SILO- GROUND-FLOOR PLAN (WITH APT NAMES)  (original-dr 1896 / added-info 1995)

SILO QUAY (FROM THE KROEG N-END)

(pic 6-94 / to S)

From the semi-public Kroeg's portion of the Quay.  

The start of the private Quay begins where the (usually) private entry into the N-Tower boiler-room (and through that to the N-Tower itself) is shaded by a big tarpaulin hoisted to the trunk of a suction derreck (remains from the '5-Year' party).

SILO QUAY (FROM CHAMBER 4(N))

(pic c 9-94 / to S)

SILO QUAY (FROM CHAMBER 2(N))

(pic 9-94 / to NNW)

From beside Bart's quay door

SILO QUAY (FROM CHAMBER 1(S))

(pic 6-94 / to S)

From the Hall exit door 

SILO QUAY (FROM CHAMBER 4(S))

(pic 9-94 / to NW)

The entry to the Hall is just beyond the sign and the line of washing. the bay window of Froujke and Diderik's Central-Stair home marks the Silo's centre.

SILO QUAY (FROM NEW-SILO QUAY)

(pic 8-93 / to NNW)

At its south end the Quay has been raised to accomodate the basement level of the New-Silo - from  this vantage, at the north-east corner of the New-Silo, we can survey the whole length of the old Silo's Quay to its north end at the Kroeg.

SILO - DIJK 'FRONT-DOOR': WESTERDOKSDIJK 51 

(pic 8-95 / to NE)

SILO - DIJK 'FRONT-DOOR' 

(pic 9-94 / to EEN)

  in process

HALL - S-GALLERY TO QUAY DOOR FROM THE DIJK ENTRY

(pic 9-94 / to EEN)  

The Silo's main entry issues directly into its central circulation space and route junction: the Hall. At the rear of its south gallery can be seen the open quay-door (outside a moored boat blocks a view of the IJ) - the narrowness of this huge building is apparant.

QUAY DOOR - EXTERIOR

(pic 9-93 / to WWN) 

The Hall's exit to the Silo's private quay has gathered shared assets: washing-lines; at left, Fred's hopper-seat; a door-surmounting ?shovel-shield; the door-surrounding shower-hydraulics (Fred's invention: a black inner-tube dispensing sun-warmed water is filled by......). 

HALL - S-GALLERY E-END: QUAY DOOR VIEW OF HET IJ RAIN-STORM 

(pic 9-94/ to EEN) 

The pole in the centre is to assist ones descent of vertical steps to the quay-path

HALL - S-GALLERY E-END: QUAY DOOR

(pic 9-94 / to EEN) 

A strangely small door set in the centre of a heavy wooden frame opens to the Quay. A small opening in the Hall's massive wall that presents at night a huge emptiness of black glinting water.

HALL - S-GALLERY E-END: AN ENSEMBLE OF 'LETTERS' THAT INCLUDES A VISITOR (NIGHT) 

(pic 9-94 / to NE)   

In the night I was about to photograph the  fortuitous 'arrangement' of 3 'letters' on the SE chamber's N wall, when - from the pitch dark, narrow and slippery quay - a superbly dressed stranger entered, saw the camera, and posed: Intention?...unconscious mimicry?...chance?: a real letter ‘W’ grouped with a lifebelt ‘O’, a baby-buggy handle ‘C’, and of all things a spontaneously ‘letter-posing’ visitor!  

HALL - S-GALLERY E-END: SWITCH-BOX WITH BENT FORK 

(pic 9-94 / to NNE)

Some objects are obviously immediate moments of wit: apt yet ironically vicarious junctions of mental with physical meanings and things.

The Quay conveyor's switch-box is a 'prisoner' staring through the 'bars' of a bent fork.

HALL - S-GALLERY E-END: WASH-MACHINE AREA: WALL 'MOTIF'

(pic 9-94 / to S) 

Around the washing-machine is an object-ensemble that seems to display an 'ironic-monumentality', though it may be merely the product of convenient placing.

