects by students of the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and projects by the practices of Jarrik Ouburg (HOH architects) and Floris Alkemade (under his own name, from his collaboration with Xavier de Geyter and from his time as partner at OMA). Compared to the other projects, the editors’ own examples sometimes seem insignificant and forced. It cannot but be that they want to frame themselves as active proponents of ‘their’ attitude.

Vanity sometimes seems to have taken precedence over substantiality.

The editors provide the artists, architects and activists with a generous platform to display their sensitivity to places, people and to the complex situations in which they work. Being put into practice does not reduce this to a few slick diagrams; it is explored by searching, listening, together with many others.

Complexity is embraced, explored and transformed into design actions.

In contrast to the straightforward brick boxes of building blocks and/or the frenetic muscle-flaunting of architectural icons that now dominate the building production, the everyday and modest elegance of the presented projects is radical and provocative in a disarming way. They are seductive, stimulating and challenging.

However, a dilemma also presents itself, one that the editors have noticed, too. After all, doesn’t ‘working from inside reality’ also mean that one accepts reality ‘blindly’, at least in the first instance? Where does that leave the critical moment, what ideals are left to nourish the profession? What does modesty achieve? Is the propagated modesty really meant to be positive or is it, given the observed marginalization of architecture, a way of accepting one’s own powerlessness by fine words?

Rewriting Architecture does not literally say so, but the editors in fact expose the myth that architects (want to) have the capacity to tilt the world in the right direction, purely by the power of their ingenious design. It recognizes their actual powerlessness not out of resignation, but out of pragmatic idealism. It presents an attitude that, despite this actual powerlessness, does have the tools to bring about change.

Unfortunately, the editors do not start from their own strengths and cannot resist the temptation to contrast ‘their’ attitude to one of the immediate past:

it is not the Superdutch attitude. That is fine as a kind of adolescent defiance of the previous generation, but it does not make the argument any stronger.

Today, the Superdutch generation mainly designs shopping centres, skyscrapers and sheikhs’ toys.

Surely it is clear to all that their claim – that of the self-appointed successors to the radical ideals of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde – is now empty?

Making the Superdutch generation the measure of all things, Alkemade et al. are comparing apples with (rotten) pears.

Rather than identify a generational conflict, Re­ writ­ing Architecture describes an architecture with a vocabulary that has always existed, but with which the headlines have not been written in recent decades. Rewriting Architecture shifts the gaze, rearranges priorities and sets a different rather than a new agenda. This other agenda does not aspire to think reflectively/critically about reality and represent it in architecture, but to be a concrete part of it and contribute to it. Like a historical pendulum, the focus of the architecture discourse seems to move away from the universal and generic and back to the local and the specific.

No matter how beautiful, noble and ‘necessary’ this ambition perhaps is, it remains unclear how this shifted gaze facilitates the step from ‘intellectual ambition’ to an actually tangible reduction of inequality, to real affordability, to real climate adaptation, as the introductions state. Will homes become cheaper to live in if they are designed with the described attitude in mind? Will they be better insulated or offer more space for urban nature? Will they become zero-onthe-meter more quickly?

Even more than an effort to convince its audience that this other attitude is a ‘better’ way to realize these social ambitions, Rewriting Architecture is a sincere appeal to architects to relate to the challenges they work on with an inquisitive, open mind.

Rejecting black-and-white thinking, the book advocates a middle course between a ‘compulsive’ avant-gardism that questions everything on the one hand, and a suffocating cuddling of what is already on the other. Both attitudes can, regardless of the architecture, result in an ‘A’ energy rating, be affordable (rather often, they are not) or result in a green roof and some obligatory birdhouses to tick the ‘nature inclusive’ box. Beyond labels and ticked boxes, the editors advocate an active, involved practice in which shades of grey can be discovered and the critical reflection on which shade of grey is the most desirable is determined in the process. Not only the product, but the practice itself has value.

‘Real’ impact on living environments can be expressed in different quantities than the ones we are used to. Not revolution, but evolution. No shock-andawe architecture, but intelligent guerrilla. By working bottom-up, from what Ouburg calls ‘the swamp’ of reality in his introduction, architecture can be more than a cynical commentary from the cultural side lines: it can once again be an active voice in society. loris Alkemade, Michiel van Iersel, Jarrik Ouburg, F Mark Minkjan (eds.), Rewriting Architecture: 10+1 Actions/ Tabula Scripta. Valiz (2020) his article originally appeared in Dutch on the Archined T website on 2 February 2021; see archined.nl/2021/02/ tabula-scripta-een-andere-kijk-op-het-ontwerpvak/

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PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT Last year, students not only learned online rather than at the Academy, but many of them also worked in the digital domain. Experiences are mixed. Professional Experience Coordinator Nico van Bockhooven advocates a continued openness to online possibilities once the pandemic is over.

Text

NICO VAN BOCKHOOVEN

In addition to their studies, students at the Acad­ emy of Architecture work in an architecture office during the day, gaining professional experience that earns them half of their credits. The conditions to which students’ work placements have to comply and the skills they have to learn there are described in the External Curriculum.¹ An appendix to this curriculum lists eight professional qualifications. These qualifications comprise four general professional qualifications (Positioning, Organizing, Interpersonal Skills and Communicating) and four professional qualifications (Enterprising, Designing, Preparation Realization Phase and Supervision, Implementation and Execution).

