Cities on Water 2012 Murano Project

Beyond simply absorbing the culture and scenic beauty of Venice and discovering the nuances of this city within the sea, my class was involved in a design project that attempted to rejuvenate part of this historic place.  A short distance from the city of Venice, the industrial suburb of Murano has been the heart of artful glassmaking since 1292.   Before this time, glass was an important component of Venetian industry but due to the dangers of fire, the doge ordered all kilns moved away from the city.  Now, like the rest of Venice, Murano is in a state of transition and in need of a rekindling of its unique identity.  Unlike Venice, Murano’s industrial identity is tied to glass factories, boat-works, and other large-scale constructions.  Because there are now so few glass artisans still working and as cheap glass from elsewhere continues to flood the market, Murano is seeing fewer and fewer opportunities for the maintenance of its heritage.  As a part of Venice, Murano has witnessed a slow exodus of residents and the services that once supported them.  Produce markets have given way to tourist shops and most of the people who work here cannot afford to live here.

Addressing these issues, the Vetro Artistico Murano has proposed a biennale festival of glass that would return the world’s attention to the city.  As landscape architects, we were given the opportunity to participate in the process by offering design solutions to a number of the existing problems.  Primarily we would articulate a route to circulate visitors throughout the archipelago (seven separate islands) that would allow them to sample the various incarnations of the industry.  This route should bring people in contact with factories and artisan studios, retail shops, and museums.  As all of Venice is a World Heritage site, protecting existing patterns of the built environment is required.  The chaos typical of the Venetian streets is somewhat lessened in Murano because of the large scale development there but the urban fabric is still somewhat confusing to the average visitor. Calli meander through neighborhoods, connect at strange places, and often dead end at factory loading docks or canals.  Making the biennale route legible is a difficult task and necessitates the implementation of some sort of way-finding device like cairns in the wilderness.

To accomplish this, our class studied maps and wandered the streets of Murano to find the best spaces to exhibit glass sculpture for the biennale.  I made this map to demonstrate viewsheds, masses of buildings, existing glass studios, and vaporetto routes. Using existing campi and proposing new public spaces, we would attempt to designate a network that would connect the various neighborhoods of Murano.  The plan should be staged in phases of development so that a loop was created to allow visitors to explore the islands at their own pace.  Perhaps new bridges would be constructed to make the route more navigable.

 Another of our tasks was to consider relocating the glass factories from their antiquated facilities scattered throughout Murano into modern ones to be built on the western most island called Sacca Sarenella.  The present factories could be transformed into hotels, shops, and housing while the modernized factories would be more efficient.  ‘Artist incubators’ and studios to attract young people to the glass industry might accompany these factories.

Lastly, the northernmost island known as Sacca San Mattia should be developed and programmed.  Venetian islands have always been constructed as cultural landscapes of interaction between humankind and nature.  Each of the islands in Venice began as salt marshes or berena which are deposits of soil held in place by root masses in the lagoon.  The Venetians stabilize these islands with long poles driven into the marsh substrate and then construct fondamente around the naturally occurring soils and fill the sacca (litteraly “sack”) with construction debris, dredge soils, and other materials until the islands are firm enough to build upon.  In the case of Sacca San Mattia, industrial waste from the glass factories has been piled up since the 1950s resulting in the present configuration.  While the island supports a small population of social housing and a recreational area of soccer fields and other play equipment, most of Sacca San Mattia is a mix of natural salt marsh vegetation and exposed soils.  It is the largest open space in all of Venice but is currently underutilized.  It was suggested that we design a part of the island as a museum complex to inform people about the lagoon and develop a large park on the rest of the space.

My plan for Sacca San Mattia creates a connection between existing residential boroughs by establishing a social housing community along the southern edge of the island complete with services such as community gardens, market, and a laundromat.  I also proposed a church because churches have historically been the organizing center of island communities in Venice.  A parterre garden adjacent to the church could provide an interesting venue for the exhibition of glass sculpture.

