(text is machine translated by DeepL)
Buildings need to be experienced with your own senses and then form your own opinion. This was the spirit of this year's architecture excursion, which primarily went to the Netherlands. However, this coastal country has long been influenced by its larger neighbours Germany and France, which was evident from the first stop at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Hoge Veluwe National Park near Otterlo. The entire site originally served as the private residence of the Müller family, an industrialist family that operated a steel mill in the Ruhr area. They chose the wooded Dutch landscape as a place to raise their children. They commissioned the eminent Berlin architect Peter Behrens to build the house, which in the end was not built. At the beginning of the 20th century, Helene Kröller-Müller, the daughter of German industrialists, became one of the most fashionable women in the Netherlands and a passionate collector of Dutch art. For her collections, the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde built a building in the 1930s, which was extended by Wim Quist in the 1970s. In addition to art collections of incalculable value, this vast complex includes pavilions by Aldo van Eyck, Gerrit Rietveld, entrance ticket offices by MVRDV, a restaurant by Monadnock and a landscape long cared for by West8. The site is significant not only for the accumulation of artworks and buildings from the past century, but for the holding of groundbreaking events. In the late 1950s, the 11th CIAM Congress was held here, where the young architects associated around Team10 decided to take a critical stand against Le Corbusier's functionalist ideas and disbanded the CIAM.
The significant increase in accommodation prices in both Amsterdam and Rotterdam in recent years forced us to adjust our schedule and instead of spending two nights each in the two largest Dutch cities, we looked for more cost-effective options while getting a glimpse of cities that were not suffering under the onslaught of tourists.
We spent our first night in the centre of Utrecht, opposite the Central Library (ZECC, 2020) and near the historic town hall, rebuilt to a design by Enrico Miralles (EMBT, 2000). After checking in, we finished our tour together at the city theatre (W.M.Dudok, 1941). While in the Kröller-Müller Park we saw the bike ride as a suitable warm-up after a night on the bus, it was only in Utrecht that we realised that the bicycle forms an everyday part of Dutch life. In a university city of a quarter of a million (40,000 students and 9,000 teachers), there are almost a million bicycles available. Under the Utrecht Central Station building, there is a storage facility for more than 12,500 bicycles (Ector Hoogstad, 2019). Also, during a visit to tourist Amsterdam, we had a glimpse of the 7,000-bike parking basin (VenhoevenCS, 2023), where you can park your bike for 24 hours for free, or in Den Haag with a capacity of 8,000 bikes (Studio Marsman, 2021) you feel like you are in an exhibition gallery rather than a parking lot. Cycling has a long tradition in the flat Dutch countryside. Investments in cycle lanes and secure bike storage also help to promote healthy exercise. During our tour of the city, we realised that the vast majority of the inhabitants move around by bicycle, then by public transport and cars are in the minority. Intercity transport is provided by enhanced train services. The Dutch government is spending astronomical sums on high-speed lines and upgrading railway junctions. A large part of the new stations were designed by the Benthem Crouwel studio (Rotterdam 2014, Den Haag 2015, Utrecht 2016, Amsterdam 2018), which also won the competition for a new train station in Brno in 2021.
The next morning we visited the campus of the largest university in the Netherlands in the east of Utrecht and then headed to Rotterdam, where in the afternoon we had a tour of the MVRDV studio, whose co-founder Winy Maas is not unknown to Brno students, because in the past semester he led a guest studio at the FA BUT together with Szymon Rozwalka and Michal Palaszczak.
In the rest of the time, under overcast skies, we walked through the centre of Rotterdam, whose historical footprint was erased by the German Luftwaffe in May 1940 to become an experimental playground for Dutch urban planners after the end of World War II. Koolhaas's cynical and uprooted relationship to place can rightly be attributed to the place he was born into (*1944 Rotterdam) and where he subsequently grew up (Jakarta 1952-55, where his father supported Indonesia's liberation from colonialist subjugation by the Dutch).
For the next two nights we stayed in Rijskwijk, not a popular tourist destination, but right next to the hostel is the European Patent Office (J.Nouvel, 2018), foreshadowing the industrial nature of the whole area. There are regular services leaving from the nearby train station, so it is possible to get to Delft station in five minutes (Mecanoo, 2018) or Den Haag in ten minutes (Benthem Crouwel, 2015), which most students took advantage of in the evenings.