HALL - S-GALLERY MESSAGE RACKS

(pic 6-94 / to NW)     

HALL - S-GALLERY: 'BIRD-TABLE' MESSAGE RACK 'HEAD' WITH 'SKULL-FACE'

(pic 9-94 / to WWN)

Was the location of this head-like letter-rack chosen to include the nail-hole ‘skull-eyes’ peering through it from the wall?!  

Its fluffy rug 'hat' is for a cat to lie on [Milou].

HALL FROM E-CENTER - BIKE AVENUE (NIGHT) 

(pic 6-94 / to WWN)

Standing with my back to the doorway of the Central-Stair facing the triangle of space next to Bart's workshop wall. At night bikes in-use join those abandoned in a path-narrowing accumulation. 

HALL FROM CENTER TOWARDS N GANG  

(pic 8-93 / to WWN)

The steel-girt Hall is encumbered overhead with conveyor machinery, its floor with bikes, and its space with Bart's workshop, whose wall [pic: rt] bites out a quadrent of its square central space. 

HALL - W GALLERY INTO THE N GANG 

(pic 9-94 / to N)

Through the Silo's 'front door' into the Hall - turn left to see the floor of the Hall sloping downhill into the semi-sunken North Gang - a band-conveyor path; now a 'street' between apt-facades and their facing store-cells.  

HALL: W-GALLERY ENTRY INTO N GANG 

(pic 9-94 / toNNW)

At its N end the Hall's west gallery merges into the North Gang; to our right is Bart's workshop wall. Invoked by their cleaness, isolation and careful placing the stacked boards weirdly resembled an art object (especially a Juan Gris).  

N GANG 3 - 

(pic 11-97 / to SSE)

Exquisite detritus - the Silo is almost empty - almost everything of use in other sites has been removed. In the distance is the Hall, at my feet a still-life of metal scraps. The globe is presumably a whim or even transient storage - one of the last of a type of evocation once common in the Silo.

N GANG 4 - 

(pic 6-94 / to SSE)

Under Connie's apt which she extended as a mezzanine over the Gang and her little jewellrey workshop (windowed cell on right). 

N GANG 4 - 

(pic 11-97 / to NNW)

Under Connie's apt mezzanine with her little Gang jewellrey workshop on left - view to north. The Silo near the end of its last year and already has an air of disuse.

N GANG 5 - APT FACADES 5, 4

(pic 8-95 / to N)

We are standing between Duro's apt [left] and his store, converted into Simona's temporary living-space [right], looking south under Connie's glazed mezzanine extension over the Gang to the west side.

N GANG 6 - WORKSHOP

(pic 6-94 / to E)

Passing the west-end of chamber 6 workshop. A typical Gang workshop - occupying the whole of a chamber and open to the Gang. 

N GANG WALL-END 7/8 - FANTASY-OBJECT 

(pic 9-94 / to WWS)

On the wall-end between cells 7 and 8 was hung a drift-wood fantasy-adjusted object. (Originally collected/adjusted by Bastian Anthea - maybe used in performance.)

N GANG 8 - APT FACADES 9,10,11

(pic 9-94 / to N)

Seen from the entry of store-cell 8 - the beautiful economy simplicity and variety of Arend's chamber 9 timber-plank wall sealing the W-end of his 2nd chamber (a music studio). Next (10) is his 3rd chamber facade; then (11) Huub's apt facade. 

N GANG 9 - VIEW TO S END

(pic 8-95 / to SSE)

View south from Arend's timber wall, past the open window of his Bakery, under the skip-windowed face of Connie's mezzanine, and up the incline to the Hall.

N GANG 11 - VIEW TO S END

(pic 9-94 / to SSE)

The Gang is one of 2 band- conveyor paths that ran the length of each of the Ground-Floor wings; cutting through the massive walls that support the 120 overhead silos whose discharge pipes protrude from the ceiling (once aimed at the conveyor through steerable wooden chutes). On the E side the facades of apartments now seal-off the spaces between these walls; on the W side the small cells are workshops and stores.

N GANG 12  - VIEW TO S END

(pic 9-94 / to S)

N GANG 11 - NORTH-END APT'S W WALL 

(pic 9-94 / to SE)

Near the Gang's north end its last apt (Huub's) shows its west Gang-facade.

