Designblog

Chaos and Order is the name of Hendrik Wijdevelds endeavor to eradicate the chaos and clutter of modern city life. I use his theories and pictures as a starting point in a deeper research into chaos and order, as one of the most fundamental dichotomies in our struggle to make sense of life. In its most extreme from it can be used as a formula to describe practically everything, from the beginning of time to the heat death of the universe.
 

Through juxtaposed pictures and excerpts from texts [download pdf]
I try to tell a story perhaps better lived in imagination than understood.
 

inspired by Rem Koolhaas’ Kunsthal Rotterdam (1990).

The Rotterdam Kunsthal is one of the very first of contemporary buildings that have tried to connect themselves in direct ways to their urban surroundings. By using geographical context it attempts to strive placelessness and lack of identity.

The first sketches of the Kunsthal show a changeable space called ‘robot’ which is flexible to all kinds of exhibition concepts with its shifting walls and tribunes. However the concept of adjusting develops further in the process and in his scale models he presents building blocks with two streets cutting straight through the construction.The Actualization: a square flat box located at the edge of the museum park. The building is divided into 4 pieces by an arterial road. It contains 3 exhibition spaces. 650m², 1000m² and 1250m², an auditorium, office and cafe.

Kunsthal

In the following drawings I researched this idea of architectural integration and urban fusion.

Gerrit Rietveld Academie / Hard Rock Cafe

Spui / Vondelpark

In this research i collected exciting materials and information, i compared it to other data that in a certain way related with it and questioned with this his decisions and my thoughts about the project.

What appealed me to start this with this project is the difference in between the first intentions and sketches and the actual outcome. The sketches look great but not very Gerrit Rietveld, the outcome (or at least the exterior of the house) looks kind of normal and look far from what I expect from a guy like Gerrit Rietveld. Never the less i like it a lot.

SharedInterests_BvandenBerg

Sayuri Chetty’s tale of the world bottle.

Villa dall’ava is a villa designed for a family that wanted a house that could be seen as two separate apartments; one for the parents and one for their daughter. The Family wanted a swimming pool on the roof and a panoramic view of the surrounding and over Paris.

The design is made with cheap material such as corrugated aluminum panels combined with expensive material such as natural stone, which is also a significant of Rem Koolhaas. Which for him is a way of mocking modernism by using materials and building structures that are different of what is commonly esthetically accepted. Another way of mocking modernism is by using different building systems that can have practical disadvantages such as sloping floors or ceilings, which you can also see in the design of Villa dall’Ava.

I was inspired by the way Rem Koolhaas is known for mocking modernism. And I questioned myself why would you call the combination cheap with expensive material, and sloping floors or ceilings mocking with modernism. Aren’t sloping floors and ceiling or the use of cheap material modernistic?
I thought that the ultimate way of mocking modernism would be something that wouldn’t be modernistic. I made a non-realistic sketch of Villa dall’Ava in a way that I find is mocking modernism.  By using materials that aren’t modern.

The Villa dall’ava is part of the Treasures of the NAi (Rotterdam); You can read more about the designed by 3 architects from OMA architects in my enclosed research pdf.

Vipcity is a research project of the Belgian bureau for urban planning T.O.P.office Luc Deleu. ‘The Unadapted City’ is a design based urbanist study. Earlier models such as Brikabrak (1998), Dinkytown (1998-99) and Octopus (1999) lead to the latest model Vipcity: an urban plan for 38,000 inhabitants.

According to T.O.P. office life on earth will become a problem because of a lack of space. While most architects and urban planners design spaces for one fixed purpose, T.O.P. office designed basic shapes that could fit for all purposes, to reduce the inefficient use of space in cities today. The basic shapes behave like a sort of skeleton, and can be filled according to the needs of the inhabitants. The only way a city can be adapted to its needs, is when its design is unadapted, still to be customized accordingly. Research lead to some rules in the arrangement of the city.

First, all needs are categorized. The facilities mentioned:
– hotel and catering – social facilities – medical facilities – distribution and Transport – education – universal and commercial services – culture and entertainment – worship – arts and crafts – sports and recreation

Next these facilities can be placed in three categories: structural, zoned and occasional.Structural facilities provide the cities structure.

The transport and distribution facilities are represented in the black oblong shape. It functions as the cities spine, along which the zones are placed (white parts in photo).The zoned facilities, shown as the small colored blocks, can develop by various, uncontrolled within a specific zone.

