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Water and Land ur of the netherlands
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g Department of LanDscape architecture anD environmentaL pLanningCollege of environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley
the birth of the idea for a study tour to the Netherlands developed after Assistant Professor Jennifer Brooke began research on the condition of reclaimed land in the San Francisco Bay Area. The low-lying tidal basins, formerly used for salt production, are now permanently open to tidal action. Large wetlands have emerged and gradually a new landscape will begin to take shape that will not necessarily resemble the original marshes of the Bay’s natural history. It will be a constructed landscape. The levees that protected the former salt flats followed a functional geometry in contrast to the evolving landscape that will become vegetated by successive plant communities and filled with birds and wildlife in a not entirely predictable fashion. Similarly, the Dutch polder (grazing land that is situated below sea level) has been converted to permanently flooded wetlands, and some of these wetlands are now 30 years old.
In fall 2005, the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina occurred in the Mississippi Delta and gave the study tour additional impetus. During that fall semester, faculty in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning decided to concentrate efforts on the California Delta, which is formed by the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. We invited Jane Wolff of Washington University
p r o f . p e t e r b o s s e L m a n n
introduction
Water and Land a stuDy tour of the netherLanDs
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in Saint Louis to UC Berkeley as the Visiting Farrand Professor, to offer a design studio that would focus on the California Delta. Her 2003 book, Delta Primer, a book designed to educate diverse audiences about the contested landscape of the California Delta, gave a unique perspective on the delta landscape with its patterns for agricultural and urban settlements. Although, hurricanes do not threaten the coast of California, an earthquake, if it were to occur on the eastern edge of California’s coastal fault line system, would create a disaster of very similar proportions to Hurricane Katrina that would affect the low-lying delta landscape. With her knowledge of the California Delta, Jane Wolff was the ideal instructor for this discussion.
We thought that a visit to The Netherlands would offer insight for design and planning of the California Delta. Holland has a long administrative history that deals with land and water issues in the Rhine River Delta and this is reflected in their standards for levee construction and water management. Given the fragile
condition of levees in the California Delta, students and faculty in Jane Wolff’s design studio questioned the wisdom of California’s legal tradition. In the California Delta, responsibility for the integrity of the levee system has historically been in the hands of the farmers, with some assistance from the state. Municipalities are now allowing landowners to build one story, single family housing behind such levees in ever increasing numbers; however, they are not insuring the sustainability of the levees over time. In The Netherlands, we hoped to study housing types and land development practices that provide alternative models for California to consider.
So, in early 2006, fifteen students met to plan a study tour to The Netherlands. Our interest in urban design, intensive and overlapping land use and creative approaches to residential density necessitated the study tour to The Netherlands and it soon became a reality. To help us with our preparation, we invited Tracy Metz to visit and lecture on “Holland and Water: A Restless Marriage.” Metz, recently appointed by Queen
a stuDy tour of the netherLanDs
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Beatrix to an independent advisory council for the Ministry of Nature and Agriculture, is a journalist for the Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad writing as a critic about Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape. One of her many books, “New Nature,” deals with the transformation of the traditional agricultural countryside. We also contacted Irene Curulli from the University of Eindhoven who had visited UC Berkeley during the Metropolitan Landscape Conference. She had presented a paper on the ethics of designing recycled landscapes and illustrated her talk with examples of Dutch sites. Her knowledge of places and firms in The Netherlands is extensive and she helped us to access many design professionals.
From our perspective, the professional community of landscape architects and planners is very tightly knit in The Netherlands. We found that, after visiting a number of firms, two themes began to emerge:
a) Landisstillreclaimedfromthesea.
Dutch design professionals repeatedly pointed to J.B. Bakema’s 1964 Pampus Plan, a diagram for building a new city on the inland sea just outside Amsterdam. Professionals used Bakema’s plan as a reference for a new set of islands that have emerged there as part of IJburg. The effort to create a new land for 30 thousand inhabitants, and build it out of sand that is piled up from dredging the sea, appeared questionable to us, especially given the availability of much surplus land that became available after industrial and port closures. Also, to the outsider, the idea to claim new land from the sea appears to contradict the second theme:
b)Waterneedsmoreland
The Dutch, however, see the two themes as perfectly compatible. In her talk, Tracy Metz stressed that the Dutch people experience climate change first hand. They are forced to deal with increasing amounts of water, and the water comes from all sides. In the north and west, the tidal level is higher. From the east, the rivers carry more water. From below, the water table is rising, and from above, the amounts of precipitation are becoming greater. To prevent flooding, more land has to be made available for the expanding volumes of water. Therefore, the strategy is to change the river landscape along the Waal and the other Rhine distributaries. Former row cropland with clusters of small forests will be changed into grazing land with streams and lakes while levees along the rivers will be lowered to invite periodic flooding.
On the following pages the participants have recorded their impressions through words and images. We start with a narrative by Deni Ruggeri, who describes visits to parks in Paris, where we started our tour.