This community would tie to the recreational facility that could be advanced as the population increases.  My proposal for the Museum of the Sea would bridge two islands and be housed in an existing significant scuola that has fallen into disuse.  The museum would have a wing that was underground that would eventually continue into the lagoon allowing visitors to experience the waters of Venice from within.  This wing would emerge from the water to bring people to a high point with 365 degree views of the lagoon environment and then carry them across via a new bridge to Sacca San Mattia where a botanical garden could expose visitors to the various plants of the Mediterranean.  From that point, a walking trail would allow people to visit the chaparral vegetation of the island’s hinterland.

 

This project was different than the design charettes we participated in while staying in the Netherlands.  Those projects were quick sketches of the first order and intentionally unrefined to simply scratch at the surface of a landscape design.  In comparison, the Murano project passed through several iterations and benefitted from the opportunity to revisit the site and conduct in-depth research as our plans evolved.

The Murano project concludes the University of Minnesota’s 2012 Cities on Water study abroad project.  This is only the third year that the program has visited the Netherlands while Venice has been the major component of the trip for fifteen years.  The level of learning intensity in both countries was incredibly high and my peers and I all agree that this has been a transformative experience.  The opportunities that we have enjoyed are incredible examples of the breadth of landscape architecture.  This program has allowed us to observe a wide range of cultural landscapes in both urban and rural settings and of both natural and constructed environments.  The organizers of the Cities on Water program have done an exceptional job of providing the students with well-rounded educational opportunities and have introduced us to people who will influence us for the rest of our lives as designers.

My fourth semester as a graduate student has come to a close.  As I write this, I am on a train passing through vineyards and olive groves heading north to Milan where I will fly to Norway for a week of self-guided exploration.  The notions and implementations of change are more poignant to me now than they have ever been.  As an undergraduate studying anthropology, I learned about the adaptations to our environment that have impacted the physical and cultural identities of humankind.  As a student of landscape, I am learning how to design and guide these mutations to benefit people and places in both marginal and terrific spaces.  This summer I will begin researching my final capstone project, which will encapsulate all I have learned to this point and will occupy most of my life for my third year at the College of Design.  As I depart from where I’ve been I am comforted by an Italian phrase I learned while living in Venice: Per realizzare un bel sogno bisogna essere suegli.  Less poetically, “In order to make your dreams a reality, you must be awake.”

Into Venice Up To My Knees

A few nights ago I bathed with hundreds of strangers in the therapeutic waters of San Marco.  Acqua alta, or high water, is the phenomenon of flooding much of the city of Venice.  Waters from the Adriatic—affected by tidal action, barometric pressure, and the Bora winds of winter and spring—ebb through the storm drains and flood the canals, slowly returning Venice to the sea.  While there have been a few extreme occasions in the past 1000 years where the acqua alta has had disastrous results, generally it is treated as just another of the wonderful idiosyncrasies of this city.

 

Radio alerts and word of mouth carry the news when tides are predicted to overtake the constructed islands of Venice.  There are maps and occasional plaques in a few key places around Venice that indicate routes that are above the 120cm water line.  In cases such as a few nights ago, alarm sirens blare throughout the city, bouncing off of pavement and rising through the slots between buildings.  Gangways are constructed along the main pedestrian routes to allow people to continue to navigate the city with dry feet.  Hotels give plastic bags to their guests who wrap their shoes while residents tuck their pants into rubber boots.  Visitors to the city make videos as the water begins to bubble through the drains and transform Piazza San Marco and other campi into pools.

As a student of landscape architecture, this situation is fascinating.  We have entire classes devoted to the management of storm water and landform construction that emphasize the art of preventing buildings from standing in pools of water.  While the original architects of Venice did not predict these high waters, they did use materials and techniques that could tolerate being inundated by the brackish lagoon.  Acqua alta has become much more common in the past century.  Nearby industries have drained the aquifer, contributing to the subsidence of the Venetian islands.  The diversion of rivers, the closing of many of the natural lagoon outlets, and the loss of the absorbent salt marshes are also factors in this disturbance.  As a UNESCO World Heritage site, protecting Venice from rising seas as global climate change melts the polar ice reserves is an obvious concern.  What can be gleaned from the culture and ecology of La Serenisma that might be transferred to other coastal cities as the world begins to cope with high water?