The facilities are shaped rectangular. This proved to be the most versatile and fitting for every function. The colors represent the different facilities.
Occasional facilities can develop everywhere by individual. By free initiatives that directly answer to a inhabitant needs.

When the needs of the inhabitants change, adjustments can be made on either zoned or occasional facilities. The space or form does not have to be adjusted, only its function, i the image represented by the change of color. Occasional facilities can easily be taken down or moved and affect the cities shape.

This research project by T.O.P. office is highly theoretical and not one of the models is executed. Nevertheless it gives fresh view the construction of the society.

stack the bottle

Can a stackable beer bottle help to make construction more sustainable? As the story goes, beer magnate Freddy Heineken came up with the idea of the World Bottle when he saw waste materials being recycled to build dwellings in the slums of the Caribbean. At his request, John Habraken designed the first stackable bottle in 1962. The ribbed glass and the depression in the bottom of each bottle reinforce the construction of the brickwork.
The bottle remains a prototype. The brewery’s marketing department is afraid the idea will harm their image. As an experiment, Habraken builds a house made out of bottles for Heineken. In 1975, the beer bottle once more surfaces as a possible building material, although critics say that far from solving the issue of recycling leftover bottles, the World Bottle would only encourage people to drink. To get the number of bottles needed to build their house, people would have to consume a substantial amount of beer first!

I found this idea really really avant-gardist and full of possibilities. I think it is a field that designers should investigate more. Not recycling materials, because it is only a reaction on the consequence of the harmfulness we have dealing with the wastes of our mass consumption society, but design the product without forget that someday it will become a waste that will take a lot of place and long process before this object will be transformed and recycled (PET recycling process for instance). What would be a world where all consumption object would be designed like this: one function before/another function after it would become a waste?

‘Patch Work Metropolis’ is a study for city expansion between Den Haag and Rotterdam in The Netherlands by Dutch architect Willem Jan Neutelings.
The initial drawing of the project contains a lot of colors which makes distinction between the places of different character in order to understand and figure out the geographical facts of the area. I was very inspired by the way of using colors and the way it looks, it reminds me of a coloring book.

My project is a book based on this idea. The image on the cover is based on that same drawing, and the content is a simple text describing the project. When you look inside of the book, you can only see white pages which have embossed lines with an instruction saying ‘Color inside of the lines’. By coloring, the text will appear.
 

(Hello Alaska)

The sketch for this 1763 interior by Leendert Viervant has a liftable part on one of the panels. It reveals an alternative to the dominant Rococo style of this period: The Neo Classicist style. This showed a clear desire to adapt to the client’s wishes.

Neoclassicism was a “return to purity” as a reaction to the flamboyant lifestyle of the monarchy in the 1700’s. It was the return to the classic styles & spirit from Rome and ancient Greece. Moral & rationality replaced bold ornamentation & superficiality. The promotion of science and individuality during the Enlightenment (origin 1650) had left a demand for personal freedom & equality.

In the spirit of the enlightenment & the belief that all individuals should be able to reason for themselves, Viervant leaves the choice to the client by offering alternatives to the initial designs. The awareness of the changing demands at the current time & difference in personal taste makes Viervant’s approach seem like a prediction of our modern customizable 21st century society.

“Enlightenment is mankind’s final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance & error.”

– Emanuel Kant

After visiting the treasure room of the NAi I was very inspired by a non-existing student houses from Jan Verhoeven [x]. A very strong image of a wooden model caught my attention.

For the student residence in the campus Drienerlo the architect Jan Verhoeven devised a smart structure. He designed an easy structure that gets stronger when you build more houses. This sketches of the plan from 1965 are very colorful, colored squares represent the layered houses. Mathematical drawings with different structures, some a-symmetric some not. The sketches give me the feeling of mandalas, the spiritual drawings that suppose to give you rest and peace. It reminded me also of the patterns my great-grandmother used for making embroiderys.
This all sounds very warm and cozy, but when you look at the drawings it's still a bit cold because of the straight and perfect lines and squares.
What i wanted to do was to make a booklet, make this drawings into embroidery and give this the warm feeling it reminded me of. The process of making the embroiderys give you the same peaceful feeling as making and looking at mandalas. Also the fabric is getting stronger When you stitch more layers, the same as the original idea from the student residence. In the booklet I also tried to preserve the atmosphere of the model with using the wood board and keeping the clean image. The text in the booklet are keywords that represent the essence of the project from Jan Verhoeven, but also three separate titles of the embroiderys.