Students have relatively little contact with the business side of the profession. To increase the knowledge and especially the awareness of the business side of our profession among our students and to stimulate them to also discuss this side of the profession with their employers, we offer the practice module Design & Management in the third year and Design & Entrepreneurship in the fourth year. Broadly speaking, Design & Management centres on the process after a commission has been acquired, with the focus on managing the design process; Design & Entrepreneurship centres on the process before a commission is obtained, with the focus on preparing an offer.

DESIGN & ENTREPRENEURSHIP Several years ago, Thijs Meijer proposed a lecture series on management. Thijs graduated as an architect from the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and is fascinated by the business side, in which he has specialized. Over the years, this series has developed into the practice module Design & Entre­pre­neur­ship.

The module, which focuses on the positioning of designers and on preparing (financial) offers, is a compulsory fourth-year course. The module combines theoretical input and workshops. Thijs himself, a number of workshop supervisors (Martin Frederiks, Frans Boots, Annegien van Dijk, Menno Moerman and Thijs) and various guest speakers provide theoretical input by giving short lectures. Marianne Idiarte delivers a lecture on acquisition and positioning, this

PRACTICE

year larded with a practical example of one of our alumni, David Tol. Leon Theunissen, former partner at VMX architects and currently a property developer at DubbeLL, treated this year’s students to a lecture about the relationship between client and designer.

He discussed this from the client’s point of view, drawing on his experience as a property developer, and from the contractor’s point of view, drawing on his experience as a partner at VMX architects.

In this module, students work on an offer in small groups of about five people. To this end, the workshop supervisors write a tender on the basis of an anonymized and simplified real commission. The composition of the groups is as interdisciplinary as possible, mixing Landscape Architecture, Urban Design and Architecture. Each group makes an offer that pays attention to financial and organizational aspects and they also choose a position. At the end of the series, each group makes a short pitch to present the offer and the ideas behind it.

DESIGN & MANAGEMENT Whereas Design & Entrepreneurship primarily centres on the process before a commission is obtained (positioning, acquiring, making an offer), the practice module Design & Management, which is taught in the third year, centres on the process after a commission has been acquired and on all things involved in the process of bringing it to a successful conclusion. It is not primarily about management tools, although some are discussed; the emphasis is on managing the design process. For this module, we asked Alijd van Doorn to generate content and to moderate the module.² This module also combines theoretical input and a practice-oriented assignment. The theoretical input is provided by Alijd. In addition, this year’s edition featured a number of guest speakers who, each from their own point of view, shed light on the managing of the design process.

Dafne Wiegers is a young alumna of the Academy.

She talked about her role at AHH – originally the office of Herman Herzberger – at which she became an executive partner and board member shortly after graduating. She gave the students her views on the

importance of knowledge of the business side of the profession, not as a goal in itself, but in order to move forward and grow as an architect and as an office. A second alumna, Nyasha Harper-Michon, also has a special interest in the business side of the profession.

She told an inspiring story about the importance of management, the heart of which was: Know what you want to do and surround yourself with people with complementary skills and tools. Garden designer and researcher Joost Emmerik’s lecture outlined how to successfully manage the design process as a solopreneur. Mathis Güller of Güller Güller Architecture Urbanism, finally, explained how he organizes and shapes large-scale urban projects and commits stakeholders to his story. He also talked about how difficult it is to do so successfully at the moment, given the limitations caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

These guest speakers illustrated Alijd’s theoretical story with a wide range of views on managing the design process.

An important part of this practice module is that the students get to work with the content themselves, under the guidance of a number of coaches (Martin Fredriks, Dick de Gunst and Chris Luth for Architecture, Leon Emmen for Landscape Archi­ tec­ture and Jaap Brouwer for Urban Design). In the workshops, students select a project on which they are already working at their offices. The variety of projects that the students bring to the table is substantial, from small-scale to large-scale. The plenary lectures are interdisciplinary. During the workshops, students work on assignments in disciplinary groups of approximately eight to ten people. They see each other’s work and learn from it. At the outset, we ask the students what the most important management constraints of their projects are. In a number of workshops, they subsequently make an analysis of their own project and process, looking at the influence of the brief, money, time, office organization, project organization and collaboration. Finally, they come up with improvement proposals for the process in regard to the most important management limitations.

Because students analyse projects they are working on for their employer, they also collect information from their employer. This sometimes leads to

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interesting discussions about these subjects at the architecture offices and to students becoming more involved in the business side of the profession. It can also lead to tension, when offices regard the information that is requested as confidential. But the module is not about factual information, it is about the underlying, universal processes. The students are asked to turn their analyses into a booklet and this often leads to surprising and evocative results, for example beautifully designed planning, process and cooperation graphics.

ONLINE PRACTICE MODULE This year, the practice modules had an extra dimension: because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the modules were taught online. This had advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that supervisors and speakers can operate from home. For busy professionals, this saves a lot of time. A disadvantage is that speakers who give presentations online, especially when they give them to groups of some 50 students, have much less of a connection with their audiences.