For many, acqua alta is not cause for alarm.  The small orchestras that line the piazza continue to perform and people wander around with gelato in one hand and camera in the other.  In fact, a general atmosphere of celebration accompanied my high water experience.  After a long day in studio working through design problems to improve navigability in Murano, my peers and I were looking forward to spending an evening in deep water.  We found galoshes in the closets of our apartments and we met at Piazza San Marco as the tides were beginning to ebb into the city.  Venice, which always smells of the salty lagoon, had taken-on an even more penetrating odor of the sea.  On most evenings, the city is congested with pedestrians and the light drizzle that was falling did nothing to drive people inside.  Like me, the flooding of the city intrigues people visiting Venice.  Is it a fascination with disaster that brings us out into knee-high cold water?  Or is it the opportunity to connect to the surrounding water that is always visible yet never actually experienced as a tactile phenomenon?

Venice, which is always surreal, becomes even more of a dream as the lights are mirrored off of normally dry surfaces and the green water laps at the feet of sculptures.  Hundreds of people splashed through the rising tides and danced a slow waltz through the pools.  Children and adults alike played, splashing one another and running full force through the water.  Wine and grappa flowed between strangers.  People brought out their dogs to exercise them in the flood.  Some tourists chose to stay on the higher ground but many others didn’t care that storm drains were backing up over their shoes.  My friends and I spent hours laughing at—and contributing to—the antics all around.  The separation between the canals and the land disappeared as we waded through the city.  Beautiful girls climbed lamp poles; others turned cartwheels or performed floating tricks.  Strangers became friends and laughter echoed in the wake of wailing sirens.  The urban fabric around Venice, which has become somewhat familiar to me by now, was rendered once again strange, exotic, and unpredictable.

Venice Sketchbook Two

Sketching allows the artist to sit still and absorb the surroundings in depth.  As I study a space and interpret it onto the page, life is happening all around.  On a recent rainy Sunday I was whiling away my time in the Museo Correr exploring the massive collection of archaeological artifacts and artworks.  I stumbled into a large room with high ceilings, Istrian stone walls, and marble sculptures overwhelmed by a crowd of people.  Just then, a trio of violin, flute, and contrabassoon began a performance of music by Salvatore Sciarrino, the Italian composer of contemporary classical music.  I was awestruck by the clarity of sound and emotion in the room as the carved faces stared back at me from eternity.  The piece ended and the group moved to another room for another performance, and then another.  As I stood listening, I took advantage of the idle time to sketch a sculpture of Aphrodite as a virtuoso performed Esplorazione del Bianco on cello. The sounds were whispers. I was happier than I’ve been for a very long time.  Life is happening all around.

Venice Sketchbook

 

Sketching is becoming an increasingly important component of my life as I explore the nuances of the Venetian landscape.  I’ve been taking fewer photographs and instead trying to internalize my surroundings in a way that can only be accomplished by measuring the proportions of spaces, the repetitions of form, and the contrasts between solid and void.  The camera is a tool to remember a place; the sketch process is one that truly helps the landscape designer to know the space.  A photograph is accomplished in an instant while even the quickest drawing requires a mindful pause and an emotional reaction to one’s surroundings.  For that time that the pencil scratches the surface of the page, my mind is focused and completely present.

 

The book I’ve been drawing in was given to me by my brother.  It is huge and makes my fingers numb as I steady it in the air standing before whatever space I’m sketching.  I cradle it in my left arm and clench it in my hand and fumble it against the wind that whips the pages.  The meandering crowds slam into my book as it projects out from my body almost 20 inches. I use a 4B or a 6B mostly or sometimes a fine tip pen.  I leave pencil shavings like bread crumbs hoping that someday I will find my way back to the campi and bridges that have become such an integral part of my daily habitations.

During my instructor’s recent review of my sketchbook, he observed that I’m becoming fairly well versed in representing the outlines of things.  He encouraged me to try to see the contrasts of light as it strikes the various surfaces in a space, to use the negative space that occurs between objects to make the void, and to capture the relative density of these places I am drawn to.  To do this, I should attempt to fill-in the shapes without outlining them.  The goal would be to see the gradation of shadow and to witness the subtleties of light as it changes moment by moment across a surface or a space.  Thus, the sketch would have increased dynamism and be more realistic as the darkness and lightness work together and exhibit the surroundings.

