Where the Wind Flows
Rotterdam, Netherlands
There is some cool architecture to see in Rotterdam but also some really stupid ticket systems.
The Market Hall is a well-known project that is a food hall in the centre with apartment buildings curving around the outter shell. I was interested to see how the building, looking pretty good online, fares as a block in the urban fabric. It is situated beside Blaak metro and tram station and fronts a large open square leading to a wide pedestrian boulevard. Oddly enough, this isn’t the street with the majority of shops and restarants which is a narrower pathway perpendicular to the boulevard and parallel to the market that leads towards the central commercial district. In this sense, I wasn’t surprised to find that the Market Hall is a project on a land plot and not an enhancement to the urban fabric.
Across the plaza are the cubehouses and Blaaktower (“Pencil”) by Dutch architect Piet Blom from 1984. This is a more interesting project because the architect wanted to create a forest of tree-houses in a community with a sense of drama, not unlike the vaulting of a cathedral. Thus, the houses are designed for an experience and social connection rather than functionality.
Each house is a tilted cube on an hexagonal pole that is the entrance with circulation upwards. The houses combine to create a village within a town with small-scale buisnesses, shops, school, and playground. Additionally, it sits on an overpass, creating a safe pedestrian connection between the housing project and the harbour.
This strive for social urbanisim is successful and could be even more successful with more businesses on the ground level. It reminded me a lot of our second studio where we were tasked with creating a mixed-use housing development in Toronto but a lot of us had no proper precedents to research. Having studied this project would have been useful at the time but the faculty has a very strange way of either not giving precedents to study, or arbitrarily assigning irrelevant precedents.
One of the houses is open as a mueum and it’s only 2 euro for students (3 regular). The house is accessed by a staircase in the hexagonal trunk above a storage room to a living room and kitchen. I thought that some of the windows could have been larger but it is otherwise not very small. The inclined windows certainly help. I heard a tour guide making fun of the sloping windows looking down instead of out but he doesn’t realize that it’s intentional to form a social connection between public and private realms. Blom called this level “Street-house.” In opposition, the second level is the “sky-house” with the bedrooms and a second bathroom. Lastly, the top floor is like a three-sided pyramid intended to give a broad view around. This lofty area would make a great children’s play space, office, or lounge but a noticable flaw is that the many inoperable windows create a greenhouse affect so it gets really hot.
A recent temporary exhibition in Rotterdam is the Rooftop walk. This is a temporary scaffolding that brings the public up to the roof to see ways inwhich roofs can be used more sustainably. Before I could get up, I had to get a ticket. Even though there’s people to welcome you, they don’t actually give you tickets. Instead you have to either go to a kiosk 100m away down some stairs and around the corner or get it online. Online isn’t so hard since there’s wifi but you then have to select a 15 minute entrance time. So even though there wasn’t many people, I logged on at 2 minutes after 3 and so I had to wait until 3:15 for the next entrance with about a dozen others. It was stupid that I wasn’t the only one loitering.
That said, once on the roof there were many examples of how the city could make green roofs, catch water, be used for housing and and more. It was pretty cool and probably pretty eye-opening to people who aren’t in architecture or engineering. The walk also had to cross a a street so they built a bridge 60m long, 29.5m high.
This month seems to be some kind of architectural festival and there was an exhibition on housing with another roof-top access at the Het Nieuwe Instituut. That exhibition was free as was the roof-top but the latter was much harder to access. Again the booth doesn’t give tickets and there’s no wifi so I was directed inside to the museum info counter. The kind lady printed me a ticket (it’s free) and then sent me back outside to get it scanned by one attendant who said another would give me a wristband. He decided to disappear and so a third guy, on seeing the people behind me having just had their tickets scanned gave them wristbands first while I stood around waiting.
The view from this building wasn’t anything notable so I went across the street to see the Depot. I wasn’t originally planning on going in but heard a lady say the inside was really interesting with stairs so I decided to go for it. Again I had to try and get a ticket. The one lady telling me to use wifi but my phone wouldn’t connect and the second lady, after seeing my phone not connecting just rang me through with my credit card. Like actually, why do I need to get a ticket online if they’re able to ring me up in person?
Atleast the public squares and plazas that I had on my list to check out didn’t need a ticket. Now if only the lights made to look like cranes would move…
The depot is a terribly designed museum. It is six floors of archives, restoration labs, and exhibitions in an egg-shaped building with a rectangular central attrium. The thought of putting a square attrium in a circular plan became evidently ridiculous because the stairs to ascend through the musuem criss-cross the atrium on opposite sides. That looks cool but it means that every floor has stupid circulation because you only go halfway around the floor before reaching the next staircase up meaning that every floor has one circuit to see whatever there is to see before you have to complete another half-circuit to get to the next stair up.