Despite several attempts to improve this, the inter­ action between students and speakers remained limited. The lack of interaction seems to be largely due to the size of the group and the relative anonymity of the participants. Apparently, being online enhances the character of a lecture – mainly sending. Online workshops in which smaller groups work with a supervisor do much better. If the size of the group is limited, interaction between students and between students and lecturers is possible.

It is not only theoretical learning that is now online at the Academy, but many students also have to complete the other half of the curriculum, gaining professional experience, online.

In the context of the practice module Design & Management, we were curious to find out how the different offices and students manage design processes and how students collaborate and communicate with their employers and colleagues on the one hand and with companies, authorities, clients and other relations on the other. To get an idea of this, we asked the students to make short video reports of their working days. This resulted in a beautiful, kaleidoscopic range of cheerful or rather sad, tranquil or energetic and informative or entertaining images.

Most students have had to work from home. Some full time and some part time, because they are allowed to come to the office for a number of days. Some have not seen their place of work since the beginning of the crisis. There are also students who started a new challenge online and have not yet had live contact with their employer. Government institutions such as municipalities in particular are fully closed.

In their video reports, some students emphasize how they deal with the situation, how they experience it psychologically and how they organize their working day. One student paints a picture of himself getting up, opening the curtains and starting his working day, sighing that there is no longer any distinction between private and professional life. Others imitate the start and end of the working day by a walk or bike ride that replaces the walk or bike ride to work. Yet another bought a rabbit that forces her to go outside every day to look for fresh food. Some work with a laptop in the kitchen, in a bedroom or in the living room; others have a professionally equipped work space at home.

Many of the images show the technical solutions employers use to keep in touch with their employees and to manage relationships and processes. In this respect, Microsoft Teams is the most widely used programme by far. One of the students showed an accelerated take of an online working day: almost 100 per cent online consultation and collaboration, both internally and externally. We saw one office that had developed its own digital platform to stimulate and maintain online informal contacts with and between employees.

But what is the effect of working online on the quality of the design process? From a practical point of view, working online appears to be efficient. If you need to concentrate and generate, then working from home seems to be the ideal solution. For many different forms of consultation, working online also seems to have advantages. It is easier to get people together, distance does not come into it and meetings takes less time. But there are also disadvantages. As it turns out, working online the entire day is much more tiring. Also, the social aspect of working and informal contacts are largely lacking. This is detrimental

to the wellbeing of many employees and therefore, in the long run, also detrimental to the companies for which they work. Many designers find designing together online an especially challenging task. That is why many offices organize live meetings, subject to the existing Covid-19 limitations. Offices that operate internationally may have an advantage in this respect.

They are used to doing a lot online, from a distance, including designing together.

It is likely that the Covid-19 pandemic will have a lasting effect on how the design process is managed and how the different stakeholders collaborate. Many offices and designers have discovered new possibilities. They have adapted their facilities to digital processes and online collaboration and they have invested in them. Knowledge of digital infrastructure and software will be increasingly important. It will be fascinating to see which aspects of online working will continue to play a part in the managing of the design process and which aspects will fade away.

For our students and our educational system, online working and online education offer opportunities as well. It makes it possible to work and learn from anywhere in the world, provided there is good internet access. Students are currently working from Brazil, Russia, Latvia and other locations. Their necessary physical presence at the Academy in Amsterdam and at work restrict students’ freedom of movement. The new situation provides the Academy’s concurrent education formula, which integrates study and the acquisition of professional experience, with opportunities. It is easier to work or study from anywhere in the Netherlands. It is also easier for students to stay in another country temporarily and broaden their horizons. And it is possible to work abroad online from the Netherlands. Students long for live education, to meet each other again. The feeling of being part of a community is strengthened by physical presence. But a combination of online and live education and the more established possibility of working online offers opportunities for the Academy’s concurrent education model.

1 See avbwerkt.nl. The full External Curriculum including the associated professional qualifications can be downloaded under ‘Menu’ and then ‘Downloads’. An abridged version in the form of the employers’ brochure can also be downloaded here.

2 Alijd van Doorn graduated from Delft University of Technology.

She ran her own architecture management office from 2007 to 2017, was assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, freelance writer and teacher at the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and senior design manager at ABT. She has been director of Heembouw Architecten en Duurzaamheid since 2018; she has been associated with the Academy of Architecture Amsterdam since 2016.

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NOTEWORTHY The AHK Graduation Prize 2020 for the best Master project has been awarded to A FireScape, the graduation project of Hanna Prinssen (landscape architect, Academy of Architecture Amsterdam 2020). Her graduation project (see page 31) comprised a landscape design for a wooded area in California in which she used ‘fire dikes’ to create fire lanes that decel­ erate the flames in the event of a forest fire.

From the jury report: ‘A Fire-Scape touches on the way we humans have to deal with climate change. It brings all of the ingredients for a convincing Master project together. It inves­ti­ gates a complex issue in an impressive manner, it is obviously relevant and its aesthetic is particularly successful. Hanna Prinssen casts a fresh eye on a problem that will increasingly call for a solution in the coming years.’

