diagoon housing by herman hertzberger

this is the diagoon housing project by herman hertzberger, built in delft in 1971. one of my peers at MIT studied it as a precedent in a studio last spring. i was looking up hertzberger's work in the netherlands and discovered that this project, a small single building for 8 or so families, is very close to me. it is tucked into a dense pack of suburban developments southwest of the center, right near the delft zuid train station off the kruithuisweg. you approach this through a maze of houses with cars in front, gardens in various states of disarray, cats on the prowl, and two kids climbing trees on a sunday afternoon that is cold enough to bite your ears when you ride quickly through it without a hat. the building faces west towards a square of land long overgrown with trees but still with paths cut through. dutch ideas of gardens are always messy and overgrown, a bit ragged as if you have been on vacation for months. i was late for something so i only had a chance to observe quickly and then continue. it always makes me nervous to start architecturally undressing a building with people inside looking out at me. i could only take one picture without feeling awkward because somebody in a white shirt was in the second-floor kitchen. hertzberger built some cool stuff with plain CMUs and modernist detailing. the cool thing about this project was its supposed interior flexibility and split-level floor stacking. it seemed nice from the outside, like a little commune set among the banality of suburbia. really, though, you couldn't tell it was much different from the surrounding blocks except that this one looked particularly austere and plain. the flickr photos of this place make it seem very clean cut and maintained, whereas in my picture it sits beyond a bulging hedge and empty tree. i almost like this more, as an image of a work that is lived in, inhabited, and has its own life. its domestic scale and simplicity give it a humble reading i admire, as if to say "i can't change much about the rest of the built environment, but i can provide a worthwhile place to make a home."

i had a discussion recently with another architecture student at the halloween party at the nieuwelaan house, the one where i was dressed as the great state of texas and encouraged people to write their stereotypes of the state on its foiled shape that hung over my shoulders. he is fed up with starchitecture and the lack of concern for details or at least architecture as something other than image or brand. he asked me who my favorite firms were in america who were unknown here but doing solid, well-designed, respectable work. i could only name a handful, embarrassingly (i did mention the name lake/flato because i like them a lot). but it made me think about how much work there is out there for architects and how even the smallest projects can be so satisfying. projects that have clean lines and are enjoyable places to live are beautiful. this is why dwell magazine does so well.

maybe: fuck the birds nest and zaha hadid and santiago calatrava and design competitions. maybe what we need instead of legions of grad students with thick glasses getting off to the rem koolhaas el croquis are people who want to move to a small town somewhere and start building solid, inspiring, cheap buildings. the chances to work at that huge scale and with that piercing urban/global vision are so minimal and the situations so saturated with compromise and legality. even if i end up being an architect i will never work like that. thought i would be open to working for somebody who works like that. in the end, there is probably more value in sitting in your hometown and designing schools, fire stations, churches, and homes. i worked for a company that did just this and has had a great impact on denton over the last 30 years. of course this takes a narrow view of what architecture can be (just buildings) but it is an inviting, human-scale version of an architectural career. so lets all light a candle for the architects who get no recognition in online rags like archdaily for putting in long hours on local projects that really change lives. god bless samuel mockbee and architects for humanity. amen.

ok, now i'm going to sleep. i have work to do tomorrow and a short presentation with winy maas present about a why factory workshop i'm participating in. goodnight.

dordrecht & de biesbosch

tuesday was the first day i had to wear my winter coat here. it was also my studio mid-review with winy maas. i had my slides together and presented what i thought was a coherent logic to back up my project. overall i don't think it was too successful. at the end there was a long almost heated discussion in which i didn't participate about the scope and dream of the studio. we have since had to refocus our ideas and waste even more time on "research." needless to say i think it has been frustrating. the problems of the studio and my problems with the studio are too numerous and intricate to detail online and i have spent enough time examining them in my head to summarize here.

today is saturday. last night there was a party on the floor below mine in the student house. you know it is a good party when you leave the house the next morning and have to avoid the patches of vomit on the patio outside. today was also one of the shittiest days on record, the kind where you become conscious, hear the shallow rain on your window, and go back to sleep. but i really wanted to get out of delft for a while so i put on my winter jacket and decided to go to dordrecht and bike out to de biesbosch, a national park of wetlands in the delta of the maas river east of the city.

dordrecht isn't much to write home about. the centrum area was nice with shops, tight streets, and wide canals where sailboats were tied. unlike antwerpen, the riverfront areas were mostly redeveloped with large apartment blocks. just east of downtown new apartment developments took over, right up to the water's edge. i arrived in the middle of the afternoon and it was raining lightly the whole time. it was cold and raining and i was on my bike so there are no pictures of dordrecht for you to see.

when you start biking out of the center, you pass through all of the new apartment buildings, stacked on the south side and glassed on the north. then the industrial part of town takes over along the river. the large docks are the striking feature on google maps, but by road you only see silos, knots of pipes, cooling towers, smokestacks, warehouses, and a dupont sign. there was construction on the road to the park and i accidentally got turned around and rode across a railroad bridge across the river towards sliedrecht before reorienting and coming back in the right direction. it was pretty miserable riding but i kept going because i wanted to see the place and do something instead of sitting in my room like i always do and like i am doing now.

