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EDELWEIS INTRODUCTION  

Edelweis is on KNSM Eiland, the most extreme north-easterly of the branching flat peninsulas of the Eastern Docks (Havens Oost). Seen across the Ertshaven water from the causeway approach-road it visually commands, though small, the Eiland’s centre; its delicate glass volume massively framed by huge new housing blocks, their late 80’s ‘sculptural’ assertiveness and their functional insensitivity strangely outdated beside the clarity, poise and straightforwardness of the 30 year old building. 

This long flattish steel glass and concrete box raised on rows of girder legs was designed and built between 1958 and 1962 as a restaurant and theatre for the dock-workers. Its design-significance enabled it to survive the 1987 demolitions and residential redevelopment of the Havens Oost. 

Squatted by 6 artists on 8^th Dec 1982 its long volume was divided by low partitions into 6 studio spaces, bracketed at the building’s ends by 2 extraordinary living-spaces. In 1987 it stood isolated on its promontory of empty sand (reflecting in miniature the Eiland’s shape and axis), a squatted oasis with a fringe of saplings and chickens. In 1991, surrounded by the mess of building-sites and growing housing-blocks, Edelweis was bought from the City by its occupiers and rented to themselves through a structure of interlocking organisations (a “Stichting Edelweis” the legal 'Edelweis Company' owner, and a Vereniging or ‘Collective’ administrating finance). 

From this point the building began to undergo a fundamental change: in seven months of co-operation (from early ‘91) the eight effected its structural transformation from a single open volume to a series of closed cells; from a shared social/working place to a row of potential private living-spaces each with its own entrance. They removed the hung-ceiling and elephantine ducts of primitive air-conditioning, divided the building into sections with cross-walls of cement-blocks (up to 4.5m, then Rockwool-insulated plasterboard), made minimal changes to the framing of the glass walls to accommodate hinged casements (the enormous glass sheets necessitating a professional glazier), cut extra windows for two apartments in the building’s brick and concrete-clad ends, and - since fire regs required separate exits - invented a means of access for the 6 new apts with no existing stairs: a dry-dock demolition affording 6 cheap steel ladders almost all of which (with the bizarre precision typical of improvisatory discoveries) fitted exactly the gap between the diamond-sawn holes in the building’s belly and the ground. To comply with the City’s interest in its historical status all the changes to the building’s external appearance were ‘architect-approved’. 

In its new ‘row-housing’ role Edelweis constitutes 8 apartment spaces. Seven occupy the raised ‘slab’ of the restaurant/kitchens/stage. Five are of identical shape and cubic volume, each a transverse segment the width of two window-bays, cut by the new cement-block walls across the glazed portion of the building. At each end of this ‘row of 5’ is a space that is continuous in level and roughly equal in volume, but otherwise differs: the one at the east end is enclosed behind exterior concrete cladding-panels in what was the stage and its ancillary rooms (and thus is graced with its own glazed entrance porch and stair); the one at the west end utilises the last remaining window-bay and has an asymmetrical plan, extending through the concrete-clad old kitchens to the north side of the front facade, wrapping in an ‘L’ the offset rectangular block of the old entrance-foyer and stair. This latter is virtually a separate brick-clad glass-fronted two-storey building embedded in the slab - it contains the most complex and isolated of the 8 apts. As a space for living in it is unlike any of the others: the encumbrance of massive forms associated with the building’s access forced on it the most radical adaptation. 

Though the work of conversion was co-operatively shared, the inside of each living-space is the invention of its occupier. Each (except the special case of the foyer) began as an empty volume the size of a large two-storey suburban detached house: a 3D tabula rasa for life-style improvisation and display. Eight still-evolving expressions of individualism protected within a collective administration.

The mechanistically fair dividing of Edelweis has forced most of its apt makers to ‘express their conceptions’ in a set of uniform containers, which by emphasising individuality makes it seem a kind of ‘exhibitionism’. From the now paved plaza the raised building displays its contents like a huge showcase - the astonishingly various constructions of the apartments glimpsed through their glass walls, mixed with reflected clouds - a ‘ceremonial presentation’ to the surrounding teeming city of an alternative and self-invented life ... exemplars of luxurious individualism, aristocratic initiative and self-sustenance!

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CONTENTS

4 SITES

SILO

TETTERODE

DE LOODS

EDELWEIS

APPENDICES

NOTES

SUB-SITES