 

A day later, I saw hundreds of sketches by the excellent Venetian artist called Canaletto at the Palazzo Grimini.  While he used a sort of camera obscura to make his elaborate and highly rendered masterpieces of Venice’s people and architecture of the 18^th century, his field studies of the city were no more than a few lines of lead on yellowed paper tracing the outlines and basic shapes of buildings, canals, and masses of people.  While I do hope to begin to learn how to make spaces on paper without creating their outlines first, there is something so elegant in Canaletto’s sketch work that inspires me to continue to draw that way too.  Like the earliest cave paintings, pictographs, and petroglyphs used around the world to tell a story, quick outlines of the surroundings are illustrative, easily understood, and splendidly spontaneous.

On the impermanence of such human constructs as architecture and memory: A photo essay describing the slow dismantling of the robust Venice Arsenale into the calm, green sea.

Sense Impressions

Quiet, loud, quiet.  Venice is a landscape of shifting personalities.  Venice is schizophrenic.  Venice is desire lines.  At once teeming with hoards of people (gaudy clothes, crowding into small spaces, cameras pointed into every orifice) and stunningly desolate (dark, stinking, frightening, lonely), Venice does not know what it wants to be.  As I get to know Venice, I am less sure of its existence.  Is this place some sort of dream?  A Disneyfied theme park or the most authentic and individualized place in the entire world?

I am astounded at the dualities of Venice.  In an instant I can transfer from a claustrophobic space—my body crammed against all the other bodies—to the longest, narrowest, most abandoned alleyway leading into some beautiful unknown.  Often, these spaces are one and the same changing as crowds ebb and flow. From the dry expanse of chiseled stone to an aqueous path running cleanly through the entire place.  Venice provides space for everything you could ever want.

Water is the lifeblood of Venice.  Water is Venice.  Reflecting the light of the world, this place has attracted artists through the ages who wish to touch the bristles of a brush to the subtle reflections of life.  Light bounces off the surface of the canals and the lagoon and leaves magical traces in your eyes, on your flesh.  Light and water are the same here, indivisible.  I don’t care to know where one stops and the other begins.  My surroundings are mirrored in eternal reflections.  The sky is below me, tall buildings spread out on flat planes, clouds and stars drift past in the wake of a gondola as it whispers through the arterials of Venice.  Never harsh, the light here calms the soul of even the weariest traveler.  I seek it out and try to escape it and I fall in love with it when it disappears.  It comes back to me and kisses me with a warm embrace.  Walking through the city (I don’t feel right calling Venice a city), my eyes try to keep pace with the flickering light.  The steep buildings canted over the canals as the land subsides into the muck, interupting the sky at unnatural, unnerving angles.  Fractals of sunlight on the surface of the water remind you that the heavens are still somewhere above, somewhere beyond these material constructions.

 

Green.  Venice has so little space given to vegetation.  A potted rosemary plant high on a windowsill stories above me.  The purple and white spring flowers and the fresh buds emerging today where yesterday they were not.  Finding few public green spaces, I see houseplants overgrowing someone’s balcony, Mediterranean leaves peeking out of some walled courtyard, or feral ecologies of sea lichens adhered to the facades of ancient buildings.  Grey concrete painted orange, yellow, and pink to warm the Venetians as the cool blue-green lagoon splashes at the shore.  Green is all around.

The canals of Venice are an indescribable green.  Sometimes there is more blue in that green than yellow.  Sometimes it is emerald.  Sometimes jade.  Sometimes turquoise.  Sometimes chartreuse touched with olive and embellished with mint.  Phthalocyanine green, rifle green, teal, harlequin, mantis, and midnight green. There is little need for trees or grass or flowers because these drifting canals are so alive.  The water flows like a leaf fluttering in the wind and it moistens the eye abraded by the harsh sharpness of architecture.  The green is consistent wherever one goes in Venice but its nature shifts with each passing moment as the light plays itself out all around.

