Last day

Final morning in the hostel...



Always the awaiting coffee and tea.


Interpretation of the Rotterdam port, beautifully painted.



Stunning Art Deco stained glass that adorned many of the windows on the first floor of what is now the architecture and design building.


Texture




Glass houses inside the shell of an old warehouse, one way to divide up the space and maintain light and visual connection. Each of these glass buildings had a different activity going on inside it, from car design to welding.










Doors.



Inside one of the old ship factories, destined for use as an art gallery sometime within the next year.

Tim drawing in the adjacent older neighborhood built for the shipyard workers, as kids watch on.



Cynthia, our enthusiastic and inspiring leader.


Final dinner!


Today we visited the RDM area in Rotterdam, a brownfield site that has been transformed from a ship yard to a campus. RDM stands for research, design, and manufacturing, a so-called collaboration between higher education and vocational training. The docks were in operation between 1902 and 1983, when the company that owned them went bankrupt, yet remain a testament to industry.

There is something haunting about visiting a space in the middle of such a transformation; it is too easy to imagine the lives of the men who once worked in these shipyards, their days filled with unceasing physical labor and an unwavering faith in machines that towered over them in scale and seeming-promise. Though this particular area is undergoing a change, on the opposite bank and as far as you can see cranes and smokestacks reach toward the sky, and immense ships and barges plow through the harbor. This place is still populated with people whose lives are dedicated to industry, and whose landscape is full of constant making, moving, building, tallying, working. There is also something beautiful about old industrial spaces, the textures and the scale and the colors, and the overt way in which preserving them tells a story. We recognize and sympathize with our own human endeavors and struggles, even if our own life experience has never included working in a factory, captaining a ship, unloading cargo, or living day in and day out amongst steel, smoke, and fire. Interweaving the old and the new creates one of the most captivating landscapes there is, and I think this must lie at least in part with our fascination with our own stories.

Today was also our last day here in the Netherlands; it has been altogether incredible. I feel ready to move on to the next phase, and so grateful to have had this experience.