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BOOK: DAVID CARR-SMITH - IMPROVISED ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM INDUSTRIAL SQUATS & COLLECTIVES
"GRAIN-SILO"
SQUAT 1989 to 1998
ATTICS - p1(of 4)
. the
THREE ATTICS
ATTICS - p1: INTRO / "MUSEUM" & "PYRAMID" . INTRODUCTION There
are three Attics. The central attic - the
final destination of the Central-Stair - is the so-called
"Museum", from this huge cavity (its centre portion 4.8m high) the shallower Attics of the Silo's wings spread
south and north. The "Museum"
is completely non-domestic, used for casual storage (some perhaps
related to the Attics' hoist located at its SW corner). It is capped by the "Pyramid",
its huge loft which, apart from its use as a dump-store,
was in a sporadic process of conversion
into some sort of domestic//workshop use.
<
SILO - INTRO <
< SILO -
GROUND-FLOOR <
<
SILO - CENTRAL STAIR <
SILO - ATTICS
>
SILO - DRYING TOWERS >
> SILO - "CORNER TOWER" >
> THE PUBLIC SILO & THE KROEG >
>
NEW-SILO - PUBLIC & PRIVATE >
> ATTICS
- p2: SOUTH & NORTH ATTICS INTRO / SOUTH ATTIC INTRO & APTS >
> ATTICS
- p3: SOUTH ATTIC APTS - cont >
> ATTICS
- p4: NORTH ATTIC INTRO & APTS >
In contrast to the Museum, the South and North Attics are the Silo's most completely domesticated domains.
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ATTICS - EAST-FACADE (paste-up: x3 pic-extracts 9-94 / to W) The access gallery runs along this side; only at the ends do apts span the building's width. |
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ATTICS - WEST-FACADE (pic-extract 6-94 / to EEN) The dijk facade. All the Attic apts face out on this side, consequently the windows are more individual than those of the east-side access gallery.
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ATTICS & APTS - PLAN (drawing 1995 / info as at 1995) The Attics plan is superimposed on Ground-Floor plan. |
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the
CENTRAL ATTIC: the "MUSEUM"
[ written c. 1994]
Up the last twisted 'gnome-castle' stair, one climbs into the great central wooden attic like a swimmer surfacing astonished in a forest - surrounded by steel trees, flaking cliffs of walls, and standing pipes like giant rigid flowers, their heads bent to suck the gloom.
A wooden causeway spans across its centre, exiting each side via rolling steel doors into the long shallow attics: charging-floors of the silos, once served by conveyors emerging from this great hollow where the remains of motivation: giant rollers and their motors sleep.
This huge cavity - filled with a dreaming dusty stillness passed by sunbeams; which at night in the dimness of a single grimy tube slips into the weird, alive with lurking cats and the past potentials of machines lost to use - is aptly known as the "Museum".
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MUSEUM: STEPS UP TO CAUSEWAY AT ITS S-END (pic 9-94 / to W) Near the Central-Stair entry are steps up to the Museum's 1.8m high central causeway (which cuts across the picture's centre). We are near the entry of the Central-Stair's last flight - up from the strange L4 'vestibule'. |
MUSEUM: ON THE CAUSEWAY JUST N OF CENTRE (pic 6-94 / to SSW) |
MUSEUM: W SIDE FROM CAUSEWAY JUST N OF CENTRE (pic 8-93 / to SW) In the far corner are steps down to the hoist-floor, |
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MUSEUM: W SIDE FROM CAUSEWAY CENTRE - BAND-CONVEYOR DRIVERS (pic 9-94 / to W) |
MUSEUM: IN SW CORNER OF THE W SIDE (pic 8-95 / to W) |
MUSEUM: SW CORNER SUB-LEVEL HOIST CHAMBER (pic 9-94 / to SW) The electric-hoist room, opening above the dijk. Strangely, it's situated #m below the floor-level of the "Museum", accessed by steps. |
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MUSEUM: E SIDE - VIEW TO CAUSEWAY CENTRE - DISTRIBUTOR & CONVEYOR MOTORS (NIGHT) (pic 6-94 / to WWS) |
MUSEUM: E SIDE - CENTRE: DISTRIBUTOR & CONVEYOR DRIVE WHEELS (NIGHT) (pic 9-94 / to NW) |
MUSEUM: E SIDE - CENTRE: CONVEYOR MOTORS (NIGHT) (pic 9-94 / to NNW) |
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MUSEUM: E SIDE - FROM CENTRE TO NE CORNER CYCLONE CLEANER (NIGHT) (pic 6-94 / to N) The Museum at night, deserted except by cats and full of gloom, is the Silo's most reliably phantasmagorically evocative place. Surrounded by practical objects designed for particular physical actions and outputs, whose forms strongly signal (human) intention, yet whose potential for directed, useful and predictable actions is now blinded, redundant and made incomprehensible (at least to a non-engineer) by breakage; in a 'forest of intentions', albiet truncated and without perceptible goals; it's unsurprising that our psyche's ancient urge to interpret intention and predict change starts to exhibit* a plethora of uncompetant meanings dredged from before ones time of 'recognising every practical thing', from a time of goblins spells and hauntings, and from the store of animated places and things in sub-remembered dreams. *(disconcertingly unasked! - or rather, in this situation, noticably unasked - ie one perceives a seperation of psyche and 'me', and 'my' mind seems autonomous: 'haunted', 'on the loose'!) |
MUSEUM: E SIDE - S OF CENTRE: PATH INTO A STORE AREA (NIGHT) (pic 6-94 / to NE) The big leaning tube 'presents' a tongue-like packet: someone's passing joke?; a 'notice-me' placing (the glove on the fence-post)?