Archiprix Netherlands 2021 The 2021 edition of Archiprix Netherlands had two ex-aequo first-prize winners, both of whom graduated from the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, and two ex-aequo second-prize winners, one of whom graduated from the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture.

The other ex-aequo second-prize winner was a graduate from Delft University of Technology.

The third prize was for a graduate from Delft University of Technology.

One of the two winners of the shared first prize was landscape architect Hanna Prinssen, with her graduation project A Fire-Scape, with which she also won the AHK Graduation Prize. Her graduation project (see page 31) com­prised a landscape design for a wooded area in California in which she used ‘fire dikes’ to create fire lanes that decelerate the flames in the event of a forest fire.

a landscape and then get to know this land­scape and all of its inhabitants. To read more about this graduation project, please turn to page 32.

The ex-aequo second prize winner was archi­ tect Lindsey van de Wetering with her gradu­ ation project for a conservatory in Suriname, Poku Oso. For her graduation project (see page 33) she designed an acoustic environment for the Cultuurtuin in Suriname in which cultural heritage in the form of music made by humans and animals is on show. The Conservatory consists of an ensemble of Surinam music build­ings. These ‘music houses’ all function as a kind of instruments, like a woodwind instru­ ment or an apinti drum. Large and small, they all belong to the same family, but also show their individual personality – defined by the type of music they make. Titei Oso, the string house, is a sound box with strings strung along its walls, which vibrate with the sound of music, rain and wind. Winti Oso, the woodwind house, is made up of funnel-shaped wind elements that contribute to the propagation of sound into the landscape.

Abe Bonnema Prize

Best Dutch Book Designs

In January, architect Ard Hoksbergen won the Abe Bonnema Prize for Young Architects 2020 with his design for the Veerkracht primary school in Amsterdam. He received a sum of 20,000 euros.

According to the jury, the primary school in Amsterdam-Slotermeer designed by Studio Ard Hoksbergen achieves exceptional, high-grade architectural quality, inspires future generations and serves as an example. The jury is full of praise for his design. The way Ard Hoksbergen fit the school into the existing urban design is outstanding and creates a new dynamic.

Accord­ing to the jury, it is encouraging to see that architecture can really make a difference to a neighbourhood. ‘The fact that this young architect has been able to achieve such high quality is impressive. This was a complex commission in terms of location, budget, parties involved and resistance to overcome,’ says jury chairman Josja van der Veer.

Ard Hoksbergen (1982) studied architecture at the Academy of Architecture Amsterdam.

In 2012 his design for a Carthusian monastery in Tubbergen, Twente won him the Archiprix, the annual prize for the best graduation project.

He subsequently set himself up as an inde­ pendent architect in Amsterdam. His work for primary school Veerkracht also earned him a nomination for School Building of the Year and the ARC20 Detail Award.

Rewriting Architecture: 10+1 Actions/Tabula Scripta, published by Valiz, designed by Haller Brun and edited by Floris Alkemade, Jarrik Ouburg, Michiel van Iersel and Mark Minkjan, has been selected for the Best Dutch Book Designs 2020. The jury chose 33 books from 267 entries that stood out in terms of content, design, image editing, typography, material, printing and binding. The 33 books will be the focus of a traditional exhibition of the same name in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam later this year. The catalogue De Best Verzorgde Boeken / The Best Dutch Book Designs 2020 will also be published at that time. The Dutch selection has been submitted to the inter­ national contest Schönste Bücher aus aller Welt.

This year, the jury consisted of Yolanda Huntelaar (designer), Michaël Snitker (designer), Martijn Kicken (advisor at Drukkerij Tielen), Carine van Wijk (director Gottmer Uitgevers Groep) and Thomas Castro (graphic design custodian Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam).

KuiperCompagnons Graduation Prizes Last December, KuiperCompagnons awarded its 2020 Graduation Prizes. Jean-François Gauthier (landscape architect, Academy of Architecture Amsterdam 2019) won first prize for the best Master project with his plan Trees First. His research takes trees and their needs as the starting point for the design of public spaces. In Brussels – the most urbanized and densely populated city in Europe, according to Gauthier – the young Frenchman explored how new typologies for public spaces can be developed using various forest habitats.

His work is an indictment of the way in which existing design processes approach the plant­ing of trees. ‘Trees are budget balancers because we prioritize parking spaces and cables and pipes. This makes it difficult to add trees, for example because there is hardly any room left for their roots. If we put trees first, we will really be able to bring nature into the living environment of people.’

Gauthier used a grant he received from the Creative Industries Fund NL to put the lessons he learned into practice. He is currently creat­ing an urban forest near Hollands Spoor train station in The Hague. ‘We are looking for ways to implement forest types based on wild envir­ on­ments, like mountains and canyons, in a densely built-up part of the city.’ He works for the office Okra, where he notices that the impor­ tance of trees is increasingly recognized. ‘Not only by my colleagues, but also by munic­ipal management departments, for example. They see that trees only thrive if we take their needs into account first.’

