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Dirty Minimalism: This un-architectural, un-urbanistic city
A challenging paper on the contemporary relationship between architecture and planning. I hope to read your views.
Dirty Minimalism
The Liberation of Unimportance in Recent Dutch Architecture
Dirty Minimalism
The Liberation of Unimportance in Recent Dutch Architecture
by Wouter Vanstiphout
We Dutch architects have always expected a lot from the reality that surrounds us.
During our most ethnographic episodes, as we described in breathless words obscure parts of our geography, weren't we always looking for seeds of imminent revolution? We looked at the most banal expressions of lower- or middle-class leisure culture and turned these into arguments for megalomaniacal upheavals of the landscape. One person flying a kite in the port of Rotterdam was to us the beginning of a mega-leisure-delta-supercity combining ecology, heavy infrastructure, and permanent vacations. (....)And our ideasour brilliant ideas, our lovely, beautiful, unique ideascould be realized, if only we could get the ministers to listen to us, just to us. And listen they did, to every damn one of us.
(....)
After the first call for ideas, forty or fifty projects were entered, ranging from a small neighborhood restaurant to a huge park for all the leisure activities of one of Rotterdam's isolated satellite towns. Some were entered by local inhabitants, others by shopkeepers or artists and curators. The philosophy behind this project is unequivocal: A.) to replace top-down urbanistic and cultural planning with a system provoking and rewarding bottom-up entrepreneurship; B.) to change the cultural and economic make-up of the city not through blanket master-planning, but through an acupunctural infusion of highly specific projects with supposedly huge spin-off effects.
The Groeibriljanten is an ostentatious symbol of the neo-liberal managerial populism of Pim Fortuijn. It works as a boot camp for the city's cultural administrators and civil servants. Instead of looking at Rotterdam from an international point of view, as a subject for constant change and architectural innovation, they are forced to lower themselves to the level of its inhabitants and work up from there.
(....)
This un-architectural, un-urbanistic city can become the stage for the fierce confrontation of interests and ideas.
(....)
continue reading: Harvard Design Magazine, http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/current/24_Vanstiphout.html
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