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in the 1960s and 1970s out of the Berkeley landscape architecture program came the call for user-friendly and people-inspired designs. At about the same time, William H. Whyte found that the secret to the success of certain plazas and small parks in New York City lied in the flexibility of their designs, the provision of a range of activities, movable seating, edges for people to lean against, transparent tree canopies and food vendors. Both schools used traditional European park and open space design as precedents. Surprisingly, at least judging by some parks we have visited in the spring of 2006, the answer to the question are parks designed with people in mind? is not as clear-cut for European landscape architecture of the 21st century.
1dAy are LanDscapes for peopLe?
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1. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines folly as: lack of good sense or normal prudence and foresight; a criminally or tragically foolish actions or conduct; obsolete: EVIL, WICKEDNESS; especially lewd behavior; a foolish act or idea; an excessively costly or unprofitable undertaking; an often extravagant picturesque building erected to suit a fanciful taste.
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Parisians love parks. During our visit to Parc des Buttes-Chaumont and Jardins du Luxembourg we found people running as if they were training for the Paris Marathon — some obviously were — others played boules, had their wedding pictures taken, played with their children or simply enjoyed an early spring Sunday strolling down the winding paths. Historic Parisian parks are designed to provide choice and a range of experiences even when the space is limited, like at Place des Vosges, where our hotel was located during the first few days of our trip. These three parks are beautiful examples of what a truly democratic public park ought to be.
In contrast, contemporary Parisian parks display a tension between innovation and tradition, and they do so with very mixed results. We visited Parc de la Villette on the same Sunday and found it largely empty of people. Villette was originally conceived in 1979 as a new type of deconstructed landscape with follies regularly spaced according to a grid as centers of extemporaneous activities. The result is a somewhat desolate space made active only by the fortunate presence of children in the playgrounds. Far from being activity-generators, the follies have fallen into disrepair, leaving the visitor wondering about their true intent. Rather than sets for artistic performances, the follies at La Villette take on the meaning of “excessively costly or unprofitable undertakings,” with very doubtful outcomes.1
Park André Citröen opened in 1992; it is smaller than La Villette and more traditional. Rather than leaving the park “open” to the interpretation of the user, its program includes choreographed walks through thematic gardens and a series of outdoor rooms designed to provide a range of experiences, from solitude to socialization, from active sports to strolling. The result is a park in the traditional sense of the term, where people can come in contact with nature in many ways. The careful use of fragrant plantings, shade and specimen trees make the visit to André Citröen a pleasant and memorable one. The park reminds landscape architects that we are most successful when we strive to improve the experience of the users and give them choice and beauty.
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in the nineteen sixties , when natural gas replaced gas produced from burning coal, the Westergasfabriek (West Gas Factory) shut down after 80 years of production. For the next 25 years, severe soil contamination encumbered planning progress and fueled ongoing controversy about the future use of the land. The Municipal Energy Company used the site for parking and storage while the city, district, and local residents debated reuse schemes for the land with its beautiful neo- classical brick structures.
In 1993 an Interim Use plan succeeded in establishing incremental reprogramming for temporary cultural uses. Soon the Westergasfabriek buildings housed a drama school, film studio, and fashion company, and hosted opera performances and huge parties inside the former gas-container. In 1995, revisions to Dutch soil cleanup regulations made park construction feasible. The district council approved a new development plan and selected Kathryn Gustafson to design the new 35-acre park. It opened in September 2003.
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Westergasfabriek’s transformation from an industrial to cultural landscape occurred gradually. During our visit, I was pleasantly surprised to find this idea of change evident. The park neither emphasizes perfection of design nor presents its new green landscape as a counterpoint to the adjacent industrial structures, as I had expected. Rather, new materials mingle with old ones without mimicking them, small construction projects appear ongoing, and several park elements portray “process” and stir a general sense of transition.
The design concept for the park makes an attempt to portrays the process of remediation—the gasholder detention ponds or the Taxodium filtration pool— in reality however, this portrayal of process is symbolic; the design does not attempt to highlight the processes necessary to its renovation into a “clean” public park. Solutions implemented to control its contamination—dams and groundwater pumps to prevent below-grade seepage, or a hill formed by polluted soil from throughout the site— all these measures are not apparent, though they are essential to the place’s history. Furthermore,
the fact that Westergasfabriek’s ponds and pools were designed for human use raises questions about the purpose for filtration features and completely veils the site’s record of contamination.
While Westergasfabriek park forgoes opportunities to reveal the story of its transformation, it impressed me as a contemporary park that is truly diverse and adaptable and, for that reason alone, a positive example of reuse.
cuLture park, amsterDam
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in amsterdam the challenge of city expansion and satisfying the housing demand are being addressed in the uniquely Dutch idiom, as throughout their history the Dutch continue to reclaim land from the sea. IJburg is a proposed archipelago of eight islands currently built within the confines of the IJsselmeer, a large inland see once connected to the North Sea, but since 1931 cordoned off as the result of the Afsluitdijk, or Enclosure Dam.
