to the most cutting-edge, modern Dutch design. The hotel is located in the heart of the modern eastern dock, and has waterfront views and a large terrace facing the south side of the city. It is privileged enough to be in a relatively serene area of Amsterdam, but only five minutes away from the central station. Spending the night at the Lloyd is quite an experience: if you look around carefully you will spot pieces by designers such as Claudy Jongstra, Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders and Richard Hutten, just to name a few. Then there are the unique touches that make all the difference in the rooms: the bed is over 13ft wide, the bathtub is strategically located in the middle of “nothing”, there is a grand piano for your entertainment, a sun roof, and furniture ranging from the 1920s to the most modern available in Holland today. To illustrate: one of the rooms is a classical music room and was designed by Joep van Lieshout. It is also used as a conference room. The kitchen at the Lloyd is something else altogether. They only work with local suppliers, guaranteeing the highest quality products. Everything served at the hotel is made in the restaurant itself, with fresh products that have no food additives or chemicals. The restaurant works all day and all dishes can be adapted to suit the guest’s needs. If fact, if you want to take some of that goodness with you, you can go by the hotel store, and pick up jams and other 100% local products. In the store, designed by Richard Hutten, one of Holland’s most renowned designers, you can find products developed by the hotel in partnership with designers and artists, as well as excellent books on design. Pets are welcome and the reception is open 24 hours a day. The Van Gogh museum is nearby and worth a visit. lloydhotel.com
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Landscape dreamers
Robotic, automated, green cities self-sufficient in sustainable energy production, urban food production centers, cosmopolitan pig farms… Welcome to the university department The Why Factory By Luciana Pessanha Within the Delft University of Technology, the oldest in Holland, founded in 1842, under a metal structure with a lofty ceiling supported against two very old walls to create a totally modern space, you will find the master’s department of architecture The Why Factory, where students are dreaming up new cities. You may call them urban planners, but the title that best seems to fit these scientists is fiction planners, given that what they do there is identify possible futures for cities, question how those futures would really work, and develop projects that become films, books and even products based on the answers they find. The department was established in 2008. It has 70 students and is run by architect and urban planner Winy Maas. The department has enormous glass windows, some classrooms and a conference room with imposing orange bleachers facing a 13 ft screen. A few times a day a professor will grab a microphone, stand in front of the bleachers and call the students in for a lecture. In that space, the students and professors will discuss issues such as sustainability, the preservation of historical cities, individualization and its consequences for cities, etc. The subjects are chosen by urgency, relevancy or personal interest of the professors in their research. “Our approach involves architecture and urban planning: what we want to do is combine the dream and the reality – both when we think of cities for the future and when we think of how to respond in the short run to current problems. Of course dreams are dreams, but, in truth, some dreams are very precise and can result in a very special type of business,” explains one of the school’s coordinators, Russian Alexander Sverdlov. At a time when urban planning seemed dead and buries nearly everywhere in the world and where public interests are being put aside while architects serve private interested, it may seem naïve to paint pictures of big cities thinking as a whole. However, if you observe the studies going on at T?F you begin to see openings capable of attracting both the public and the private initiative. One example is the research named Transformer. A large part of the world’s urban population lives in apartments on average 100m2 but uses only 30m2 de at a time – when they are in the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, etc. Since the studies at T?F range from the microscopic to the urban, the idea was to develop architecture on every scale to improve spaces. Subdivided into groups, the students analyzed what the spaces in a Transformer world would look like, from the buildings to the apartments,
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the environment around them, the cities, and even the world, where spaces would be used to their full capacity. Another study, Luxury of the North, developed in partnership with Droog, created an extreme situation in the North Pole, where contact with the outside world would only happen once a year, when icebreakers could make it through to them. The challenge was to create a city from nothing, ship this city to the North Pole in containers, attempt to grow the products developed and, further, create products for export. This project will soon be exhibited in Canada. According to Brazilian student Igor de Vetyemy, T?F’s fundamental catchphrase is, “Let’s take it to extremes!” What you most hear around here is, “Anyone can do that. We want to see what happens when this situation gets extreme.” And it was thinking of extremes that the school created a module called Anarchy. “Anarchy has a terrible connotation today in many countries, because it represents chaos, failure and disaster. Bu the idea of anarchy is the ultimate freedom,” explains Mexican professor Felix Madrazo, who coordinates the course. After studying the history of anarchy, its key players, quotes and some cities that came close to is, students are faced with the following challenge: populate and build on a 10 x 10 km plot of land. At first, the number of residents equals the number of students in the course: 25. But every week the population of this fictional location multiplies by 100. The students chose to locate the city in Venezuela. The project will close with a population of 25 million people living in 100 km2, a very high density for the space. This was intentionally decided to force conflicts that must be resolved without the intervention of any authority or pre-established regulations. “At a given moment, they began to need order. So a forum was created on Facebook for them to regulate themselves. At one point, someone decided the solution was to start killing each other, so they voted on FB: should we kill him? Yes? No? The city reached a point where it could no longer grow. How to deal with these issues? As soon as the conflicts begin, freedom ends. And that is exactly the most interesting moment: where does freedom end and when do we begin to need rules?” adds Alexander Sverdlov. Without any initial public infrastructure, the residents need to create their own resources to get water, food and energy. When the city began to grow, the first issues began to arise. Where to dump the mountains of trash? And that is when the challenges began. The residents were forced to stop acting individually to begin to negotiate, fight, make alliances, and work as a team. Professor Madrazo clarifies his intentions with a simple example: “If you decide to go to the countryside with your friends and hang around naked, ok. But when other people start moving into the neighborhood, conflicts begin to arise. We propose to try and see how far anarchy will go in a situation of extreme geographic density.” The whole process will become a film when the experiment is finished. The Why Factory’s most extreme project might well be Biodiversity, which proposes the return of wildlife to the city of Amsterdam. The idea was for students to develop projects that would help animals inhabit cities, offering them space and food. From apparently crazy proposal like this come ideas for products, like, for instance, the Biodiversity Ball. T?F plans to produce it and distribute it to supermarket chain, where customers will receive it as a bonus for buying other products. The Biodiversity Ball is nothing more than a ball full of seeds. All a person needs to do is play with it out on the street. This simple act, however, has the power to shape the city’s landscape. The intention is to create an industrial product that can change the face of Amsterdam. “We do things on a very small scale, but that can affect the global scenario,” says Sverdlov. He ends by saying, “Our project here is to visualize the future, whether it is ugly, beautiful or scary.”
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Before sipping your coffee, thank the Dutch By Bruno Moreschi At first it may not seem to make much sense, but it is God’s honest truth: if it weren’t for the Netherlands, our coffee would not taste the same – or, worst yet, the drink would never have become as popular with us as it did. The explanation can be found at the Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam’s botanical gardens. Established in 1638, it is one of the oldest in the world. In the 17th century, a simple coffee seedling at the Hortus Botanicus (of the Coffea Arabica species) became the basis for all coffee plants harvested in South and Central America. Therefore, it’s time to say: Than you very much Holland
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