On top of this, most of the floors had very litte to see, just a single window in a racks of paintings. These archives are pretty poor too because the inclined and curved outer walls make for a lot of dead wasted-space that can’t be showcased on the interior. Though it was cool to look into the restoration labs, most of the museum is just circulating around the central atrium over and over again because of the stair placement. On the exterior it’s mostly a mirror finish so it’s pretty cool to take photos of but I found little else to be impressed with.
My mood improved when I made my way to Little Coolhaven. This is a redevelopment of industrial buildings into lofts and workspace — not unlike what happens in Toronto. The difference is that Little C, as it is affectionately called, has some well-done landscaping in the spaces between buildings and has bridges between upper floors. The landscape makes for nice social spaces and play spaces with vegetation . Plus, the bridges look cool. I suspect that they connect hallways and while they might seem somewhat useless, they probably help with fire egress. I saw atleast one person cross a bridge in the short time I was there. The only downside to the development is that it’s beside a highway, somewhat far from the city, and could use with more commercial shops on the ground level. It was too quiet. The architecture reminded me of New York but the lack of people inhabitating the space made me think of Toronto.
My annoyance with tickets continued on my second day in Rotterdam when I decided to visit the Unesco World Heritage Site at Kinderdijk. For starters, getting there was a pain. A little research gave me a few routes and I decided the cheapest way would be to take the tram and bus. A two hour ticket is 4 euro which is stupidly expensive considering a full day pass is 9 euro but even getting the ticket is hard. There’s no machines at the tram stops but you can get it at metro stations. I was walking by a tram stop when I realized that they have wifi for getting tickets on the app. I really didn’t want to get the app but the metro station was far so I caved, what’s another company with my email address and a poor password? My annoyance at the tram stops not having ticket machines was slightly relieved when I found out that they all have decently fast wifi so for traveler’s like me without data, we’re not inhibited — it’s only the seniors or people who aren’t familiar with smartphones.
While the locals use loaded physical cards like Toronto’s Presto or Vancouver’s Compass, the app has a handy dandy QR code. It’s straight forward to activate the ticket on the phone but where do you scan it on the tram? Despite there being an icon to scan a QR code I don’t think there’s actually a machine to do it on the Trams. I spent the 30 minute ride online trying to figure out how to scan my ticket because there’s nothing like a public transit agency reminding you on every page to tap in and tap out; nor official youtube videos showing how the QR code can be scanned on the subway.
There’s also nothing like a public transit agency that has a route planner that gives you directions, like google, to use another company without telling you. So my 4 euro ticket only got me half way and when I got on the bus the driver was like, “this is a different company.” Wait, what!? I had to pay another 4.4 euro.
There isn’t a lot of information online but it is possible to walk around the Kinderdijk windmills for free. The ticket is to get into two of them which are museums, watch a video about the history of the site, go in a restored pumphouse, use the canal boats to get around, and go on a 30 minute boat cruise. It appears that if you buy online ahead of time and select a time-slot it’s 16 euro for weekdays but onsite it is 18.5 euro. I didn’t buy it online because I really didn’t want to be caught with missing a timeslot and on the weekends there’s no discount anyways. But why have an online discount in the first place and why make assigned time slots when it’s not even that busy? I’m sure it’s helpful in the high season but that’s not now. I’m sure it’s especially helpful to have assigned timeslots to check-into the site even though the paid attractions are distributed around the site, some a good 20 minute walk away.
Anways, I got myself a ticket because I figured I probably wasn’t coming back and I kindof wanted to see the inside of the windmills. These windmills are mostly from 1740 and are used to pump out the dykes around the farms. There’s two kinds, half made out of brick and half with thatching. They’re not used anymore but the first museum was pretty cool because the blade was was operating. I saw the wooden gears spinning and the shaft rotating as the propeller turned. There were small descriptions of the rooms where the children slept, the kitchen, and the living space.
The next windmill wasn’t as interesting and I didn’t bother to see the movie in the boat because it was really hot and I didn’t want to wait for the group ahead to finish. There are 19 windmills in total spread out along three dykes. One ferry boat is used to get between the two museums and a second is for a 30 minute cruise up and down the channel. I took that cruise to get a little closer than the walking path. The other uses for the ticket are a documentary movie, a building with information on birds, and a restored coal-powered pump station from the 1800s. The cool thing about this pump station was an interactive minature model to control the windmills. There are six stations, each station controlling a windmill. A wheel is used to rotate the windmill into the wind and a lever to turn it off during a storm. It wasn’t really playable by myself but it got me excited.
My ticket woes were only alleviated on the way back when I took the ferry. That was the alternative to the tram/bus option. I was, however, confused when the ferry man charged me 2 euro for the ride back. Online it was suppose to be 8.98 euro for a round tip from the city which would have been comparable to the 1-day bus pass and 1 euro more than what I thought I was going to pay for two single trips. It takes two ferries to get back and on the second ferry the ticket person barely glanced my way when I got on so I said nothing and paid nothing. For being the first city in Europe where I can’t even get out of the train station without going through a fare gate, I can’t say I’m impressed with the Netherland’s ticketing system or their need to have advanced timed tickets.