Sensuality.  Venice leaves a taste in your mouth that is not always delightful.  Smells drift from restaurants and mingle with those from the canal.  Sounds echo off the quiet.  A shout in a campo bounces through the labyrinth of calli.  Voices are melodies, footfalls are rhythms; breezes through the spaces between places are the whitenoise hiss between songs.  A glass bottle shatters at two in the morning on the Rialto Bridge and the sound reverberates forever.

First Days in Venice

I am swaying back and forth.  I still don’t have my sea legs.  Or is it my land legs?  The lagoon is rolling, green, turning over.  I cross via vaporetto from my apartment in San Zaccharia to our studio in the Giudecca.  A five minute boat ride and the robust block of the church at Redentore looms over me as the terra firma lifts and falls much like the water surrounding me.

I’ve been to Venezia before.  Three years ago, after 27 months in West Africa, I landed in Italy with a woman I was in love with.  Now I am here again, this time alone.  Transitions.  But isn’t this the city of love?  I’m here as a scholar of placemaking, of the cultural landscape.  If architecture is frozen music, Venice must be frozen love.  Romantic, candle-lit tables tucked away into some sottoportego. Couples embracing on moonlit bridges locked forever in dreamy kisses.  Velvet-padded gondolas, accordion solos, the echoes of some singing man off the canyon walls of a narrow canal.

Nobody seems sure: Either the water is rising or the ground is sinking. No matter what the reality, it elicits a sort of prolonged panic.  Somehow, I need to understand this.  As students of landscape architecture, we are encouraged to be ecologists, geometricians, geologists, and historians.  The depth of our studies though pushes us as sculptors to a block of marble, as painters to a blank canvas, as poets to unrequited love.

Some of what I learned as a Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia inspired me to pursue my studies in landscape architecture.  This has, somehow, brought me back here.  The first part of this trip spent in Holland taught me about organized spatial design and wide-open spaces extending to some man-made horizon.  If the Netherlands is a country created by obsessively pumping water out to the ocean, Venice is a city organically gathered around the idea of embracing the sea.  I have to admit; I think I prefer the latter.

Beyond my studies of such communities of people learning to live in soggy places, the archaeologist in me is fascinated by such a place frozen in time.  Because of its World Heritage status, I didn’t have to dig this city from the earth.  Still, here it is exactly as it was.  And me.  Exactly as I was?  Venice is not my home.  Still, somehow I feel more at ease here than I have for quite some time.  As Emerson once wrote, “Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of fact.”

 

Transitions

I am writing now from Venice, an amazing little city in Italy.  Perhaps you’ve heard of it.  Before I go on, I would like to share some pictures of the Netherlands where I spent the past four weeks.  It is really a terrific place.  Go, should you ever have the chance.

I learned a lot while living in the Netherlands.  Beyond anything else, this country will teach you about design.  No detail is left to chance.  Sightlines and viewsheds are organized to bring the mind’s eye to the horizon, to the lonesome existential place that we each have in this world.  Geometries are manifesting everywhere.  Something from nothing, terra firma from an aqueous bath.   Everywhere you look, something transports you back into the Old World.  Massive windmills, cobblestone streets, urban wharfs in sunken canals.  Beyond that though, it is all so fresh.  I spent amazing moments with the very people who designed it, or at least some of it.  As a place, the Netherlands is always still forming.  Land is sinking, seas are rising, rivers are widening.  Ecologies are being created, histories are being written, and lessons are being learned.  It is all part of some sort of master plan.

As a student, I have been given incredible answers from indisputable teachers.  I come from a place of organic development and I am only beginning to learn to see the human touch in my surroundings.  The United States is remarkably different from Holland.  I am drastically different from the person I was before I came here.  I think that the biggest lesson I learned while making my home in the Netherlands is that transformation is everything.  Change is all around, it is everything.  Nothing is; everything is becoming.  My mentor in Holland told me once “Change is the very essence of our practice.”

In Holland, the sky and the sea are the same.  A thin line of stoic, manicured trees someplace there in the distance makes you think that they are separate.  The truth is though, that which we create is all that comes between these two.