On the morning of the third day, the bus dropped us off in Amsterdam at the main station, where all expeditions probably head to, and experienced an unadulterated tourist rush. As soon as we could, we left the harbour and headed via IJdock (Mecanoo, 2012) to the brick classic Het Schip (M.de Klerk, 1920), where working-class housing and impeccable craftsmanship go hand in hand. Together, we walked across the historic centre from the Stock Exchange (H.P.Berlage, 1903) to the Rijksmuseum (Cruz y Ortiz, 2013), and by the end of the evening, everyone was free to explore the port city at their own pace and taste. The combination of the futuristic extension of the Stedelijk Museum (Benthem Crouwel, 2012) with the adjacent antiquarian bookshop of Robert Premsely, where Benthem Crouwel monographs could be purchased, proved successful. We said goodbye to Amsterdam with a tour of the island of IJburg in the eastern suburbs, where a quarter of a century ago the sea bay of IJmeer used to be and is now a full-fledged urban district with 20,000 inhabitants (when completed it will have 45,000 inhabitants). IJburg is a fraction of the visionary project of the city of Pampus for 350,000 inhabitants, which was already conceived in the 1960s.
The Sunday farewell to Holland was preceded by a short walk on the sand dunes on the shores of the North Sea, where the land art installation The Vault of Heaven (J.Turrell, 1992) is located. At noon, a guided tour of the church (A.van Eyck, 1969) was scheduled, where the rule "do not judge a building only by its outward appearance" was once again confirmed. The last city visited in Holland was Hilversum, whose modern form was shaped by W.M.Dudok. The Zonnestraal Sanatorium (J.Duiker, 1931), located in the southern suburb of Hilversum, is not only a pearl of functionalist architecture, but also an example of how to treat similar buildings in the future. In interwar Czechoslovakia, similarly valuable functionalist monuments were built, but their current state is more than deplorable. Just take a look at the town spa in Zábrdovice (B.Fuchs, 1931) or the Machnáč bathhouse in Trenčianske Teplice (J.Krejcar, 1932).
We spent our last night on the banks of the Rhine in Düsseldorf, Germany, from where it is a short walk to the Insel Hombroich open-air museum, founded in the 1980s by the construction entrepreneur and patron Karl-Heinrich Müller. He needed to create an exhibition space for his growing art collection. However, he decided not to approach an architect, but the artist Erwin Heerich, who gradually built 11 pavilions in half-timbered masonry in 1982-94 (other buildings by the painter and poet Per Kirkeby and the sculptor Thomas Schütte were added later). These sometimes remain empty and serve as walk-through exhibits. At the turn of the millennium, Müller also bought a nearby retired NATO base, where he attempted to replicate a similar scenario with the help of world-renowned architectural luminaries (T.Ando, A.Siza, R.Abraham), but there can be no greater difference than the difference between a long-cherished garden overseen by a local artist and a hastily revitalized military base via a host of foreign stars. In some ways, it was reminiscent of the diametrically opposed contrast between historic Amsterdam and modern Rotterdam that we were able to experience a few days earlier.
The two main destinations of this year's architecture tour were the outdoor museums, where art and buildings merge with the man-made landscape. Another insight was also that quality buildings do not necessarily come from the pen of an architect, but rather from a person with a sense of place, composition and materials. The five-day stay in Holland was a quick taste of the variety of contemporary architecture on offer. It was intended to encourage students to subsequently embark on individual journeys or consider a work or study placement under the Erasmus+ programme. In a busy programme we have had to miss a number of cities, which we hope to be able to rectify in less than eight years' time. Groningen, Eindhoven and Maastricht are already waiting.
Journey to the Netherlands 2024 - Excursion Report
"Probably the "island" can only be experienced - not described."?Karl-Heinrich Müller, founder of the Insel Hombroich MuseumBuildings need to be experienced with your own senses and then form your own opinion. This was the spirit of this year's architecture excursion, which primarily went to the Netherlands. However, this coastal country has long been influenced by its larger neighbours Germany and France, which was evident from the first stop at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Hoge Veluwe National Park near Otterlo. The entire site originally served as the private residence of the Müller family, an industrialist family that operated a steel mill in the Ruhr area. They chose the wooded Dutch landscape as a place to raise their children. They commissioned the eminent Berlin architect Peter Behrens to build the house, which in the end was not built. At the beginning of the 20th century, Helene Kröller-Müller, the daughter of German industrialists, became one of the most fashionable women in the Netherlands and a passionate collector of Dutch art. For her collections, the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde built a building in the 1930s, which was extended by Wim Quist in the 1970s. In addition to art collections of incalculable value, this vast complex includes pavilions by Aldo van Eyck, Gerrit Rietveld, entrance ticket offices by MVRDV, a restaurant by Monadnock and a landscape long cared for by West8. The site is significant not only for the accumulation of artworks and buildings from the past century, but for the holding of groundbreaking events. In the late 1950s, the 11th CIAM Congress was held here, where the young architects associated around Team10 decided to take a critical stand against Le Corbusier's functionalist ideas and disbanded the CIAM.
