IMPROVISED HOMES IN AMSTERDAM INDUSTRIAL SQUATS

BOOK: DAVID CARR-SMITH - IMPROVISED ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM INDUSTRIAL SQUATS & COLLECTIVES

Over the Kitchen’s bath one mounts the stair to Klaas's front-door. This was the tower’s earliest living place: Mark H’s pioneering two-level 1989 apt.

KLAAS KUITENBROUWER APT: ( MARK H: SUMMER 1989- / KLAAS: WINTER 1993--- ) (L7/8)

The front door opens into a lumber-cluttered passage circumambulating the incompletely removed remains of the tower’s huge delivery-hopper: a three-sided room-within-a-room, now a snug office. Through a balustraded square of missing ceiling can be seen the final roof, its steel-grid centered on the eye of a small dome (faint echo of the Pazzi Chapel !).

To reach the upper floor from this enclosed space one must re-thread the peripheral passage: past a small door to the north Attic; a curtained wc and wash-basin; the apt’s front-door; a pair of pillar-sized flues (painted as ‘fire’ and ‘water’) that pass through floor and ceiling (cut-off in the room above to support a desk), and - guided by a clean-cuffed and suited pointing printed hand - find the ninth stair in a cluttered corner. Up and with relief one emerges at last into the tower’s topmost clear [1] (though not quite simple) space.

The room is as if zoned into four cross-related squares. One enters a ‘¼’ that is empty but for bare and polished boards - its diagonal-opposite ¼ inverts the form: a missing floor thinly fenced. On one’s left is a ¼ for sleep and waking: a dressing-table and a huge bed - its diagonal ¼ is for eating and talking: a dining-table framed like a stage-set, dramatically top-lit like a Baroque ‘last-supper’.

High-up and isolated with few and small windows the room feels strangely ‘sealed and suspended’. However such windows as there are - two in situ and two made - is each unique in itself and in its mode of conveyancing [2]:

The plastic roof-domes (bought from a salvage firm) were mounted by Mark over the remains of two flue outlets that projected through the roof, their thin metal snipped around their edge and squeezed inside the smaller diameter of the domes, wired and plastic-sealed - one is now opaqued, the other (above the table) a translucent circle that generalises the condition of the sky: a bright sun-lamp, pearly-moon, or black disc.

The tiny (in situ) steel-framed square window high on the SW wall shows, if one climbs to it, the whole length of the Silo’s roof walled at its end by the New Silo tower. From one place in the room the tower’s square top exactly occupies the window’s centre: a dull beige and pink geometric picture glowing in the dark wall like a tv, the image shifting on the square in perspective relation to ones movements in the room (a primitive mechanical prototype for an electronic LCD ‘painting’).

From the balustrade around the floor’s missing quarter, on the Ij-side of the lower room a (in situ) porthole window displays (in counterpoise to the ceiling-disc of sky) a disc of Ij water: green and rippled, churned with white wind-flecks, sunlit with passing shadows...in all its states it seems as if the opening below one - like a telescope directed downwards at the surface - samples the moment’s water and presents it flat inside the lens-like frame.

The last was made by Klaas: a ‘cinema-scope’ window positioned as the high bed’s magic head-board displaying a film-like cut of moving traffic on the Ij bisecting ferry-passings from the Havens, upon a constant background of waters divided like a model by green narrow dykes.


N-TOWER (L7) KLAAS APT (1st L): ENTRY SPACE (pic 6-94 / to WWN) The apt 'front door' and entry space. Encumbered with stacked boards like complex steps, the passage between stair-enclosure and two huge ventilation pipes must be negotiated to reach the last flight of the Tower's stair: up to L8 - the upper floor of the apt and the top level of the Tower.	N-TOWER (L7) KLAAS APT (1st L): ENTRY SPACE (pic 9-94 / to NNE) A print of a pointing hand directs visitors to the L8 stair.	N-TOWER (L7) KLAAS APT (1st L): ENTRY SPACE (pic 9-94 / to SE) At the far end, in the SW corner a curtained wc and wash basin is partially visible, on its left is a red door which opens (down a steep little stair) into the dance studio space of Henriette's N-Attic apt [ref:], and the wc and basin share the plumbing of her under-floor wc and bath.