“So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal and the teaching so much needed if we are to see the whole of life, and to now serve the whole of life, holding no ‘traditions’ essential to the great TRADITION. Nor cherishing any preconceived form fixing upon us either past, present or future, but—instead—exalting the simple laws of common sense—or of super-sense if you prefer—determining form by way of the nature of materials…”

– Frank Lloyd Wright, An Organic Architecture, 1939

INSPIRATION

As an inspiration for this publication I chose Ton Alberts and Max van Huut. They were the leading architects in organic architecture. Their NMB (now ING bank) office building was realized according to a completely new concept: organic forms instead of the straight lines that dominated the impersonal, efficiency-focused office buildings of the 1980s. The free forms encourage a creative atmosphere at work. They created people-friendly surroundings with plenty of plants, varied spaces and climate-neutral installations. The office of the ING Bank is one of the most impressive examples of the upsurge in organic architecture during this period.

DISCOVERIES

Fallingwater, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most widely acclaimed works, was designed in 1936 for the family of Pittsburgh department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann. The key point for the design of the house was the waterfall over which it was build. While designing this house F.L.W. stayed true to his principles. He respected the properties of the material and he respected the harmonious relationship between the form/design and the function of the building.

THE DIFFERENT SIDE OF ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE

Antoni Gaudi’s concept of organic architecture was significantly different than the one of Frank Lloyd Wright. In his work Gaudi mimicked nature itself by creating concrete waves on the facades of the buildings , making lizards from shattered colored clay tiles,  twisting metal leafs and flowers for railings on balconies and stairs. His greatest work La Sagrada Familia (not finished) truly is the most magnificent example of Gaudi’s work. The rippling contours of the stone facade reminiscent us of sand castle, while the towers are topped with brightly-colored mosaics which look like bowls of fruit. Gaudí believed that color is life, and, knowing that he would not live to see completion of his masterpiece, left colored drawings of his vision for future architects to follow.

(I did some research )?

After seeing wonderful sketches of the famous design for the Rijksmuseum by Dutch architect Pierre Cuypers’, I made a pop-up of the building as a form of a pop-up. click on the image to view the result!

In 1875 architect Petrus Josephus Hubertus Pierre Cuypers won the design-contest for the Rijksmuseum. Before this time he designed little more than a hundred churches, for witch about seventy got realized. Besides that me made designs for monasteries, chapels and did renovations of old churches.

Cuypers was the first Dutch architect who, in his time, used Gothic construction-techniques and put them into practice. Before he made use of the Gothic shapes in a decorative way, until he completely switched to a Neo-Gothic style.

The Gothic revival was a reaction on the cold and strict forms of the Classicism. This came from a nostalgic, romantic interest for the Middle Ages.

Cuypers’ design for the Rijksmuseum featured Renaissance-style arches, neo-Gothic windows and Medieval towers. The function of the building is not clear. From the outside you would not guess it is a museum. However, Cuypers build an ode to Dutch history by combining styles and thereby gives an public lesson in Dutch history.

The design got a lot of critique from the public, the Protestant majority could not cope with the ‘to Catholic’ result. They considered it also to be ‘to Medieval’.

I think it’s a remarkable building, build with a great eye for detail.

During my research I found out that the recent construction work, which started in 2003, is not only focused on modernizing the facilities but as well to bring long gone elements of Cuypers original design back into the building. Like for instance, in the front-hall they remade the mosaics on the floor. The Rijksmuseum hired a specialized Italian company to get the job done. The mosaics are series about the cycle of life, cycle of the year and the cycle of seasons. I’m looking forward to see the work in its final state.

 
The project I singled out from the NAI treasure collection is called 15 MILES INTO THE EARTH by Hendrik Wijdeveld.

Wijdeveld situated his 1944 design for an international geological research centre in a shaft in the earth at a depth of 15 miles. Designed during the harsh winter of 1944 and 1945 at the tail end of the Second World War when food and supplies were scarce, this project is a plea for international collaboration and for putting science and technology to a peaceful use. At that point in time, little was known of the earth’s deeper strata. Wijdeveld foresaw new discoveries, an ‘uranium age’. At the same time, the project is a ‘world theater’. With a ritual scene taking place at the base of the shaft, he depicts the world coming into being as the primordial force of nature and man’s creative power collide in an explosive display of energy.

Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld (1885-1987) considers himself as director with the world as a total theatre, a stage for his designs: he is architect, editor-in-chief, and typographer of the journal ‘Wendingen’, as well as a designer of books, theatrical stage sets and costumes, furniture and utensils. The most famous example is the huge People’s Theatre in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam in the shape of an enormous vagina, the national park Amsterdam-Zandvoort, a number of enormous high-rise projects and “Plan the Impossible”, like this extraordinary proposal dating from 1944, involving boring a 25 kilometre deep shaft deep into the earth, and a plan to hem in the existing city with a ring of towers. The towers would not only act as dramatic landmarks but would set a resolute boundary to urban growth. He took advantage of his experience in theater design to stage a new landscape and evoke collective experiences.
Several architects such as Brandon Mosley, Rick Gooding and Douglas Darden have based their utopias in the underground. The novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne digs into the depths of the prehistory of the globe. Furthermore many modern and contemporary artists worked with the concept of the hole, in primis Anish Kapoor seems to be almost obsessed by it.

hole (hõ?) noun 1. opening into or through a thing 2. hollow place, as a pit or cave (a deep place in a body of water; trout holes) 3. underground habitation, burrow 4. flaw, fault 5. the shallow cup into which the ball is played in golf; a part of a golf course from the tee to the putting green 6. shabby or dingy place 7. awkward position. [middle English, from old English hol (from neuter of hol, adjective, hollow) & holh; Old High German hol, adjective, hollow and perhaps to Old English helan, to conceal; first known use: before 12th century] 1. I have a hole in my sock 2. He fixed the hole in the roof 3. There is a mouse hole in the wall 4. The dog dug a deep hole 5. Her putt rolled right into the hole 6. She made a birdie on the seventh hole 7. The course has 18 hole synonims perforation; gap; flaw; weakness; burrow; aperture; orifice antonyms bulge, camber, convexity, jut, projection, protrusion, protuberance rhymes with hole bole, boll, bowl, coal, cole, dole, droll, foal, goal, knoll, Kohl, kohl, mole, ole, pole, poll, prole, role, roll, scroll […]

‘A hole?’ the rock chewer grunted. ‘No, not a hole,’ said the will-o’-the-wisp despairingly. ‘A hole, after all, is something. This is nothing at all’. (Ende)

Holes are an interesting case-study for ontologists and epistemologists. Naive, untutored descriptions of the world treat holes as objects of reference, on a par with ordinary material objects. Hole representations – no matter whether veridical – appear to be commonplace in human cognition. Not only do people have the impression of seeing holes; they also form a corresponding concept, which is normally lexicalised as a noun in ordinary languages. Some languages even discriminate different types of hole, distinguishing e.g. between inner cavities and see-through perforations. Moreover, data from developmental psychology confirm that infants are able to perceive, count, and track holes just as easily as they perceive, count, and track paradigm material objects such as cookies and tins. These facts do not prove that holes and material objects are on equal psychological footing, let alone on equal metaphysical footing. But they indicate that the concept of a hole is of significant salience in the common-sense picture of the world, specifically of the spatio-temporal world. If holes are entities of a kind, then, they appear to be spatio-temporal particulars, like cookies and tins and unlike numbers or moral values. They appear to have a determinate shape, a size, and a location. (‘These things have birthplaces and histories. They can change, and things can happen to them’, Hofstadter & Dennett) On the other hand, if holes are particulars, then they are sui generis particulars. For holes appear to be immaterial – they seem to be made of nothing, if anything is.
For example: 1. It is difficult to explain how holes can in fact be perceived. If perception is grounded on causation, as Locke urged, and if causality has to do with materiality, then immaterial bodies cannot be the source of any causal flow. So a causal theory of perception would not apply to holes. Our impression of perceiving holes would then be a sort of systematic illusion, on pain of rejecting causal accounts of perception. (On the other hand, if one accepts that absences can be causally efficacious, then a causal account could maintain that we truly perceive holes) 2. It is difficult to specify identity criteria for holes – more difficult than for ordinary material objects. Being immaterial, we cannot account for the identity of a hole via the identity of any constituting stuff. But neither can we rely on the identity conditions of its material “host” (the stuff around the hole), for we can imagine changing the host, partly or wholly, without affecting the hole. And we cannot rely on the identity conditions of its “guest” (the stuff inside it), for it would seem that we can empty a hole of whatever might partially or fully occupy it and leave the hole intact.3. It is difficult to assess the explanatory relevance of holes. Arguably, whenever a physical interaction can be explained by appeal to the concept of a hole, a matching explanation can be offered invoking only material objects and their properties. (That water flowed out of the bucket is explained by a number of facts about water fluidity, combined with an accurate account of the physical and geometric conditions of the bucket.) Aren’t these latter explanations enough? Further problems arise from the ambiguous status of holes in figure-ground displays. Thus, for example, though it appears that the shape of holes can be recognized by humans as accurately as the shape of ordinary objects, the area visually enclosed by a hole typically belongs to the background of the host, and there is evidence to the effect that background regions are not represented as having shapes. So what would the shape of a hole be, if any?