Development at IJburg, which lies at the far eastern reach of Amsterdam, was proposed as far back as 1965. However, it was not until 1998 that the Amsterdam Municipal Council in partnership with several building consortiums began to realize the IJburg project. IJburg is an ambitious plan. The eight proposed islands will each feature its own mix of housing, office space, public amenities, and recreational space. Likewise, the water and the water’s edge will be treated differently on each island, giving them an individual feel. Ultimately, IJburg is projected to have 18,000 homes housing 60,000 residents.
3 iJburg
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Our study tour visited Steigereiland, the first partially inhabited island in the IJburg project. Steigereiland is accessible from greater Amsterdam via a tramline and is slated for 6,000 residences. At the visitor’s center we learned about the construction of the IJburg islands. The land of IJburg is built using a “pancake method”. Layers of sand are successively laid down and allowed to drain to form a solid compacted base. When the land level rises above water, more sand is added to form the surface of the island. All of the sand is dredged from the Markemeer, a nearby lake, and transported to the site on barges and through pipelines.
Although the land is completed on Steigereiland, much of the housing is still being built. In walking around, the overwhelming experience is one of a construction site. The full IJburg project is many years from completion. The dredged sand blows up from the unfinished sites in sizable quantities. The mixed-use character of the proposed community as built thus far, is leaning heavily toward the residential. All of the new residents are in for a long ride as the surrounding homes; offices and accompanying neighborhood fabric are being built. Nonetheless, for the new residents, the “pioneers” as one IJburg local referred to them, the IJburg experience seems to be more about realizing a collective dream for the future and less about the somewhat discouraging conditions of the present.
Text Sources: IJburg, City of Amsterdam Development Corporation, 2004; IJburg: Het nieuwe uitzicht van Amsterdam, Colofon/IJburg Visitor’s Center, 2003
1 Zeeburgereiland
2 Steigereiland
3 Haveneiland
4 Rieteilanden
5 Centrumeiland
6 Strandeiland
7 Middeneiland
8 Buiteneiland
Source: dRO (Amsterdam’s Physical Planning Department)
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strolling along bustling streets filled with bicycles, boats and sidewalk cafes, one wonders how Amsterdam has become the unique network of narrow streets and concentric canals known today as the crescent city. Situated in a harsh coastal environment on the IJsselmeer, it’s amazing to imagine what it took to raise Amsterdam from the muddy bogs of a river delta to the beautiful city it is today.
From two mounds of earth at the mouth of the Amstel River, Amsterdam began to take its form in 1392. Ramparts of earth and wood were constructed along the sides of the river to create the 195-acre medieval city center that remains as the heart of the city today. Valued for its strategic location along a prosperous trade route, Amsterdam was one of many coastal areas to become quite densely populated. By the mid 1500’s Amsterdam’s development expanded beyond the city walls. By 1593 a new wall was built for defensive purposes, expanding the city westward and increasing the reclaimed land to over 415 acres.
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Once again, by the 17th century, Amsterdam encountered staggering growth as a result of its thriving trade empire. A major expansion began along the western edges of the city. In 1663, four man-made islands were built on the eastern side of the city, which ultimately became recreational areas and housed much of the future industry in the 1800’s. This aggressive expansion reclaimed enough land so that no further expansions were needed for over 200 years.
1340 1425 1585 1613 1663 1880
tracing amsterDam: the morphoLogy of a city buiLt on Water
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In the 1880’s, Amsterdam once again began to grow beyond its city walls. Due to the rapid expansion and new transportation needs, the outward appearance of the original city was affected greatly by the filling in of canals for roads, widening of streets, and lowering of bridges. Thanks to public concern, the destructive developments were eventually brought to a halt. The rest of the city was left intact, leaving us with the historic city form we know today.
Throughout the past 50 years, Amsterdam still faced the need for expansion. Recently the city developed the eastern docklands into the high-density residential islands of Java, KNSM & Borneo-Sporenburg. With the success of this experiment, in 1995 the city approved a plan for the city-extension of IJburg, a series of seven artificial sand islands reclaimed from the IJsselmeer east of Amsterdam. The form of these islands is quite different from historic Amsterdam. With a much larger block scale and row house scale, the high-density developments are laid out in linear patterns. As in the historic city center, canals will wind through the new islands, however due to the lack of transformational uses, they are only recreational design features.
The integration of water and public spaces will always play an important part in the design of Amsterdam, yet it appears as if the quaint neighborhood spaces of the historic city are being lost to contemporary designs that need to respond to dependency on automobiles and the lack of practical use of the canals. Dutch ingenuity continues to bring about ideas and forms that make land in ways most of us could never imagine.
Historical maps & history source: Amsterdam Heritage – Topography. Accessed 4/14/06. www.bma.amsterdam.nl/adam/uk/intro/topio.html
2006 PROPOSED
1340 1425 1585 1613 1663 1880
tracing amsterDam: the morphoLogy of a city buiLt on Water
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she emerged from the patio, a three year old vision of pink princess. The steps were her stage. Three doors down, two boys chased a ball out of a private courtyard and into the street, where two girls sat perched on a speed bump. Parents mingled on porches and sat in beach chairs on the sidewalk. On this westernmost street in Sporenburg, a quiet mutiny was taking place.
