AMSTERDAM CITY USE - PLANNERS' INITIATIVES & SIMPLIFICATIONS

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DESIGN-ECOLOGY  

NOTE 
[Written 1-07]

In the mid 1990's the Silo Squat's amenities, both private and accessable to public use, were in their first phase of maturity (: not yet infected with 'design awareness'). The Entrepotdok (its warehouse buildings and its quay) had been converted into housing ten years previously and clearly demonstrated the perverse and destructive choices of the city's architectural/environmental planners. The disregard for users' individual needs or for the potential of local initiatives to form environmental purposes, that would inevitably, if only vicariously, provide richly detailed and often unforseen public facilities; the transformation of a previously rich individual/public environment of pleasure, insight and usefulness into a place that is experientially sterilised, sentimentally 'decored', visually monotonous, tediously predictable, absurdly 'cleansed' of variety and activity; was a shocking insight into the regressive potentials of a mode of 'planning' by simplification and control.

This contrast - of the beauty, subtle delicacy, humane experience of the Silo Squat's dijk with the banal sterility of Entrepodok's planned quayside - directly provoked the short polemic below. Subsequently the Silo itself has been 'Entrepotdoked' and it is appropiate - even if it confuses this mid-90s text - to directly compare the lost Silo's public dijk with its freshly sterilised "Silodam" conversion.

DESIGN-ECOLOGY  
[Written mid-90's]

The Silo's enormous cliffs of walls, an exquisite blend of monumental industrial harshness softened by slight decay and the growth of nature and little improvised structures (the chicken hutch, etc.), bits of interesting junk and used sculpture; the charming and casual amenities - the results of individuals' needs - so definitely precise in their choice and placing for immediate use: a chair or two, a box, a table - a sitting and drinking-tea place on the sunlit grass-grown cobbles footing the huge warm cliff of rubbed and brick-rich wall - places for conversations left there as facilities for all (residents and strollers-by) - the skip-scavenged furniture and brief improvisations too priceless to merit moving after use, each initiative adding its riches to the place, costing nothing when the act of satisfaction is uncompromised by meanings extraneous to the need!  

How different from the City-Council initiated 'redevelopments' of unused or squatted buildings into living-places. The sterile death of the once experientially fertile waterfront of Entrepotdok now boasts only a souvenir: a rusty crane, and two kitsch bars: a couple of wasp-nest foci, on the long perspective of well flattened pavé deserted but for dust and dog-shit - stretched desolate before the huge internally populous yet deathly blank facade. Such is the quality of life where aesthetics has ousted pragmatism, 'design' replaced improvisation, 'clear solutions' prevent innovation - where value is assessed in terms of mass-endorsed ('universal') meanings rather than invested in realising the actual possibilities of individual living.

ENTREPOTDOK - 'REDEVELOPED' AS HOUSING

THE SILO'S PUBLIC DIJK - SQUATTED AND 'REDEVELOPED' AS HOUSING