© 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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CONTENTS   4 SITES  

SILO

  TETTERODE   DE LOODS   EDELWEIS   APPENDICES   NOTES   SUB-SITES

BOOK:  DAVID CARR-SMITH  -  IMPROVISED ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM INDUSTRIAL SQUATS & COLLECTIVES

"GRAIN-SILO" SQUAT 1989 to 1998

NORTH & SOUTH DRYING-TOWERS  - p3(of 5) :

the NORTH DRYING-TOWER ( the "IRON-TOWER")


< SILO - INTRO <  
< DRYING-TOWERS - p1: N & S TOWERS INTRO / N TOWER & APTS <
 

< DRYING-TOWERS - p2: N TOWER & APTS - cont <
 
   DRYING-TOWERS - p3: N TOWER & APTS - cont 
> DRYING-TOWERS - p4: N TOWER & APTS - cont >
 
> DRYING-TOWERS - p5: S TOWER & APTS >

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CLIMBING THE TOWER ... cont ...   

At the level of Brian’s upper-room (L5) the stair stops its vertical zigzag and turns in a new direction - one resumes the climb close by an open door above the Ij - emphasising how high and airey, how flimsy and precarious the tower is.  The stair enters the next floor directly like a companionway to a deck -  there is no confining  wall, no threshold - the space opens to the full plan of the tower.

N-TOWER (L5) 
(pic 6-94 / to EEN)

Between the curtained corner of Brian's apt and the open escape door the stair changes direction and ascends on the tower's outer face to L6: Brian and Mark's Kitchen.

N-TOWER (L5) 
(pic 9-94 / to NE)

The open escape door offers the space of Het Ij and a dangerous climb down a rotting ladder to the L4 catwalk.

N-TOWER (L5) 
(pic 9-94 / to NNE)

The flight to the Kitchen - its steel treads are wrapped in sound-dulling carpet.

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BRIAN & MARK HORNER KITCHEN: ( APR 199# --- ) (L6)       

[N.B.: Quotes are Brian’s] 

Emerging up into this hovering coloured room is a marvellous joy: to see such invention and resourcefulness allied with a capacity for beauty so unselfconsciously applied.  So unlikely a location and such grandeur for a kitchen!

Though once as full of standing ducts as a cube cut from a forest this place was the most spacious in the tower - there were signs of social and administrative use here (and the only domestic-sized electric sockets).  Brian and Mark cleared and floored this erstwhile grove of pipes, establishing between their apts a kitchen-dining place with bath and WC...intended for the whole Tower - “but depending who’s on lower floors!”.

The lower parts of the of the tower’s delivery-hopper (now a floored room-sized enclosure in Mark’s apt above) dominate the kitchen: two hollow pyramids whose massive valved spouts were cut away by Brian, and their ultimate outlets into the dryer-stack below: two bifurcated square ducts, which inverted now support the table’s wooden top [1].

The kitchen is the final destination of the tower’s deadly (and life-enhancing!) hazard: the hoist-hole that pierces every narrow landing is here an unprotected 21m plunge three steps from a dining table across the squeaky boards - “You get used to it, you know it’s there”. 

Foot-Note:

  1. The L7-L6 delivery-hopper once fed grain into the tower’s twin dryers through its double-pyramidal bottom, via valved nozzles and bifurcated pipes (that now support the Kitchen table). Brian stood wide-spread in each inverted pyramid and burned-off its heavy nozzle between his feet ... (one was accidentally dropped in the Ij, the other after a varied career, capped his apt stove; a third pipe, that by-passed the dryers, is his stove’s upper-chimney).

N-TOWER (L6) PRE-SQUAT
(pic (?) / to W)

The level that would be the kitchen with its pre-squat installations.

View from the entry stair towards the NW corner.