Adriaan Geuze set out to create a community that maximized private space, minimized public space, and did away with the in-between. This approach seemed dubious from afar; I expected to find a disappointing landscape of barren streets devoid of life.
To my surprise, the blank public spaces showed signs of transformation. In one large housing block, owners had begun to remove the metal driveway gates from their carports, rejecting the public-private dichotomy for a more ambiguous transition. Other residents placed tree planters on the wide sidewalks. The smallest suggestion of enclosure or demarcation of space invited the placement
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of a bench, or plants, or children’s toys. The different streets and buildings have not all matured at the same rate. Those with the widest sidewalks were more easily claimed; the architectural articulation of the facades has also contributed to the capacity for change and ultimately to the complexity of the urban experience.
Borneo and Sporenburg were a daring experiment in creating new city form from old industrial land. This new frontier called for an aggressive imagination, which Geuze and others provided. But the inhabitants have not bought into his concept of the house as a respite, a cave, in which they retreat from a harsh world. They want transitions, spaces which are ambiguous in their ownership: where neighbors stop by to chat, where soccer balls roll by, and where children indulge their own imaginations.
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to see an army of bicyclists (more bicycles than cars) careening down the road towards me. Advice from fellow seasoned travelers of staying off the red pavement lest you get run over by a bicyclist had a meaning I couldn’t have previously imagined. These were not the bicycle boulevard commuters of Berkeley aggressively pedaling to their destination, but a community of safe and confident bikers, casually riding, carrying on conversations, often with more than one person or child balancing confidently on the same bicycle. The complexity and causality of the moment, something I had only dreamed about, is the product of the cities historic density and partly created by the pressures of reclaiming land.
The second moment that comes to mind was on our visit to Borneo-Sporenburg, where we stumbled upon a mid-afternoon tea party of 6-8 young ladies enjoying the much awaited sun on the sidewalk in front of a row of their homes. I was prepared to criticize the development for its contemporary use of the typical Amsterdam row house and canal forms,
4dAy hoLLanD: stories of the streets
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First and foremost, a great street should help make community: should facilitate people acting and interacting to achieve in concert what they might not achieve alone.
The best streets are those that can be remembered. They leave strong, long-continuing positive impressions. Allan B. Jacobs, Great Streets, The MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1993.
as i think back to the number of streets I took a closer look at during our walks through Amsterdam and the Netherlands two moments come easily to mind. My first morning in Amsterdam began with a quick walk to gather my provisions for the day. Leaving the hotel, it was a pleasant walk through the streets of the Museumplein (or Vondelpark) neighborhood to the nearby market. The morning’s silence on the hotel’s street, Wanningstraat, was coming to an end, with signs of the neighborhood starting its day. Window shades were raised, and bicycles prepared, while two neighbors chatting near the postbox replaced the sound of the birds chirping. I turned the corner, and looking in the first floor windows at eye level, I noticed the high density that is associated with the row house typology, but also the many small businesses or services that this typology contained, many of them related to the neighborhoods musical theme and proximity to Amsterdam’s famous concert hall. As I reached the nearby main street, where we arrived by tram on the previous evening, I was amazed
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hoLLanD: stories of the streets
Borneo - Seinwachterstraat Canal Brantasgracht Borneo Green
Borneo Canal Bijlmermeer Kofofenstraat
Ijburg RijnkanaatRotterdam KopvanzuidJacques Nycolaastraat
Java Edge
as a result of our previous visit to IJburg, where I found the monotony of row house façade and barren windblown streetscape to be eerily quiet and reminiscent of an American suburb. There - from the pedestrian perspective - the monotony was produced partially by the lack of any individual traces along the sidewalks in front of the houses, which in turn is caused by a parking configuration that brings cars into the center of blocks and moves a lot of action to the rear of homes. At IJburg, this configuration creates fewer curb cuts and allows for continual street parking. However, Borneo-Sporenburg was a pleasant surprise. The scale of the streets was very reminiscent of the historic Amsterdam streets, and the modern row house facades designed by numerous architects provided texture and complexity of materials. This complexity kept the eye moving. The narrow lanes of the streets suggested that streets and sidewalks belong to the pedestrian realm and not to the automobile. Although the entries to many of the houses included access to interior automobile parking, these edges still felt permeable and semi-public, thus offering space for the occupants to inhabit and present themselves to the street, or have a spontaneous tea party. I remembered this observation some days later, when we walked through a modern row house housing development in Kop Van Zuid, Rotterdam, which had American-style semi-private setbacks in the front, but streets scaled to the movement of cars. The front spaces were all planted with the same pear tree and rows of shrubs, offering little variation or clue to the inhabitants of the housing and no place to facilitate the interaction of people.
a n D r e a s x . s t r a v r o p o u L o s
the dutch landscape has historically been characterized by strict control over land and water. However, growing awareness of environmental concerns has prompted a shift in the public consciousness and a rethinking of the traditional precedent in this landscape so heavily dominated by its people.