As I progress along this journey from a country a few hundred years old to a city dating back more than a thousand, I am enthralled by this process of discovery and change.  Venice is, by all accounts, “Che bella questa citta!” But it wouldn’t be any sort of destination without the journey one makes to get there.

Marker Wadden Charette: On The Horizon

One of our primary functions here, besides touring the landschap of the Netherlands is to work through a few quick design projects, or charettes.  Generally, a design charette involves being given a particular problem and then coming together in small groups to quickly generate ideas.  The point isn’t to fully flesh-out all the details of the solution but to react quickly with a few peers to see what the brainstorming session might stir up. Last week, the Cities on Water class participated in such a charette.

I wrote recently about my trip across the Houtribdijk in Flevoland east of Amsterdam. This dike was initially constructed in 1976 with the intention of draining part of the Zuiderzee for an agricultural polder called the Markerwaard but due to shifting financial considerations and societal pressures about ecological impacts, that empoldering has been indefinitely postponed.  The lake that now exists where that polder would be is the 70,000 hectare Markermeer, one of the largest freshwater lakes in Europe.

Unfortunately, this lake is evolving into an ecological wasteland.  The Markermeer has become a turbid, cloudy, nearly lifeless body of water because its clay bottom is constantly being churned by waves with nowhere for the accompanying silt to drain.  This silt is described as a thick layer of yogurt that strangles the aquatic vegetation and stifles fish and microorganisms.

Recently, the Dutch Nature Preservation Society Natuurmonumenten was awarded 15million Euros to realize the Marker Wadden project in the north part of the Markermeer.  The project involves digging trenches to trap the silt, constructing a large break water to calm the waves, and the subsequent fabrication of a dredge island from the silt dredged from the trenches.

Our charette problem asked us to help tease out some designs that might help make such an undertaking a reality.  Working in groups of three, we spent three nights in nearby Lelystad where we would have constant contact with the Markermeer and its surrounding context.  Each day we conducted bike tours of the shore to try to understand the enormous scale of this lake and met with a local ecologist who described the current and predicted conditions of the lake.  We also were joined by our favorite local landscape architect Jan Wouter Bruggenkamp and the director of Natuurmonumenten Roel Posthoorn.

Our design for Marker Wadden, On the Horizon, is one that promotes the water of the Markermeer while utilizing techniques to generate new ecologies and spaces for people and wildlife.  Recognizing the importance of the infinite sea that is the Markermeer, we accentuate the space by situating the islands just at the edge of sight from Lelystad.  Acknowledging the cultural history of the Netherlands was a guiding factor of our analysis and design.  By drawing from the form geometry of the agricultural lands of Holland, we proposed to initially construct our islands in a rectangle of precisely organized grid points.  Just as the Markerwaard was to be a polder of farms but is now becoming a place given to the promotion of wilderness, the islands we have designed will, over time, transition to more organically shaped spaces.  Our flexible design is one that anticipates change and evolves over time.

The technology used in the formation of our islands draws on the techniques traditionally used in Dutch poldering but also brings new ways of land formation to Holland.  The initial sequence will include the construction of a riff to slow down the wave activity near the construction site and a trench will be dug near the riff for the settling of silts.  Our riff includes the generation of energy from the waves by including oscillating wave cylinders in the infrastructure.  Following the construction of the riff, the fabrication of the islands will begin.  By installing a 5 meter grid of vertical poles embedded in the substrate 2 meters and emerging from the surface of the water 1 meter, we will begin the island formation.  According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, 2-20 ha is the optimal size range of dredge islands for stability and avian habitat.  A silt fence will be drawn around the basic island shapes anchored to the poles.  Mechanical pumping will be used to deliver the silt into the cavity.  As the cavities are filled, willow mats will be added to provide some stabilization for the silt.  Over time, the islands will grow in height until they emerge on the surface of the Markermeer.