To read more about Gauthier’s project and those of other prize-winners, please visit blauwekamerezine.nl/ezine-2020-7/ for a special online edition of Blauwe Kamer.

debestverzorgdeboeken.nl

Landscape Triennial

Photo Jan-Kees Steenman (seeityourself.nl)

AHK Graduation Prize

For the 2021 Landscape Triennial, Sven Stremke, Paolo Picchi and Dirk Oudes curated an (online) exhibition on energy landscapes. ‘Our Energy, Our Landscape’ showed the work of ten young designers who have been working on the energy transition in design studios or gradu­a­tion projects in recent years. The projects show innovative ways to realize the energy land­scapes of the future, such as mobile solar panels that play a part in crop rotation, algae production in the polder and coastal defence lines in the North Sea combined with wind energy pro­duc­ tion. Short video presentations by the students and an accompanying essay are available at the website of the Landscape Triennial. l andschapstriennale.com/editie-2021/ landschapslaboratoria/onzeenergie/

The other winner of the shared first prize was landscape architect Ziega van den Berk, with her graduation project Het Doggersland. For her graduation project she investigated what it would mean to the Doggersbank, a shallow sand­bank located in the middle of the North Sea, if the design of the wind farms planned there was approached from the perspective of the landscape and marine life. Here, the hard sub­ strate of wind farms offers opportunities. To take these, one has to first understand the sea as

AWARDS AND EXHIBITIONS

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ABOUT THE AMSTERDAM ACADEMY OF ARCHITECTURE This annual newspaper is published by the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, an international school that offers space to experiment, produce and reflect in the heart of Amsterdam, providing a laboratory and workplace in one. Established in 1908, the Academy is now part of the Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK) and offers three Master’s programmes: Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture. The interdisciplinary courses prepare students for practising spatial design as a discipline on the cutting edge of visual art, construction engineering, civil and cultural engineering and the spatial sciences in a national and international context. Students study and

work simultaneously, combining academic learning with professional development. All of the guest teachers are practicing professionals, forging a strong connection between the school and the job market. Graduates are entitled to independently practice one of the three disciplines taught at the Academy. The degree meets the admission requirements that are defined in the Dutch Architect’s Title Act and is notified with the EU. The graduate has direct access to the Dutch register of architects, urban planners and landscape architects and is qualified to compete in the European market. The Academy has its own place in the cultural life of Amsterdam and places itself in the professional debate through lectures, workshops, events and exhibitions.

Project P1a (AUL) Space Ateliers in the Fort bij Uithoorn Susanna Constantino / Temple of light Tatjana Djordjevic / Fort Pod Anna Fink / Prospect + Refuge Paul de Kort / Observatory 2.0: Fort aan den Ham Saša Rađenović / Camouflage Ricky Rijkenberg / A landmark for Kudelstaart nautic centre Serge Schoemaker / Hidden in plain sight: An art residency Hannah Schubert, Fiona Kydd / Skin, soil, water and air: A bathhouse Daphne Wiegers Project P1b (A) Large House A house without Rockwool® Geurt Holdijk, Paul Kuipers / The self-cleaning villa: Sanitization and the 1.5m society at home Pnina Avidar, Robert Henderson / Halsema’s hof Max Rink, Niels Tilanus / A higher ground: A home for an artist in residence Farah Agarwal / Improvisations on how to behave Paulien Bremmer Project P1b (UL) Place Rooftop culture Zuzana Jancovicova / The marble rock Marit Janse / High life new Amsterdam Ania Sosin / Third dimension of a public space Grisha Zotov Project P2a (A) Building and Construction Wet feet Lisette Plouvier / Building with nature Marlies Boterman, Joost Lauppe / Maison circulaire á Bordeaux Bruno Vermeersch / Bio-based pavilion Eindhoven Maartje Lammers Project P2a (U) Blok Typology Maluma and takete, or the vegetal component of density Iruma Rodríguez Hernández / The Active City Game Giacomo Gallo, Jacopo Grilli Project P2a (L) Human and Animal Welcoming the pioneers: Designing the new land for coexistence with the non-human Thijs de Zeeuw, Jean-François Gauthier / Welcoming the pioneers: Designing the new land for coexistence with the non-human Mirte van Laarhoven, Jean-François Gauthier Project P2b (AL) Building in Landscape The philosophical farm Anouk Vogel / Once upon a time in the West(land): Transformation of glass house area Hondelersdijk into a future zero-energy eco farming estate Paul van der Ree, Lieke de Jong / (In)visible Dingeman Deijs / Westworld 2100 Kim Kool, Willemijn van Manen / Crystal palace: Transformation of Westland into an experience economy Robbert Jongerius Project P2b (U) Neighbourhood Transformation shipyard Hein Coumou, Robert Younger / Future-proof Surimameplein Floris van der Zee, Marco Broekman Project P3a (AUL) District / Typology Collectivity Jeroen Geurst / Central market district: 24-hour healthy urban living Burton Hamfelt / Designing an urban ecosystem Matthias Lehner / Marktkwartier: Central market urban design Raul Corrêa-Smith / Intense city: Adaptive reuse for a symbiotic and intensified cityscape Andrew Kitching / Central market: From concept to design Tess Broekmans / Cause you’re so special – just like anybody else Olga Aleksakova / Centrale markthallen urban design Jason Hilgefort / 5-minute city Andrew Griffin Project P3b (A) Residential Building Food­centre Amsterdam: Feed your masterplan Arnoud Gelauff, Tjeerd Beemsterboer / The new young ones Marlies Rohmer, Floris Hund / The charged void Jolijn Valk, Stijn de Jongh / Housing is a form of individual selfdetermination Jacco van Wengerden, Luuc Sonke / Micro apartments, Maxi design Bastiaan Jongerius, Ronald Janssen Project P3b (U) City The logistics of neighbour­ hoods: Amsterdam central market Mauro Parravicini, Marta M. Roy Torrecilla / Fresh hub: New food centre Amsterdam Felix Madrazo, Klaas van der Molen Project P3b (L) Place in Urban Landscape Marktkwartier: A radically green residential island in Amsterdam Ruwan Aluvihare / City Oasis Brigitta van Weeren / Public space food market Amsterdam Sylvia Karres, Ania Sobiech Project P4 (A) Public Building OBA next: Into the clouds Dafne Wiegers, Gert Kwekkeboom / A new museum for Paramaribo Machiel Spaan, Lindsey van der Wetering / Working (away) from Home Jo Barnett, Richard Proudley / Circular city hall in Purmerwood Stephan Verkuijlen, Michiel van Raaij / The hood: A public roof for the neighbourhood Jeroen van Mechelen