Because of a 500 year long history, the idea of rescinding control of the landscape constitutes a radical change in the public consciousness. During our trip, we visited the creation of ‘new nature’, both incorporated into new developments, and also as reclaimed areas of the developed landscape. Dutch nature policy focuses on the creation of a countrywide network of nature areas that include national parks and wetlands1. The creation of this network is not just an attempt towards preserving habitat and biodiversity, but it is the acknowledgement of the growing water problem in the Netherlands. The creation of new nature areas is not just for people’s enjoyment, or the protection and reintroduction of animals and plants, breeding grounds for migrating birds, but because the Dutch have realized that — in the future — more space has to be made available
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for water. Raising groundwater tables, higher tides, more precipitation and higher flood levels all make water a complex land-use component.
In the context of water and land it became obvious to us the Dutch attitude towards nature is so different from our own because we are taking a different approach towards land that has ecological value. In the US, we strive to protect so-called wild areas, and places that have a heritage as being ecologically valuable. However, in the Netherlands ecological value is created on land that previously had industrial or agricultural use.
As a greater percentage of our own land become developed and often abandoned, we can learn to think like the Dutch, and construct ecological value, even in
the most unlikely spots. The success of a project like Oostvaardersplassen point to the many, not entirely predictable possibilities of re-introducing natural processes into an urbanized landscape.
1. Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality – Official Website
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oostvaardersplassen, an area of roughly 3,600 hectares, was originally part of the IJsselmeer, today it is part of the youngest polder in southern Flevoland and it has become a wildlife refuge that unexpectedly created itself after being abandoned. The site was originally reclaimed in 1968 to accommodate an industrial area located between the cities of Almere and Lelystad. The site was left undeveloped due to the economical crisis of the 1973 oil recession and because the land was not completely drained.
Left to itself, nature took its course, without interference the land developed into a wetland habitat, very much needed for birds in Western Europe. Only six years into the process, plants and animal life emerged at Oostvaardersplassen and it became so populated with birds (spoonbills, cormorants, bearded tit, graylag geese, egret and bittern) that it was granted the status of National Natural Reserve.
It became evident that the site needed a series of interventions to maintain what had been formed by chance, essentially stopping the reclamation
5 oostvaarDerspLassen nationaL naturaL reserve
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oostvaarDerspLassen nationaL naturaL reserve
and maintaining the new wetlands and lakes. Given the below sea-level altitude of this former polder, an embankment was built to keep the lower water-table of lakes and wetlands separate from the higher water-table of the IJsselmeer. Pumps were installed to gauge water levels; areas were divided into sub-zones and seeded with grasses; Heck cattle, konik horses, red and roe deer were introduced to graze vegetation in the sub-zones; planned roads and railway lines were shifted to the edges of the site.
After 25 years of careful management the Oostvardersplassen prove to be extremely successful in attracting rare and common birds. So much, that it was granted an award valuing the area in the European context. This brought a new focus to the environmental consciousness of the Dutch and in 1996, the site came under the auspices of the Forestry Commission. They in turn adopted a new Management Plan
‘Oostvaardersplassen more natural’ based on as little human intervention as possible.
However, due to the success of the management, the numbers of grazers has significantly increased and the capacity for such large animals to survive in great numbers is now questioned. Many zoologists believe that intervention will be needed to prevent death by starvation. This poses an interesting dilemma. At the same time the introduction of other rare species such as the Otter, Beaver, Elk, Wild Pig, Relict Mouse, Sea Eagle and Tree Frog is being discussed. Many questions remain about the correct management of Oostvardersplassen, but one thing is certain, the Dutch are gaining much experience with the balance between the dynamics of nature and the management of reclaimed land.
at his office in utrecht, we met Dirk Sijmons to hear about the idea to make more “Room for the Rivers”, how this “room” will come about in the Netherlands and how this idea will change the Dutch landscape in the future. Sijmons, a landscape architect, serves as an advisor to the Dutch ministries of spatial planning and agriculture.
In the Netherlands, nature is a product of agriculture. When the modern agriculture was introduced in the Netherlands, nature - as we in the US might define it - disappeared. In the current situation, the idea to create more space for rivers will enable the Dutch to construct a “new nature”. Dirk Sijmons would be the first to admit, that the various concepts of nature - new, old and natural- are not without confusion.
