well. here i am. and there you are, reading about my being here. it puts us in the same place for a moment. for the past two weeks i didn't really leave delft because i was sort of lazy and afraid of spending money. yesterday i went to amsterdam for the first time and this deserves an independent post, so i'll do that later. so, let me fill you in with some details in wobbly chronological order:
last weekend, all of holland celebrated openmonumentendag. on saturday and sunday, all of the archaic monuments of the country were open to the public and free. so all the old town halls, cathedrals, forts, manors, mansions, castles, preservations, homes, and other monuments were fair game. i stayed in delft like a slob but i managed to see the interiors of the two main churches here and the town hall (stadhuis) too.
this is the nieuwe kirk on the main square. they built it when they got tired of the oude kirk. i think it is still about 400 years old. it still chimes every half hour and you can hear it everywhere in the town, even when you're trying to sleep. lots of people were wandering. there was a sing-a-long for hymns too. the stained glass was impressive.
this was near the apse in the front of the church. what was this tiny door used for?
then i went up into the stadhuis, which is still used for municipal meetings and the town council. they have a nicely elevated view of the market, complete with a train for kids to ride on.
the oude kirk is probably around 800 years old. i don't remember for sure. i remember seeing a map of delft in 1200 and the church was on it as one of a few landmarks other than some canals. it is more austere in its whitewashed lack of ornament but it is interesting how both have the same style of wooden roof construction. both also had a similar layout inside, with the organ over the entrance in both cases (though maybe this was installed later).
also on saturdays delft has a flea market with very refined taste. vendors line up to sell old portraits, chairs, plates, novels, war items, and lots of other trinkets you could purchase to decorate your home. most of the inventory would qualify for antique status. it is fun to look though.
where shopping carts go to die.
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then during the week i worked mostly on school things. right now we're doing research to narrow our interests into a topic of manageable scale that we can use it in our design. what i mean is, the studio is about how future technologies influence the city. while past technical innovations were mostly mechanical (subways) or material (steel), now the city has become a vast network of automated processes ranging from water pump control to wireless to CCTV to environmental sensors to traffic control devices to supercomputers that model the inside of an atomic bomb to the heavy infrastructure of cabling and data centers that allow the internet to exist. there is a lot going on. our assignment is to first figure out what type of technology we want to base our design on.
i first was interested in doing some type of project addressing invisible technologies like wireless networks and somehow making it visible, but then i got excited about a more organic approach. tools are already in use for biomodification and genetic alteration on a number of scales from medical treatments to new species of fruit to goats that can produce spider silk to pigs that are altered to reduce the amount of nitrate in their waste to glofish to debates on using animals like pigs as organ farms for human use. a lot of the representation of this is very pessimistic about humans abusing the tool of genetic manipulation and the world being degraded as a result. there are rightly a lot of ethical questions about all of this and i still need to get more educated about the facts (though i did have a good starter conversation about genetically modified crops with sam and katie at royal bengal).
so i'm interested in how this tool could be used. for example, there are researchers working on modifying plants so they can sequester far more carbon dioxide than they normally do. how would the use of carbon-sucking species influence green space or even building facades in the city? i've heard there is a francois roche building in bangkok that supposedly incorporates something like this at a nano level, but i haven't found any good documentation of it yet. plants could also be modified to produce specific rare chemicals that are critical to electronics manufacturing. what if you could grow corn that contained a harvestable amount of silicon? plants also can act as sensors: a recent project is a plant that grows red instead of green when planted in the presence of landmines. some species could be a distributed network of groundwater or soil contamination or air quality. maybe fluorescent bacteria could light streets or airborne organisms could continuously clean urban air. waste management is also an issue in cities. some smaller areas are now opting for manmade wetlands to clean water. how could this be implemented on a larger scale with possibly modified plants to make the process more efficient? how would the creation of large urban wetlands affect city growth and infrastructure? i think right now i am most excited about the wetlands idea but maybe because it is the most obvious and tangible application i have found so far.
so we're starting with both cultural references and technical ones. on wednesday we sat around and i showed bits of various sci-fi movies that are sort of relevant. on friday i finally had the chance to sit down and watch "logan's run," a 1976 glam sci-fi flick about a society where each person dies when he or she turns 30. so it is a culture of youth and excess; all of the clothing resembles flowing pastel tunics, like a gay robin hood in las vegas in 2050. blasters don't emit lasers; shit just blows up where you point it. not to give away the plot of the film, but some people decide to run away instead of "renewing" (people think you are born again when you're 30 through this cult ceremony but really they just zap you). they have to escape through the waterworks of the city. apparently, the future city (housed inside geodesic domes that would make buckminster fuller quiver) is powered by water. i was really excited when they finally showed the water intake because they shot that scene at the water gardens in fort worth designed by philip johnson:
other scenes are shot in futuristic places in dallas so it was a nice little tour of the metroplex. it was even more interesting because there was no mention or plot of the adversary in this film. why are people killed at 30? who made these decisions? who do they rebel against when they break the system? what are people actually doing? they hint at a computer presence that controls everything in a few key scenes, but that part of the plot could have been much more developed. the film though is highly recommended.
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whew. what else did i do? i sat in at a jam session at club bebop on tuesday. that was fun. i talked with a trumpeter who is more into "groove" than standards, meaning he plays funk. he proudly told a story of kidnapping bootsy collins from his hotel room in den haag when he was there for a festival and holding a james brown jam session at a local jazz cafe.
also somebody down the bushes in front of my bicycle storage unit and i came out the door to find some concrete pylons covered in snails! i had never examined a snail in detail before. they were pretty fascinating. two small boys were playing with them and shouting at me in dutch but i couldn't respond! what could i do? it was almost a boo radley moment where i just had to continue on my walk to the grocery store without saying anything. i came out with my camera in the morning but they were gone. where would snails go? how far could they really get in 18 hours?
while on another bike ride, i stumbled upon a small organic grocery store. i think i might go there more often even if it is more expensive. i finally found red onions here and bought some brown sugar and organic falafel. there is good food here, you just have to know where to look.
i went to another lecture by patrick healy and it was still quite enjoyable. he ties a lot of things together in his ramblings that are periodically reinforced by a look at a pile of notes. he is irish and in moments of passion his accent shows itself. he talked mostly about 19th century interiors with citations of late 18th century french novels, paintings, monuments in berlin, and heavy references to both greek and roman art. on some level it is an exercise in archaic thought but he does a good job of reminding you why this discussion is relevant. he also had some choice quotes and made some good points about kitsch and its origin.
there is a carnival in delft this weekend too. they set up in the markt with bumper cars, an old west roller coaster complete with wide-nosed caricatures of american indians and a large mural about new york over a trailer that sold cotton candy. europe has gypsies but america has the upper hand on carnies. you could ride one ride that twisted you upside down and gave you a new view of delft. it seemed scary. a few friends rode it but i couldn't do it.
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then on saturday i took a bike ride east of delft to a park called westerpark. they had some nice marshy areas and a fair number of mosquitoes. transit in holland is well segregated by speed. bike paths are separate from streets and sidewalks. in the park, there were separate paths for bikes, pedestrians, and horses that would independently through the grounds as if it was an amusement park. added to those layers were paths for the golfers on the golf course and a road for cars. it was interesting to see how they overlapped. all of the non-motorized transit used the same bridges but when they would approach the bridge, each path would remain distinct so three separate paths, each separated by a meter of grass, would lead up to the bridge. it was cool to see. the area was nice.
this is how tomatoes are grown in holland.
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ok. i am hungry now. this blogging stuff is hard work. i need to go eat so i'll post something about amsterdam soon.