N-TOWER (L7) KLAAS APT (1st L): ENTRY SPACE & DUMP (pic 9-94 / to E) ... in process	N-TOWER (L7) KLAAS APT (1st L) (pic 6-94 / to NNE) This apt's first marvellous 'window-effect' [pic lft] is seemingly a wall-hung mirror - in fact a hole cut in the hopper's steel side revealing the apt's entry space. Its position, the wall's thinness, its round-cornered shape, is sufficiently unconventional as to induce an interpretation of 'mirror' (or less specifically of 'image'), provoking the perception (even in the photo) of the scene beyond as more connected with its 'surface' than spatially seperate. This false perception tends to override even the strong hint of 'window' suggested by its positional relationship with the undoubtable window in the plank-faced desk wall.	N-TOWER (L7) KLAAS APT (1st L) (pic 9-94 / to NNE) In the three months since the last pic the office has been partly cleared of construction materials.

N-TOWER (L7-8) KLAAS APT (1st L) (pic 6-94 / to N)	N-TOWER (L7-8) KLAAS APT (1st L): VIEW TO 2nd LEVEL (pic 6-94 / to EEN)	N-TOWER (L8): KLAAS APT (2nd L) (pic 6-94 / to NE) L8 is the Tower’s only level without columns interrupting its space. Mark (the Tower's first occupant) cleared this top room of ventilation piping and sealed its roof exit-holes; laid a wood floor on the steel, leaving a balustraded void in the NE corner that visually connects the two levels. Klaas’ huge bed is raised on storage, for a cinematic head-board he cut a window through the thin brick wall.

N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): NE-QUARTER VOID (pic 6-94 / to EES ) View over the balustrade from the upper room down to L7.	N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): NE-QUARTER VOID (pic 9-94 / to NNE ) View over the balustrade from the upper room down to L7. At this time a hammock and writhing bedding hung in the double-height space.	N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): NE-QUARTER - VOID TO L7 - L7 WINDOW (pic 6-94 / to EEN )

N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): BED-HEAD WINDOW (pic 6-94 / to NNW) ... in process	N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): BED-HEAD WINDOW VIEW (pic 6-94 / to NNW)	N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): SE-QUARTER TABLE-AREA (pic 9-94 / to E) ... in process

N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): SE-QUARTER TABLE (pic 9-94 / to NW)	N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): SE-QUARTER CEILING WINDOW 'MOON' (pic 9-94 / to NE) ... in process	N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): SE-QUARTER WITH ITS NORTH WINDOW & CEILING WINDOW (pic 6-94 / to SE)

N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): SE-QUARTER WITH ITS NORTH WINDOW (+'IMAGE') & CEILING WINDOW (pic 9-94 / to SSE) ... in process	N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): S-WALL HIGH WINDOW (pic 6-94 / to S) Standing back a few meters from the wall the view of the Silo Pyramid and the New-Silo Tower come into conjunction in the window's centre like a 'sighting-hole', and as one moves the view moves in relation to this remembered version of its whole: so 'focussed' by its possible proportional completeness. Reinforced by its bright isolation and the window's apparently useless functionality - that both pull it to the surface of the wall, this image seems to have (almost certainly by chance since this is an existing factory window) the deliberate order of a designed 'picture'. Only when one climbs up to it and looks through and out does it resolve and recede into a 'view' [ref: next pic].	N-TOWER (L8) KLAAS APT (2nd L): S-WALL WINDOW: VIEW THROUGH & OUT (pic 6-94 / to S)


N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN STAIR TO KLAAS' L7 'FRONT-DOOR' (pic 9-94 / to SSE )