These islands will continuously transform due to fluctuating water levels and tidal activity.  Plants of the various Dutch ecotones will be seeded or staked to provide a range of habitats for birds.  The islands will eventually represent a gradation from mud flat to woodland.  As these plants take hold, they will continue to stabilize the silt and become attractive, varied landscapes.  Eventually, these islands will be robust enough to support occasional human visits for bird watching, hiking, and canoeing.

One of the strengths of our design is the flexibility to experiment with land formation.  As the silt has been described as having the consistency of yogurt, construction will be a challenge.  Because we are actually constructing many smaller islands rather than one large one, our design provides room to adapt to unexpected difficulties that might arise.  Another strength is our engagement with the water in our design.  The overall dimensions of the island will be 1000 hectares but rather than being a single body, the island will be comprised of spaces for water as well as land.  Among the islands, the waters of the Markermeer will be like small rivers and tidal pools.  Also, because of the configuration of our riff to the islands, there is a large body of water between.  This water too would have another character apart from that of the larger Markermeer.  While the lake water exhibits strong waves, the space between the riff and the islands would be calm enough for small boats.

The Markermeer is, as we learned, at its presently degraded state because it is cut off from the larger system of exchange that is necessary for a healthy ecosystem.  Much like the adjacent Oostvaardersplassen, cutting a piece of nature out of its larger context results in a dysfunctional and dismal place.  The charette gradually took on a growing complexity.  For the first time since coming here, we were designing and redesigning our ideas.  The more we learned, the more difficult it became to solve the problem.  The more our plan evolved, the more we were forced to return to the original renderings.

Eventually, almost in a couple of hours, my group had a much better understanding of the complexities of our surroundings.  Our design grew from an abstraction to some sort of a solution.  We had sketches, renderings, and designs.  We had a good understanding of what we were proposing.

As a design project, the challenges were fantastic.  I enjoyed the process of moving through the design, of seeing something evolve from a few circles on a piece of paper to an articulated design with precise phases and realistic spaces.  Forcing us to move quickly through the process released an energy that came through in the designs and in the presentations.  Unlike many design projects where we have had several weeks to manufacture a space, The Marker Wadden charette challenged us to be efficient and knowledgeable. As a design team, we learned to believe in our design.

Sketches from Second Week in Netherlands

My sketching is getting faster, more articulate.  I’m concentrating on studying spaces rather than individual things.  Trying to capture the momentum, the volume, the atmosphere, the alignments, the proportions, the scale.  Most of the field sketches shown here have taken less than 30 minutes.  Waiting for trains, sitting still for a few moments, taking notes during lectures.

The last one, Plaza over the old canal, took about two hours on a congested Saturday morning.  I have been to this spot almost daily since coming to Utrecht and am fascinated by the space.  At night it is lit with a spot light directly into the heart of the plaza while the purple lights from Winkle van Sinkle pull you through to the other side.  In the the mornings, a few commuters pass through on their way to the Hoog Catherijne train station.  The afternoons see so many people lingering for a look across the canal or leisurely passing in adoration of this historic space.  As I drew here, hundreds of people slowly wandered through and stopped for a smoke or to snack or to watch people pass by.  Musicians set up, performed, and then moved on.  People looked over my shoulder.  Once, when I dropped my bag of pencils with a loud noise, a woman sitting on the steps below me said something in Dutch.  I told her I didn’t understand and she quickly switched to English and said “That bag must be heavy!”  I laughed as she told me that in Holland any time someone drops something, its common to comment that it must weigh a lot.  As I continued to sketch, the weather changed from a sunny morning to a cool, dreary afternoon but it didn’t change the usage of the space at all.  A few people were soliciting passers-by for a charity to protect the environment.  One of them sat next to me for a while and asked, once we switched our conversation to English, why I chose this spot.  I mentioned that I was fascinated that in such a flat country there was so much topography in this spot.  The high Dom Tower in the distance, the Old Canal far below.  The pedestrians on one side of the plaza are at least five meters lower than those on the other but barely notice as they climb up above the water below. This plaza is actually a bridge.  The Old Canal passes under this spot and is completely exposed on either side.  As I said this, the man looked around and smiled.  He told me that he grew up a short distance away and that he comes here all the time but had never noticed that he was actually standing on a bridge.