Cool stairs: wooden steps imposed onto tall granite risers, make for a patterned walking experience.
Battlestar Galactica (JJ)!
The wavy building, one of the newer buildings for housing in central Almere.
Design charrette presentations: ideas for several public places in an area of future development.
The longer we are here and the more conversations we have with designers and planners, the more complex this place and the issues it faces becomes. Of course this is the case, and not really a surprise, but it's always a little disappointing to discover the hard realities behind something when you had hoped you had finally found an untainted truth. Today we returned to Almere, the fastest growing city in the Netherlands, to hear about their future plans and tour the 'older' part of the city, which is only about 30 years old. There was something eerie and foreboding to me as I walked through an office in the city hall advertising plans for the extensive new development, happy people in the posters offering me tea and coffee (of course) and holding out blueprints. There is something that feels very out of control to me about the speed with which this land has been dammed, drained of sea water, planned, built upon...it's like teetering on the edge of a cliff and hoping that there is something soft and pleasing to catch you when you fall instead of a pit of snakes, but not really knowing and having to jump anyway. I suppose this is life; the development is just so unchecked, and the decisions that are being made now so crucial to a future that no one can predict. Of course, I am talking about the Dutch here; if they believe something should be different in terms of their landscape, they just make it that way. Like the future land corridor for the Oostvardersvold, where wind turbines will be torn down and farms taken apart as if they were simply plans on paper that can be redrawn, and the consequences, well, apparently nonexistent.
As we were discussing some of the large scale future plans for Almere, and why at one point in time it had seemed like a good idea to build a city like Amsterdam on land that what was once the bottom of the sea and is now sinking, I couldn't help but ponder the contradictions that shape our lives. Like the lowest, most life-threatening location for building here is also the most fertile land, and that living on the very edge of the sea is both terrifying in terms of physical safety and utterly captivating in terms of the soul. Contradictions are dynamic, they are filled with energy, they capture our imaginations and they are the glue that holds our lives together whether we like it or not. The trick is to figure out how to recognize what we have for what it is, work with it, and hopefully make it shine.
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