Research O6 (AUL) Paper Arjen Oosterman, Billy Nolan, Jeanne Tan, Alexandra Tisma, Vibeke Gieskes, Rachel Keeton, David Keuning Clinic 1 (A) Chris Scheen, Dex Weel, Rob Hootsmans, Florian Schrage, Peter Defesche, Ira Koers, Rik van Dolderen, Maartje Lammers, Jo Barnett Clinic 1 (U) Arjan Klok, Ton Schaap Clinic 1 (L) Philomene van Vliet, Maike van Stiphout, Remco van der Togt Graduation Clinic (A) Vibeke Gieskes, Wouter Kroeze Graduation Clinic (U) Markus Appenzeller Graduation Clinic (L) Hanneke Kijne Morphology V1a (AUL) Body [Space] Johann Arens, Merijn Bolink, Sanne Bruggink, Popel Coumou, Emma Hoette, Kristin Hollingsworth, Hans van der Pas, Marjolein Roeleveld Morphology V1b (AUL) Material [Space] Abla Bahrawy, Bram de Jonghe, Elena Khurtova, Tanja Smeets Morphology V2a (AUL) Inter [Space] Cédric van Parys, David Benz, Christiaan Bakker, Maze de Boer Morphology V2b (AUL) Digital [Space] Anna Dekker, Marius Schwarz, Ronja Andersen, Charlotte Schrameijer Morphology V3a (AUL) Virtual [Space] Jilt van Moorst, Aron Fels, Nils Johannesson, Bats Bronsveld Tools 1 (A) Building Technique Jos Rijs, Charles Hueber, Jeroen van den Bovenkamp, Jean- Marc Saurer Tools 1 (U) Urbanism John Westrik Tools 1 (L) Landscape Analysis Mirjam Koevoet Tools 2 (A) Construction Design Jos Rijs, Jean-Marc Saurer, Charles Hueber, Gerard Bierlaagh Tools 2 (UL) Analysis of Landscape and City Mirjam Koevoet Lectures C1a (AUL) History: Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture Daryl Mulvihill, Indira Van ’t Klooster, Joost Emmerik, Vincent Kompier, Pauline van Roosmalen, Adam Stech, Hannah Schubert, Matthijs Schouten Lectures C1b (AUL) History: Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture Daryl Mulvihill, Indira van ’t Klooster, Joost Emmerik, Nikol Dietz, Minji Choi, Jóhannes Þórðarson, Mechthild Stuhlmacher, Lara Voerman, Gert-Jan Wisse, Charlie Xue, Daan Roggeveen Lectures C2a (AUL) History: Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture Daryl Mulvihill, Indira van ’t Klooster, Joost Emmerik, René Boer, Marco Broekman, Steven Graham, Joost Emmerik, Marieke Berkers, Hanneke Kijne, Ton Muller, Arjan Boekel, Dirk van den Heuvel, Bogomir Doringer Lectures C2b (AUL) History: Philosophy and Art Bert Taken Lectures C3/C5 (AUL) Practice, Methodology and Strategy Hanneke Kijne, Markus Appenzeller, Jan-Richard Kikkert, Harma Horlings, Berno Strootman, Tom Frantzen, Michiel Akkerman, Ute Schneider, Dana Behrman, Nadia Nilina, Perry Lethlean, Floor Arons, Marlies Boterman, Paul Kuipers, Tobias Goevert, Martijn Slob, Nyasha Harper-Michon, Véronique Faucheur, Klaus Overmeyer, Marc Pouzol, Martijn de Wit, Frank Karssing, Bart Prince, Slawomir Ledwoń, Olga Aleksakova, Julia Burdova, Rolf Bruggink, Jean-François Gauthier, Richard Sennett, Thijs van Spaandonk, Sjoerd Soeters Lectures C4/C6 (AUL) Beyond Peak Indifference Markus Appenzeller, Thijs van Spaandonk, Scott McAulay, Marina Dubova, Pierce Myers, Henk Ovink, Laura Burgers, Matthias Rammig, Gyorgyi Galik, Mike Wells, Rosalea Monacella, Wong Mun Summ, Diederik Samsom, Roman Krznaric, Ameneh Solati Pre-Master Architecture and Technology Jos Rijs, Jean-Marc Saurer, Adri Verhoef, Rens ten Hagen, Paul Vlok, Hans Hammink, Daniël Jongtien, Marlies Boterman, Jarrik Ouburg, Tom Surman, Midori Ainoura, Paulien Bremmer Minor Architecture Marlies Boterman, Paul Vlok, Baukje Trenning, Paul Kuipers, Ricky Rijkenberg, Bente Wesselman, Peter van Assche, Jarrik Ouburg, David Veldhoen,