There are three ways to deal with water in the Netherlands. One is accepting risks, which means accepting the possibility of floods by taking chances. The second way to deal with water is see water as an engineering challenge that can be met by introducing skillfully constructed dikes and big water gates. However, these technologies are
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facing limits because of the rise in sea level and global warming. The third approach is to make room for rivers, to make land available that will be flooded periodically. In essence, it is the reintroduction of a water storage system into the Dutch landscape at the expanse of farmland. This new policy is likely to succeed, because overproduction of agricultural products has forced the European Union to impose rules that prevent farmers from using all available farming and grazing land. River levees will be constructed in a manner that permits flooding in certain areas and the creation of bypasses to lower water levels. This new system will function as network for water storage. Thus, when the water level is low in the port areas, water can
be released from storage and when the water level is high near the coast, the rivers will replenish the storage, thus flood the land. All this will be happening at a large scale, carefully monitored with much ingenuity. This large-scale intervention will create a new landscape, sometimes flooded and bogged in many places. Woodlots will emerge on slightly higher elevations and seen from the air the landscape of trees, meadows and streams will change according to the dynamics of gently flowing water. The idea, “Room for the Rivers” was first articulated in 2002 as part of a competition; however, most of projects are still in the discussion state. How the “new nature’ will change the Dutch landscape is not entirely predictable.
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two urban squares have been the subject of much discussion in The Netherlands, Amsterdam’s Museumplein (Museum Square) and Rotterdam’s Schouwburgplein (Theater Square). The former was designed by Swedish landscape architect Sven-Ingvar Andersson and the later by Adriaan Geuze of the Dutch landscape firm West 8, with both designs being implemented in the last couple of decades. Both spaces are built on top of parking, and each is surrounded by several civic, cultural institutions.
I was able to observe Amsterdam’s Museumplein numerous times on our trip due to its proximity to our hotel. The dominant feature of this “square” is an axial lawn connecting the Concertgebouw on the southern end to the Rijksmuseum on the northern end. The decomposed granite area closer to the Rijksmuseum is also an important social gathering space, and its large fountain, allees of trees, flanking café and museum store break down the space into smaller scaled areas. None of the museums have their main entrance opening
6dAy tWo Dutch squares: park vs. pLaza
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onto the Museumplein. A condition that makes for a consistently active orientation along the southern commercial street at the Concertgebouw. The tram line also runs along this edge, and there’s a popular grocery store located at this end. The store is partly submerged underground, and its green roof slopes down to the park in a manner that this edge feels like a civic square. But the dominance of turf in the bulk of the Museumplein gives the rest the feel of a park and not as much that of a square.
Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam is significantly smaller than the Museumplein, and it’s also much more dominated as a hard-scape. Aside from our group, it was rather empty of people on this grey morning. Critiques I have read of the space indicate that while it is busy for special events, the daily use is not as high as one would hope. A main design feature of the square is its elevation up about two steps from the surrounding streetscape in order to create the feeling of a stage, but also to accommodate parking below. This slight grade change from the surrounding streets and sidewalks diminishes the ease of access to the space, with only a few sets of stairs and one handicap ramp along the edges. The one building that is on the same level with the square is the cinema that was built at the same time and which occupies the northwest quadrant of the square. The result is that the square is actually “L” shaped, and the space feels more like a plaza designed for the cinema than a space relating to the surrounding streets and institutions.
tWo Dutch squares: park vs. pLaza
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upon arriving in rotterdam on a sunny afternoon , it was hard to believe this 20th century port city was once a quiet fishing village. Walking down the wide streets bustling with cars, buses and the occasional bike, I attempted to find our way on an 1837 map of the city. I was soon lost. Old Rotterdam was destroyed in WWII.
Early in the 17th century Rotterdam began to expand its port operations and out compete other Dutch cities such as Dordrecht and Delft. Rotterdam soon surpassed its rivals due to the watery depths of its natural harbor, which allowed newer modern frigates with deeper keels to gain access to its port. Rotterdam became a major Dutch port, second only to Amsterdam.
By the late 19th century major changes to the urban fabric occurred. As a result of industrialization, the city filled canals and widened streets to accommodate increased road traffic. Despite changes, much of the 17th century urban fabric remained up until 1940. The most significant urban historical event occurred on May 14, 1940 when the German
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0 100 200 300 m 1837
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Air Force razed nearly the entire city, except for a few civic buildings, including the cathedral. After the war, substantial urban remodeling took place, resulting in larger city blocks, occupied by larger structures.
Sources: Rotterdam city triangle 1932 & after the war: Meeus, J.H.A., & Vroom, M.J., Learning From Rotterdam, Nichols Publishing, NY, 1990.
0 100 200 300 m 1837
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Nowadays Rotterdam is one of the largest ports in the world, and by far the largest in Europe. Although vestiges of an older Rotterdam are hard to trace, they have remained between urbanization.
as i flip through the hundred upon hundreds of photos from our trip, I pause at those that show signs of life. Throughout Amsterdam, the complex layers, played out over centuries, are evident in the abundant complexity of form, yet digestible via a framework of well-connected, highly articulated public streets and canals. Bikes, cars, and boats overlap in a single frame: moving, docked, just used, waiting, lined up, lived in, worked on, decorated, cared for. Buildings with red shutters wink at me, the next leans in close, every 25 feet or so a new structure, another detail, a plant potted out on the stoop, a cat in the window, even a bag of trash tells a story: many people live here. There is a street sweeper just around the corner: someone cares. Even in Borneo-Sporenberg, an urban renewal site without such a history, this imported yet modernized framework of relationships between buildings, street and canal yields a lived-in and human-scale texture to the spaces between a diversity of buildings and exudes evidence of use and care.
