IMPROVISED ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM INDUSTRIAL SQUATS

© DAVID CARR-SMITH 2005 : all images and text are copyrighted - please accredit text quotes - image repro must be negotiated via [email protected]
Key F11 for full-screen on/off. Click on pics to enlarge.

This web-book presents a visual-conceptual-experiential documentation of four occupied industrial sites in central Amsterdam, researched and recorded between 1990 and 1997 and between 2006 and 2008.

The earliest text was almost all written before 1996 and was prepared for a book whose publication lapsed. Though in some cases refering only to what is now past - the presentness of the experience it conveys is, for me at least - and hopefully also for some who made these marvellous places - a monument to their existence ... De Loods is now destroyed and the Silo gutted. The pre 1996 text is still in the present tense; to convert it to the past would be laborious and sometimes experientially destructive. Though some factual descriptions of the destroyed sites are now pointless (in terms of saving future visitors' work), to excise them would unravel text and the atmosphere of discovery and wonder that the experience of these places afforded the writing, (facts also inform interpretation of the pictures especially vis à vis size distortion via wide-angle lenses).

Photo subjects are never interfered with: care is taken not to disturb the arrangements/patterns of objects from large to tiny; lighting is as found - I never use flash or imported light; only extremely rarely have I had to switch on an in situ lamp to collect a picture ... and only a lamp that I knew was in normal use, and only with a recorder's sense of 'guilt'.

Some pictures, resized and compressed for the web, have been minimally re-enhanced to conserve visibility (not to increase 'attractiveness').

The site's content will change as info is added and edited. The biggest (ongoing) additions are in the Tetterode section. Tetterode survived the late 1990s destructions and continues to evolve (mainly driven by the growth of families). A batch of recordings made in spring 2008 enables a view of the development of this huge factory-squat over 18 years.