Project P4 (UL) Regional Design and Research The Dunes between Noordzeekanaal and Oude Rijn Saline Verhoeven, Huub Juurlink / The Dunes between Noordzeekanaal and Oude Rijn Raul Corrêa-Smith, Roel van Gerwen / A fantastic new coastal landscape Marieke Timmermans, Pepijn Godefroy Project P5 (AUL) Research and Design Solo space: A single-artist museum and a garden Inna Tsoraeva, Alexander Sverdlow / Regiopolitan living: Parkstad Limburg Dirk Sijmons, Maurits de Hoog / The post-fossil city: I have seen the future Eric Frijters, David Kloet / General Infill Plan Amsterdam Don Murphy, Edwin Oostmeijer / Banlieue renouvelée: Strategies for adaptation and survival on the other side of Paris Pierre Marchevet, Gianni Cito / Marineterrein: Future ecosystems for knowledge and nature Dana Behrman, Maike van Stiphout / Beneluxbaan: The city that moves; what moves the city? Bart Reuser, Lada Hršak / Creative work estate Het Domijn Machiel Spaan, Philomene van der Vliet Project P6 (A) Integral Research and Design Architecture school Bart Bulter, Lucas Pissetti / Building as a circular product Menno Rubbens, Laura van de Pol / European parliament building Brussels Wouter Kroeze, Stephan Petermann / Dutch national pavilion Osaka World Expo 2025 Felix Claus / New cultural centre Bijlmer Daria Naugolnova, Alexey Boev, Egbert Fransen Project P6 (UL) Integral Design: Vision, Plan, Detail Designing complexity in a dynamic metropolis Martin Probst, Wenchi Yang / CIAM icon Eva Radionova, Martin Aarts / Ártúnshöfð, Reykjavik, Iceland: Where lands­ cape meets city Tess Broekmans, Jandirk Hoekstra / Landscape in transformation: The olive tree disease as the latest challenge for a landscape in crisis Jana Crepon, Gianluca Tramutola Project P4/P6 (A) Extra Jeroen van Mechelen Project P4/P6 (UL) Extra Herman Zonderland, Yttje Feddes Research O1 Repertoire: Space and Place Sebastian van Berkel, Robert Bijl, Eric-Jan Bijlard, Geurt Holdijk, Kim Kool, Willemijn van Manen, Claire Oude Aarninkhof, Bas van Vlaanderen, Sarah Wolff Research O2a (A) Material and Construction Thomas van Nus, Christina Eickmeier, Bregt Hoppenbrouwers, Joost Kreuger, Gijsbert van Ettekoven, Machiel Spaan, Marlies Boterman, Michiel Zegers, Henk Jan Imhoff Research O2a (U) Urban Instruments Andreas Mulder, Gert Breugem Research O2a (L) Ecology and Biodiversity Rob van Dijk, Koen Wonders, Fred Booy, Geert Timmermans Research O2b (AUL) Reflection and Argumentation Mark Hendriks, Ania Molenda, Caroline Kruit, Oene Dijk, Marieke Berkers, Charlie Clemoes, Isabel van Lent Research O3a (AUL) People and Society René Boer, Michiel van Iersel, Eva de Klerk, Jaap Draaisma, Wouter Pocornie, Charlie Clemoes, Nathalie Dixon, Pamela Jordan, Lada Hrsak, Research O3b (A) Housing Jan Richard Kikkert, Christa Rinzema, Paul Vlok, Meintje Delisse, Bart Bulter, Mark Snitker, Luuc Sonke , David Tol, Jeroen Atteveld, Marlies Rohmer, Joke Vos, Jolijn Valk, Paul Vlok Research O3b (U) Urban Systems and Infra­ structure Jaap Brouwer, Jerryt Krombeen Research O3b (L) Fieldwork Marjolijn Boterenbrood, Isabelle Andriessen Research O4 (A) Public Building Kuba Jekiel, Jilt van Moorst, Bart Guldemond, Vinny Jones, Jos de Krieger, Simone de Waart, Baukje Trenning, Rens Borgers Research O4a (UL) Regional Research Merten Nefs, Tobias Woldendorp, Jeroen van Schaick, Marieke Berkers, Arjan Smits Research O4b (U) Urban Regions Linda Vlassenrood, Nadya Nilina, Cassim Shepard, Ksenia Averkieva, Ciro Miguel, Fred Patrick Adasi, Joy Amaka Research O4b (L) Time and Process Rob van Dijk, Koen Wonders, Geert Timmermans, Roel van Gerwen, Fred Booy Research O5 (AUL) Paper Anastasia Smirnova, Marieke Berkers, Mark Hendriks, Bob van der Zande, Billy Nolan, Jeanne Tan, Fred Feddes, Vibeke Gieskes