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: STAIR FROM L5 ENTERS L6
(pic 6-94 / to NNE)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: FROM ENTRY STAIR
(pic 9-94 / to W)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: CENTRE TABLE TO NE
(pic 6-94 / to NE)

An astonishing blend of domestic and machine!  The gap between industrial-pragmatism and living-room comfort and chic - between the intrusive hopper, the girdered walls, the riveted steel pillars and the ‘soft-side’ of homes:  carpets, sofa, let alone the ‘italian-restaurant’ pepper-grinder - is bridged by the ‘funny’ use of machine parts: the inverted ducts for table legs, the aesthetic colouring of the industrial.

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: FROM DINNER-TABLE
(pic 6-94 / to NE)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: FROM NW CORNER
(pic 6-94 / to EEN)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: CENTRE TABLE & HOIST-HOLE
(pic 6-94 / to EES)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN - CENTER TABLE & HOIST-HOLE
(pic 9-94 / to SSW)

 

 

 

 

 

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: HOIST-HOLE & COUCH
(pic 6-94 / to EEN)

One of the Kitchen’s most exciting features is just behind the settee where the unprotected 21m deep hole (probably once a cable-driven lift) penetrates six levels. Visible below are Brian’s two ‘house’ floors; through doors facing the light over the water are tiny rusty balconies to a thin escape ladder - the Kitchen is the highest level on which one is inescapably aware of the tower’s flimsy openness and, via this 'archaeologists trench', deduce its volumetric distributions.

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: HOIST-HOLE
(pic 9-94 / to EEN)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: HOIST-HOLE - VIEW DOWN
(pic 6-94 / to EEN)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: CNTR-TABLE TO BATH
(pic 9-94 / to SSW)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: CNTR-TABLE - PART
(pic 9-94 / to NNE)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: CNTR-TABLE
(pic 9-94 / to NE)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: DINING-TABLE
(pic 6-94 / to SSW)

The surface painting is Vielborg's.

 

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: FRIDGE ETC
(pic 9-94 / to NW)

An essay on the relations and difference between manufactured objects (whether crafted by machine or hand) and spontaneous acts of wit intelligence and chance [FOOT-NOTE 1]. A street-found fridge - its hard industrial cuboid opposed by spray-paint wit: its whiteness by black, its coldness by red, its surface softened into a hot space ...whose broken door-hinge has initiated a rich unstylised drama (instead of a consumer re-buying reflex!): a bike inner-tube (ubiquitous Dutch litter - everywhere in the Silo’s grubby corners) twisted into tension holds the hinge’s upright pin in place; serves the over-long power cable as support (strange liaison: an intimate sort of curly dance around the tube’s twists); and nudges a Chinese commercial-crafted teapot. An eventful and spontaneous ‘drama of objects’...acutely ‘present’ because, an act of need and chance, it ‘performs itself’.

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: WC, BATH & STAIR to L7
(pic 6-94 / to SW)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: WC, BATH & STAIR to L7
(pic 9-94 / to NW)

N-TOWER (L6) KITCHEN: CEILING & STAIR TO L7 'FRONT-DOOR'
(pic 9-94 / to SSE)

Pic Foot-Note :

  1. My favourite example of an 'intentional-design' equivalent is in Corbusier’s Villa La Roche (Sq. du Docteur Blanche, Paris XVIe), 1923:  Above the start of the wall-ramp in Dr. Roche’s art-gallery is a naked light bulb in a mass-manufactured brass fitting supported by a common steel tube #m out from flat wall. The starkly different character of these four ordinary objects, their harsh undisguised functioning and necessity of relating, is revealed as blatant yet uncontrived drama ...(the bulb’s glare is even painful - but all the more event! ) [ Re: Corbusier - Villa La Roche: wall-lamp ]  

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< SILO - INTRO < 
< DRYING-TOWERS - p1: N & S TOWERS INTRO / N TOWER & APTS <
 

< DRYING-TOWERS - p2: N TOWER & APTS - cont <
 
^  DRYING-TOWERS - p3: N TOWER & APTS - cont 
> DRYING-TOWERS - p4: N TOWER & APTS - cont >
 
> DRYING-TOWERS - p5: S TOWER & APTS >

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CONTENTS   4 SITES  

SILO

  TETTERODE   DE LOODS   EDELWEIS   APPENDICES   NOTES   SUB-SITES