IMPROVISED ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM INDUSTRIAL SQUATS
& COLLECTIVES
DAVID
CARR-SMITH
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This web-book presents a visual-conceptual-experiential documentation of four occupied industrial sites in central Amsterdam: Grain Silo, Tetterode, De Loods, Edelweis - researched and recorded from 1990.
Inside Amsterdam’s industrial squats and collectives are some of the largest and most complex ‘peoples design initiatives’ in urban Europe. These abandoned factories and dockland buildings host an astonishingly rich variety of self-invented domestic and 'live-work' architecture. Apartments, workshops and even whole houses are built inside the vast and simple or labyrinthine spaces, their familiar domestic provisions bizarrely confronting the redundant factory structures. Improvised from the detritus of their sites and the surrounding city, they develop from simple plastic-screened encampments to elaborate built dwellings. Though pragmatism is imposed by the exigencies of their sites, constructional means, and the necessities of living in them, they are inevitably expressive of their makers and often espouse daring structural solutions. Over time some evolve into stylish ‘city apartments’ or complex family homes.
The surprising opportunities and demands of the industrial sites challenge domestic conceptions and force their users to invent expedients unrestricted by mass-taste, ready-made products, or design-training. The results demonstrate a mode of design rare in our culture: a kind of accretive forming of an individual’s needs on all levels from the shape of their home-enclosure to the casual positioning of their coffee cup. In consequence such apartments display an extraordinary and characteristic beauty - a degree of integration and visual interrelation, a formal and functional unity of structure and use, a completeness and complexity of conception, necessarily beyond the scope of those designed for clients.
They reveal the variety of a modern urban-vernacular based on recycling of rich-city refuse, improvisational intelligence, and individualistic self-interest enabled and sustained by collective cooperation.
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© DAVID CARR-SMITH 2005 : all images & text are copyrighted - please accredit text quotes - image repro must be negotiated via dave@artinst.entadsl.com
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LINKS :
Angela Wright - Art Installations : www.angelawright.co.uk
David
Carr-Smith - current lectures : www.davidcarrsmith.co.uk