LECTURERS AND PROJECTS

Metin van Zijl, Kaita Shinagawa, Paulien Bremmer, Oep Schilling, Edwin van Gelder, Jeroen Musch, Lesia Topolnyk, Jos Rijs, Oene Dijk, Marijke van Warmerdam Pre-Master and Minor (UL) Mirjam Koevoet, Sanne Horn, Boto van der Meulen, JeanFrançois Gauthier, Mathieu Derckx, Charlotte van der Woude, Basia van Rijt, Sander Maurits, Jerryt Krombeen, Natascha van den Ban, Mark van Vilsteren, Imke van Hellemondt, Willem Hoebink, Jo Barnett, Paul Reintjes, Robert ten Elsen, Chris van Gent, Marijke Bruinsma, Stefan Bödecker, Esther Reith, Ruwan Aluvihare, Pieter Boekschooten, Steven Broekhof, Klaas Jan Wardenaar, Maike van Stiphout, Harma Horlings, Iruma Rodríguez Hernández, Bieke Van Hees Pre-Master (UL) Gianluca Tramutola, Bieke van Hees, Jean-François Gauthier, Charlotte van der Woude, Imke van Hellemondt, Jerryt Krombeen, Basia van Rijt, Sander Maurits, Natascha van den Ban, Mark van Vilsteren, James Heus, Ania Sosin, Willem Hoebink, Pieter Wackers, Sebastian van Berkel, David de Kool, Klaas Jan Wardenaar, Koen Vermeulen, Liza van Alphen, Harma Horlings Minor (UL) Ania Sosin, Kim Baake Practice Module 1 Design & Management Alijd van Doorn, Martin Fredriks, Dick de Gunst, Jaap Brouwer, Chris Luth, Leon Emmen, Dafne Wiegers, Nyasha HaperMichon, Joost Emmerik, Mathis Guller Practice Module 2 Design & Enterpreneurship Thijs Meijer, Frans Boots, Martin Fredriks, Annegien van Dijk, Menno Moerman, Mariane Idiarte, David Tol, Leon Theunissen Practice Coaching Judith Korpershoek, Martin Fredriks, Frans Boots, Ellen Marcusse Introductory Workshop (A) Dennis Meijerink, Christiaan Schuit, Lynn Ewalts, Rimaan Aldujaili Introductory Workshop (UL) Iruma Rodríguez Hernández, Willemijn van Manen Start Workshop Oene Dijk, Paul Vlok, Jelte van Koperen, Daan van ‘t Sas Winter School (AUL) Hanneke Kijne, Bruno Doedens, Gert Hagen EMiLA Summer School Maike van Stiphout, Eva Radionova Holland Tour Oene Dijk, Daryl Mulvihill Midsummer Night Lecture Merlijn Twaalfhoven

The Amsterdam Academy of Architecture would also like to thank all assessors, graduations mentors, graduation committee members and staff members.

67

Time Is Running Out, Madeleine Maaskant 3

1.5 °C 4 — 27

Planet Paradise, Bruno Doedens 4 Value for Money, M arkus Appenzeller and Thijs van Spaandonk 10 Designing for Change 12 Harvest Home, Jo Barnett 18 ‘The Great Thing about Cities Is: They Rarely Die’, David Keuning 20 Dear Future, The Sustainability Student Group 23 Food for Thought, Gavin Fraser 24

EDUCATION 28 — 55

Courage, Jetske van Oosten 28 Archiprix Nomi­nations 30 Aleppo to Amsterdam, David Keuning 36 Off the Beaten Track, Julie Vegter 37 Blockbuster, David Keuning 40 Lecture Series C3C5 42 Lecture Series C4C6 43 Thicker Than Water, Eva Radionova and Lauri Mikkola 44 Ego to Eco, Gert Hage 45 Into the Woods, Machiel Spaan 46 One Tree, Marlies Boterman 48 Back in the Building, Jonathan Andrew 50 Offline? Online? Both, as Long as There Is a Line!, Markus Appenzeller 52 With Flying Colours 53 International Endeavours, Mildred van der Zwan 54

RESEARCH 56 — 63

Circular City, David Keuning 56 Engaging Stories, Eric Frijters 57 New Energy, Maaike Zwart 58 Publications 60 Treasure Chest 61 Turning the Page, Xander Vermeulen Windsant 62

PRACTICE 64 — 65

Practice Makes Perfect, Nico van Bockhooven 64

AWARDS AND EXHIBITIONS 66 LECTURERS AND PROJECTS 67