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By contrast, my photos of Kop Van Zuid, a recent urban renewal site along the Maas River of Rotterdam, angle upward to the only thing moving, the clouds racing across a blue sky. The high-rise buildings and bridges may be admirably clean, sleek, commanding against this lively backdrop, but at ground level, the food for stories are few. One of the few remaining pre-WWII structures, the Holland America building, seems out of place rather than treasured or even engaged. The edge of the river seems to be attacking the waterfront park with inhospitable wind and shunned rather than celebrated. The canals jut into housing developments without activating them, no boats or bridges or ducks. Over-scaled buildings dominate and with no active edge at the street, they give no sense of life, sense of care. The diverse layers of life are missing, cleaned up and tucked away.
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the history of water management in the Netherlands dates back one thousand years. Yet within the last fifty years, water management projects have increased in scope and in scale without precedent. The first of these projects, the Deltaworks, came forth in response to a catastrophic flood that took place in 1953. During this period, the Delta Commission built numerous dams in southern Holland to prevent the occurrence of similar calamities. We visited the last of these projects, the Maeslant Barrier. Its impressive gigantic doors swing shut as if on hinges, sealing off the waterway in the event of a surging storm, preventing high waters from flooding cities inland.
More recently, the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management implemented a new water management policy that addresses several climatic factors such as rising sea levels, river discharge, and increasing rainfall. Instead of relying on traditional dike systems to keep the Dutch landscape dry, the program advocates treating water as a valuable resource through the creation of space for it within
7Water management strategies in the netherLanDs
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the landscape. To better understand this, we visited the office of Robbert de Koning, a landscape architect whose work largely focuses on rivers. With him, we drove around looking at rivers and dikes in the Arnhem region. Robbert discussed several projects that ranged from the relocation of a large dike in the NIJmegen area to the Noorwaard Project. The Noorwaard project intends to ease pressure on the Waal River as it bends around two
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Water management strategies in the netherLanDsthousand hectares of predominantly agricultural land. Presently, a dike surrounds the polder, protecting it from the North Sea to the south and the river to the north. Several plans have emerged to reintroduce a series of creeks and larger channels that divert water in the event of a flood. These would help relieve upstream pressure on the river. Ultimately, the agricultural land destined to become the spillway would then be converted to
pastures, simultaneously displacing low-lying farmers. Consequently the final design must weigh their concerns and incorporate them appropriately.
7
traveling through the netherlands, it was impossible not to be struck by the Dutch willingness to experiment with urban form. At IJburg, the Eastern Docklands, and Kop van Zuid we encountered innovative approaches to design on a scale that would be unimaginable in American cities. The Bijlmer stands as a bleak reminder that these experiments do not occur in a vacuum and can have a profound impact on the lives of the people that inhabit them.
Built on the southeast corner of Amsterdam between 1968 and 1975 and housing over 50,000 people, primarily in 31 10-story blocks, The Bijlmer was conceived as the unadulterated embodiment of Le Corbusier’s modernist ideals. Architect Siegfried Nassuth’s design concentrated residences into large, snaking apartment blocks separated by vast park-like spaces. Additionally, housing and other uses were strictly segregated and an orthogonal system of raised roads separated automobile and pedestrian circulation.
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barren landscape create a feeling of disorientation. Cosmetic changes, including façade improvements and public art projects, have done little to temper the harshness of this unwelcoming environment. It is easy to see why those who had the means to live elsewhere had shunned this place.
Even in this uninviting landscape, however, there were signs of hope. Parts of the Bijlmer bustled with activity, something that had been missing from some of the more sterile new projects we had visited. A modest memorial to the victims of an Israeli plane that crashed into the neighborhood in 1992, designed by Georges Descombes, provided a moment for respite and introspection in this imposing environment. In addition, many of the hulking housing blocks have been replaced with smaller scale urban fabric. Even when the renewal is complete, however, several of the original housing blocks will remain as a stark memorial the neighborhood’s past.
The reality of life in the Bijlmer never met the lofty goals of its creators. Almost immediately, the neighborhood was plagued by high crime and poverty rates. The neighborhood soon became a place for immigrants from the former Dutch colony of Suriname and was largely isolated from the rest of Amsterdam. A multi-billion euro effort to renew the neighborhood began in 1992, with completion anticipated around 2009.
Visiting the site, the sheer scale of the project was startling. The monotonous blocks of housing that remain from the original design form a bleak backdrop to the desolate expanses of open space that sit between them. Together, the towering buildings and
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our stay in the netherlands up to this point has led us to understand that the Dutch have a very unique approach to design. In a country, where development and survival relies on controlling and manipulating nature, in particular water, form follows function in an aggressive manner. Amsterdamse Bos Park, our last site to visit, clearly falls under this form–function paradigm. The park, however, is still groundbreaking. The designer’s intent to structure a layout of form for processes and activities to evolve resulted in a park with many memorable spaces.