on the way to the national park, you pass a golf course whose fairways are mostly under the tall trusses of high voltage cables. in a few minutes you pass an electricity substation with thick concrete walls and a sawing type of electric hum. there was another industrial port on the left and then, within 5 minutes, you're past the stayokay hostel and in the park. national parks in america are considered to be isolated places of preservation. here it is another function that is layered closely on the land, abutting other types of uses casually. to be fair, most of the park was across the river, accessible by ferry, but the tight change of use in this area was surprising. maybe this is a result of there being so little land to start with. regardless i pulled my bike into the visitor's center and browsed around for a bit, waiting for my jacket to dry and the sweat on my back to evaporate.

i was lucky because as i started to walk the short loop, the rain had let up and the sun poked through the haze for an hour. it was nice to be walking around in the midst of this natural setting. i am the type of person that needs to do this frequently to recharge and sharpen my mind. even if it is a short nature trail in a park for an hour, it helps me to center myself, breathe, and appreciate this place where we live. i've done it this semester in the parks of london, in the dunes of haarlem, and on the beach at scheveningen. beyond that, i really enjoy wetlands. this one reminded me a bit of blackwater national wildlife refuge in maryland. wetlands are essential lungs of water ecosystems. one thing i've missed since coming to MIT is the lack of camping and wilderness in my life. anyway, it was nice to spend 90 minutes walking a few kilometers in this park.

then, about halfway through the walk, i realized that this isn't nature at all. i was walking on an embankment that is part of the polder system used to drain the land. to my left were low fields with sheep and horses. i passed a barn with rusting tools in the front. signs frequently dotted the canal above the reeds, directly boats where to go. later i passed a lock or bridge. trees were planted in straight lines at regular intervals along the walking path. towards the end of my walk i hung out with some chickens, peacocks, and a small drenched horse. beyond the rustling stalks i could see barges loaded with containers steaming upriver. this area is productive land that happened to have a footpath running through it. i don't know how the public/private land rights work in holland but it is certainly mixed within this park.

in fact, de biesbosch is really a polder museum that happens to be gorgeous. it is still nature, just nature frozen at a later date than most natural parks. the natural/artificial dichotomy is one i've been thinking about constantly this semester, both in my studio about automation and independently. humans have lived in some places so long that their mark on the land is inseparable from anything that was there before. and humans are biological themselves so how is anything we make distinctly unnatural? we are arranging elements in increasing complex arrays and disrupting ecosystems with high concentrations of metals and compounds that were previously deep inside the earth, but this doesn't mean it isn't natural. it is dangerous and destructive but not unnatural.

this argument that humans are natural beings so their creations are natural is well-trodden (i don't have more sophisticated meditations to share with you in blogland) and in turn can be used to support current methods of production. instead i think it highlights how blurry the boundary is. i used to side more with the crunchy granola AT-hiking hippies on issues like this but after time at a tech school and more thought i still don't support total technologizing but am somewhere in the fuzzy middle. both ends of the spectrum are too extreme to deliver any promising solutions. unfortunately the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle wrapped in questions of scale, application, and lifecycles that are too complex for us to work out. yesterday at dinner, i was rereading an essay by gary snyder in "turtle island," written in 1969, where he advocates population reduction through polyandrous marriage but is severely against nuclear power. this was probably because reliable information on nuclear power wasn't available and everybody was scared shitless in the cold war.

but did you know that only 20% of the radioactive uranium you will probably be exposed to in your lifetime is from anthropogenic sources? it is a somewhat common, naturally occurring substance in the earth and groundwater. sunflowers are naturally efficient at uranium removal from tainted groundwater. after chernobyl they planted sunflowers on rafts to remove uranium from the water. while these are low levels of radioactivity that aren't going to make your children grow three legs, it is still an example of an element that is considered to be a human pollutant in the natural world that is, in fact, quite natural itself. again the question is a level of concentration that makes it unnatural and that is a more difficult question than a binary yes or no answer. there is a recent interview on BLDGBLOG with the designer of the yucca mountain repository that is very insightful.

anyway, the point is that environmental modification isn't the end of the world, but it comes down to a difficult question of scale and concentration. shoot, look at the banana, for one brief example. tons of species have destroyed their habitat before us and have suffered the consequences. coyotes overhunt does and later starve. giraffes grew longer necks because there were no leaves left on the lower branches. iraq used to be the fertile crescent. in the future we will resemble dinosaurs.

and, if it makes any difference, nature doesn't give a shit about the natural/artificial distinction. birds nest in the As of wal-mart. long-legged cranes pick through open landfills looking for scraps of crusted mcdonalds hamburger buns. in the concrete basin of the los angeles river, trees grow in the cracks and shrubs spring up next to the abandoned shopping cart that has parted the waters and allowed life to spring forth. maybe another word for natural should be indifferent.









i found my bike again as the sun was falling off the earth. the ride back to dordrecht seemed shorter but it started raining again, harder than before. the dupont refineries were already glowing, still belching smoke. by the time i got back to the city it was mostly dark and still drizzling. after riding around a bit more and finding nothing interesting, i caught a train back to delft to spend the night in solitude. i might do laundry too.

dutch geometry