These difficulties – along with some form of horror vacui – may lead a philosopher to favor ontological parsimony over naive realism about holes.
A number of options are available: [A] One could hold that holes do not exist at all, arguing that all truths about holes boil down to truths about holed objects. This calls for a systematic way of paraphrasing every hole-committing sentence by means of a sentence that does not refer to or quantify over holes. For instance, the phrase ‘There is a hole in…’ can be treated as a mere grammatical variant of the shape predicate ‘… is holed’, or of the predicate ‘… has a hole-surrounding part’. (Challenge: Can a language be envisaged that contains all the necessary predicates? Can every hole-referring noun-phrase be de-nominalized? Compare: ‘The hole in the tooth was smaller than the dentist’s finest probe’) [B] One could hold that holes do exist, but they are not the immaterial entities they seem to be: they are, like anything else, material beings, which is to say qualified portions of space-time. There would be nothing peculiar about such portions as opposed to any others that we would not normally think of as being occupied by ordinary material objects, just as there would be nothing more problematic, in principle, in determining under what conditions a certain portion counts as a hole than there is in determining under what conditions it counts as a dog, a statue, or whatnot. (What if there were truly unqualified portions of space-time, in this or some other possible world? Would there be truly immaterial entities inhabiting such portions, and would holes be among them?) [C] One could also hold that holes are ordinary material beings: they are neither more nor less than superficial parts of what, on the naive view, are their material hosts. For every hole there is a hole-surround; for every hole-surround there is a hole. On this conception, the hole-surround is the hole. (Challenge: This calls for an account of the altered meaning of certain predicates or prepositions. What would ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ mean? What would it mean to ‘enlarge’ a hole?) [D] Alternatively, one could hold that holes are “negative” parts of their material hosts. On this account, a donut would be a sort of hybrid mereological aggregate – the mereological sum of a positive pie together with the negative bit in the middle. (Again, this calls for an account of the altered meaning of certain modes of speech. For instance, making a hole would amount to adding a part, and changing an object to get rid of a hole would mean to remove a part, contrary to ordinary usage.) [E] Yet another possibility is to treat holes as “disturbances” of some sort. On this view, a hole is to be found in some object (its “medium”) in the same sense in which a knot may be found in a rope or a wrinkle in a carpet. (The metaphysical status of such entities, however, calls for refinements.)
On the other hand, the possibility remains of taking holes at face value. Any such effort would have to account to the effect that holes are sui generis, immaterial particulars – but also for a number of additional peculiarities. Among others: [a] Holes are localized at – but not identical with – regions of space. (Holes can move, as happens anytime you move a piece of Emmenthal cheese; regions of space cannot.) [b] Holes are ontologically parasitic: they are always in something else and cannot exist in isolation. (‘There is no such thing as a hole by itself’) [c] Holes are fillable. (You don’t destroy a hole by filling it up. You don’t create a new hole by removing the filling.) [d] Holes are mereologically structured. (They have parts and can bear part-whole relations to one another, though not to their hosts.) [e] Holes are topologically assorted. (Superficial hollows are distinguished from internal cavities; straight perforations are distinguished from knotted tunnels.) Holes are puzzling creatures.
Black Holes appear to be the origin of the Universe, and vaginas the cradle of life.