Entering the park that late afternoon I wondered if the modernist intention of form follows function can still be seen. To give the reader an idea of Bos Park, it is important to note that the park is two and half times larger then Central Park, was constructed during a period of 35 years (1929 –1964) and is located on the southwest corner of Amsterdam proper. The designer, Cornelis van Eesteren, along with a team of botanists, biologists, engineers, sociologists, foresters and town planners put together
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the original plan. The result is today’s highly complex engineered landscape design that evenly distributes in plan: woodlands, open lawns and water.
What I see as I start to walk is what I perceive as “picturesque” and possibly even static, however, looking deeper and walking further one starts to see the dynamics and underlying processes of change that have shaped the park and continue to shape it today. There is a clear hierarchy and choice in paths, succession in trees, multiplicity and range of recreational activities. Thus the park appears as a result of form and function, but in its ever-changing conditions, offers very rich experiences.
Source: “Plattegrond.” www.amsterdamsebos.nl
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most of us learned to talk by listening, and we learned to write by reading: we developed the capacity to invent and transform language by observing and engaging what already existed. Learning the language of design is a similar process, and that’s why study trips like ours are important complements to the work that goes on in design studios.
What we saw in Paris and the Netherlands was especially relevant to this spring’s third-year landscape studio, “Looking Ahead in the California Delta.” The Delta, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers drain into San Francisco Bay, has a complicated past and a precarious future. The land in the region is sinking, and the water is rising. Widespread flooding is a constant hazard, and its potential casualties include productive farmland, endangered plant and animal species, tens of thousands of houses, and the water supply for the southern half of the state.
The Netherlands is a European counterpart to the California Delta. The regions are similar geographically, and the questions facing Dutch designers and planners are almost identical to the ones that the third-year studio encountered. Both landscapes have been shaped by reclamation and its unexpected consequences. Both lie in large part below sea level, and both are managed through a complicated system of dikes that hold water back and pumps that carry it away. Both face significant pressure for change, and many of the forces for transformation are the same: rapid urbanization; the changing economics of agriculture; a burgeoning interest in nature, or at least in its appearance; and an increasingly urgent threat of flooding from rising sea levels and development upstream. In both places, people responsible for managing the landscape are coming to the same conclusions: that absolute control is not possible; that building higher and higher dikes is not the whole answer; and that land and water need to be considered as complements rather than as opposites
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In many ways the response to these issues is more sophisticated in the Netherlands than in California. Dutch society has been dealing with the dynamic processes of the Rhine delta for nearly a thousand years, and it has developed powerful and effective institutions to plan, build, and administer public infrastructure. Social awareness about the landscape and its dilemmas is much higher than in California. The Dutch see the landscape as a medium for design: they have generated a unique and specific vocabulary of form from the ongoing tension between natural forces and cultural interventions.
What we saw in Paris presented some of the same lessons at a different scale. Well built, carefully maintained, and intensely inhabited, the streets, squares, and parks we visited demonstrated the value of public spending to promote public space. And, like the Flevoland polders, the pleached trees of the Luxembourg Gardens revealed the strange, special beauty that arises from constant interaction between nature and culture.
Our trip had a powerful effect on the Delta studio. It stimulated a range of experiments with urban form. It provided information about the physical construction of large-scale infrastructure. It expanded students’ ideas about land use, ownership, and administration. It suggested many different ways of making landscape processes legible. Most important, it provided fuel for a lively discussion about what design can and should do in the complex, fluctuating, profoundly manipulated landscapes where we live and work.
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both the study tour of paris and the Netherlands and this publication have been made possible thanks to the support of the Beatrix Farrand and Geraldine Scott Knight Funds.
During our visit to the Netherlands, we benefited from Irene Curulli’s knowledge of the Dutch Landscape. Irene is a lecturer at the University of Eindhoven and a principal at Terrafirma, a Landscape Architecture firm in Amsterdam. Irene introduced us to the work of leading design firms in Amsterdam, through lectures by Frits Van Dongen of Cie Architects and Planners and by Maike Van Stiphout, Jana Crepon and Willem Jan Snel of DS Landscape Architects.
Through Jane Wolff we met Tracy Metz, a Journalist and a writer who has recently been appointed by Queen Beatrix to an independent advisory council for the Ministry of Nature and Agriculture. Also through Jane we were able to visit the office of Robbert DeKoning, who has been working for several years on the Room for the Rivers Project.
AcknowLedgements
Finally, during our visit to Utrecht we had the privilege to meet Dirk Sijmons of H+N+S landscape architects, National Landscape Advisor for the Netherlands and designer for the 2002 “Room for the Rivers” plan.
Deni Ruggeri was responsible for assembling the material included in this publication and worked with Annabelle Ison of Ison Design on its final production.
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InstructorsPeter BosselmannJane WolffDeni Ruggeri
ParticipantsHeather Clauss Noelle ColeDavid de la PeñaPeter FrankelCalder GillinSadie GrahamJoshua KentPatricia Algara KimballJohn MartinMei MinoharaJennifer NataliAaron OdlandZach RutzAndreas X. Stravropoulos is
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