In this psychogenic place where all objects are in a state of
incomprehensible intention, an equally incomprehensible
yet live action can have a sinister presence. In a forest of frozen
intentions what does this real yet apparantly meaningless act intend?: incipient paranoia
suggests that such a 'ritual' intervention into the psychophysical stasis
can perhaps 'break the spell' of the locked presences; that the 'power' of the
objects' frozen intentions can perhaps be woken, or at least
psychically directed.
(De Chirico is supposed to have said something like: "primative men must have
seen auguries everywhere". Also ref his pre-1917 pictures).
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MUSEUM: E SIDE - S OF CENTRE: PATH TO STORE AREA WITH PREENING CAT (NIGHT) (pic 6-94 / to NNE) In the middle of the path is a preening cat. On a hearthrug its posture and movements are familiar, but here, in this incomprehensible yet intention-filled 'forest of symbols', the rare commonplace can easily be experienced from 'within the mind' and the cat seen as a bizarre alien and frighteningly live object - more suitable for a dream!
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MUSEUM: E SIDE - FROM CENTRE TOWARDS S-ATTIC ENTRY & STAIR TO PYRAMID (pic 9-94 / to S) We are looking towards centre-south where the Central-Stair enters the Museum and one can then mount steps onto a little platform extension of the causeway's SE corner [pic: rt-cntr]. Just beyond these steps the South Attic's entry is visible and ascending from this platform to their left is the oddly twisted stair up to the Pyramid's entry-hatch. |
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the "PYRAMID"
Above the Museum's ceiling is another and more secret place: the interior of the "Pyramid" that surmounts the centre of the Old Silo's roof-line. Up a slightly twisted stair from the south end of the causeway, one pushes through a heavy hatch into a space converging upwards, crowded with the crisscrossing of stored timber and beams rising from an undergrowth of discarded objects. High in its peak through tiers of platforms and ladders can be seen the underside of a tiny room.
Facing into this homely little room it's hard to believe that its solid floor stops at an edge and under it is a deep space webbed with beams; that one is supported in the topmost point of a tower of cavities stacked down to the 'Hall of Bikes' a hundred feet below. The strange illusion that its table was recently used: of refreshments and a book - is sustained by a roll of tape, a nail and slab of wood; endorsed by the creased cloth, saucepan, and a lamp. The carpet-covered table laid with a few utensils of pewter and ceramic in the stillness of a panelled room, that paradigm epitomised in 17th C Dutch genre painting, is here reproduced in its most threadbare and ironic form in dusty junk ... raised on its high stage, an old relic - to be discovered only after a precarious climb.
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PYRAMID (L-0): ENTRY FLOOR (pic 9-94 / to E) |
PYRAMID (L-0): ENTRY FLOOR - VIEW UP PAST PLATFORM L-1 TO TOP PLATFORM L-2 (pic 9-94 / to S) |
PYRAMID (L-1): VIEW FROM FIRST PLATFORM DOWN TO WORK-BENCH & SHADED WINDOW ON L-0 (pic 9-94 / to NNW) |
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PYRAMID (L-2): VIEW FROM TOP PLATFORM DOWN TO L-1 & L-0 FLOOR (pic 9-94 / to NW) |
PYRAMID (L-2): SITTING-PLACE & VIEW DOWN TO L-0 FLOOR (pic 9-94 / to W) At the Pyramid's peak is a board floor that isolates a tiny room furnished with a table and chairs which is used by (at least) one Silo visitor for occasional study. |
PYRAMID (L-2): SITTING-PLACE IN PEAK OF PYRAMID (pic
9-94 / to WWS)
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PYRAMID (L-2): SITTING-PLACE (pic 9-94 / to WWS) |
PYRAMID (L-2): SITTING-PLACE (pic 9-94 / to S) |
PYRAMID (L-2): SITTING-PLACE SOUTH WINDOW - VIEW OF NEW SILO TOWER (pic 9-94 / to S) |
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^ ATTICS - p1: INTRO / "MUSEUM" & "PYRAMID"
> ATTICS - p2: SOUTH & NORTH ATTICS INTRO / SOUTH ATTIC INTRO & APTS >
> ATTICS - p3: SOUTH ATTIC APTS >