N GANG 12 - CORNER: NORTH-END APT'S WALLS

(pic 9-94 / to EES)

At the Gang's N end the last apt shows both its walls.

N GANG 12 - NORTH-END APT'S N WALL

(pic 6-94 / to E)

This blocked opening in the last apt's N wall was once the 2nd conveyor-path through the length of the Ground-Floor. Faced with plastic ?fertiliser bags, in the gloom of a failing tube it presents a paint-like surface peculiarly at odds with the masonry and metal context - like a huge palette-knife painting in a gallery. 

N GANG 12 - 

(pic 9-94 / to EEN)

At the Gang's N end. This last chamber was never cleared or claimed for use. A small sliding steel door gives access to the N-Tower, Kroeg, and quay. 

NO PIC

N GANG CELL 2

(NO PIC) 
A narrow way winds between tall stored objects into the gloom beneath a high dirty window.

N GANG CELL 3

(pic 6-94 / to WWN)
This cell, squeezed under an extended living-space, is like a little box-theatre lit in bright orange by a single lamp, its fronting fence of bolted rails corralling a frantically active hoard of hurled-in shapes of wood. 

N GANG CELL 4

(pic 9-94 / to SW)
Also under an extension of the living-space that owns and faces it 'across the street', is like a small shop, a jewellery maker's studio displaying through a glass facade the intricate patterned order of work and tools and the concentration of the activity of craft - filling this most tunnel-like anddarkest portion of corridor with the reassurance of its beacon of light and human presence (like a sudden corner-shop in a dark slum!). 

N GANG CELL 5

(pic 9-94 / to NW)
Elaborating this sense of habitation, an exquisite little bed/sitting-room based on a wooden platform fills the upper half of cell five, the store-cell of its facing apt - built by a guest in a "couple of days" from stored scrap. Entered up a thin silo// steel ladder and through a door set into its glazed and bay-fronted facade; across its red floor a deep-embrasured window provides an exit to the cobbled dijk outside - its afternoon light filling the small room whose mirror-spangled ceiling projects glints into the dark trough of the inner gallery two metres below.  

N GANG CELL 6

(pic 6-94 / to WWS)
The sixth cell (functionally continuous with the metal workshop facing it) displays a 'Metaphysical still-life' of fragments of commonly useful (mainly transport) machines.

N GANG CELL 7 - FROM CHAMBER 7 WORKSHOP

(pic 6-94 / to W)
The seventh, a sort of shrine-like tableau displays a single object symetrically framed in the dark high cell between its white flanking piers: a huge domed pile of randomly angled pale wooden slats dappled in red (the spoil of some demolition), avaraged into smoothness like a giant pine-needle ant-heap.  

NO PIC

N GANG CELL 8

(NO PIC - txt 8-95)
An open fronted cavity, grimey and dully lit - with 'gate-posts' of piled car tyres and a big slippery bank of car doors and panels.

N GANG CELL 9

(pic 6-94 / to WWS)
The ninth is weird: a bright room glimpsed through a crack in its dark facade of huge scavanged film-set 'castle doors' appliqued under their arched top with the crude shapes of a metal '3rd-Reich Eagle' forming the illusion of a hugh face with flat eyes and bulging nostrils - a silver tube sprouting behind it like a hair.

N GANG CELL 10

(pic 6-94 / to WWS)
The down-to-earth cell ten, the "Fietsen hok" ("bike rubbish store") is a severe little workshop, with dirty-window-lit dismembered bike-bodies framed in the opening of a domestic door.
This practical cell seperates cell 9's bizarre 'face-facade' from another mentally provocative ensemble in cell 10 - this time a funny not a sinister illusion (in so far as inherently fearful - at least in our culture - projections of the psyche can be funny!):

N GANG CELL 11

(pic 6-94 / to W)
Across the width of the shallow eleventh cell is a little steel house - the place where electricity enters from outside; containing junctions, fuzes, and meter - a practical metal shed ludricously flaunting a silly windowed face on its big box head; made tipsy by its simple electric brain, punched in one swollen eye by a leaning tube like a drunk bumped into a lamp-post; its 'jaunty-hat' roof sprinkled with powdered corn and beetles leaking from a silo-pipe above it. 

A ludricous finale to the long parade of cells.