The significant increase in accommodation prices in both Amsterdam and Rotterdam in recent years forced us to adjust our schedule and instead of spending two nights each in the two largest Dutch cities, we looked for more cost-effective options while getting a glimpse of cities that were not suffering under the onslaught of tourists.
We spent our first night in the centre of Utrecht, opposite the Central Library (ZECC, 2020) and near the historic town hall, rebuilt to a design by Enrico Miralles (EMBT, 2000). After checking in, we finished our tour together at the city theatre (W.M.Dudok, 1941). While in the Kröller-Müller Park we saw the bike ride as a suitable warm-up after a night on the bus, it was only in Utrecht that we realised that the bicycle forms an everyday part of Dutch life. In a university city of a quarter of a million (40,000 students and 9,000 teachers), there are almost a million bicycles available. Under the Utrecht Central Station building, there is a storage facility for more than 12,500 bicycles (Ector Hoogstad, 2019). Also, during a visit to tourist Amsterdam, we had a glimpse of the 7,000-bike parking basin (VenhoevenCS, 2023), where you can park your bike for 24 hours for free, or in Den Haag with a capacity of 8,000 bikes (Studio Marsman, 2021) you feel like you are in an exhibition gallery rather than a parking lot. Cycling has a long tradition in the flat Dutch countryside. Investments in cycle lanes and secure bike storage also help to promote healthy exercise. During our tour of the city, we realised that the vast majority of the inhabitants move around by bicycle, then by public transport and cars are in the minority. Intercity transport is provided by enhanced train services. The Dutch government is spending astronomical sums on high-speed lines and upgrading railway junctions. A large part of the new stations were designed by the Benthem Crouwel studio (Rotterdam 2014, Den Haag 2015, Utrecht 2016, Amsterdam 2018), which also won the competition for a new train station in Brno in 2021.
The next morning we visited the campus of the largest university in the Netherlands in the east of Utrecht and then headed to Rotterdam, where in the afternoon we had a tour of the MVRDV studio, whose co-founder Winy Maas is not unknown to Brno students, because in the past semester he led a guest studio at the FA BUT together with Szymon Rozwalka and Michal Palaszczak.
In the rest of the time, under overcast skies, we walked through the centre of Rotterdam, whose historical footprint was erased by the German Luftwaffe in May 1940 to become an experimental playground for Dutch urban planners after the end of World War II. Koolhaas's cynical and uprooted relationship to place can rightly be attributed to the place he was born into (*1944 Rotterdam) and where he subsequently grew up (Jakarta 1952-55, where his father supported Indonesia's liberation from colonialist subjugation by the Dutch).
For the next two nights we stayed in Rijskwijk, not a popular tourist destination, but right next to the hostel is the European Patent Office (J.Nouvel, 2018), foreshadowing the industrial nature of the whole area. There are regular services leaving from the nearby train station, so it is possible to get to Delft station in five minutes (Mecanoo, 2018) or Den Haag in ten minutes (Benthem Crouwel, 2015), which most students took advantage of in the evenings.
On the morning of the third day, the bus dropped us off in Amsterdam at the main station, where all expeditions probably head to, and experienced an unadulterated tourist rush. As soon as we could, we left the harbour and headed via IJdock (Mecanoo, 2012) to the brick classic Het Schip (M.de Klerk, 1920), where working-class housing and impeccable craftsmanship go hand in hand. Together, we walked across the historic centre from the Stock Exchange (H.P.Berlage, 1903) to the Rijksmuseum (Cruz y Ortiz, 2013), and by the end of the evening, everyone was free to explore the port city at their own pace and taste. The combination of the futuristic extension of the Stedelijk Museum (Benthem Crouwel, 2012) with the adjacent antiquarian bookshop of Robert Premsely, where Benthem Crouwel monographs could be purchased, proved successful. We said goodbye to Amsterdam with a tour of the island of IJburg in the eastern suburbs, where a quarter of a century ago the sea bay of IJmeer used to be and is now a full-fledged urban district with 20,000 inhabitants (when completed it will have 45,000 inhabitants). IJburg is a fraction of the visionary project of the city of Pampus for 350,000 inhabitants, which was already conceived in the 1960s.
The Sunday farewell to Holland was preceded by a short walk on the sand dunes on the shores of the North Sea, where the land art installation The Vault of Heaven (J.Turrell, 1992) is located. At noon, a guided tour of the church (A.van Eyck, 1969) was scheduled, where the rule "do not judge a building only by its outward appearance" was once again confirmed. The last city visited in Holland was Hilversum, whose modern form was shaped by W.M.Dudok. The Zonnestraal Sanatorium (J.Duiker, 1931), located in the southern suburb of Hilversum, is not only a pearl of functionalist architecture, but also an example of how to treat similar buildings in the future. In interwar Czechoslovakia, similarly valuable functionalist monuments were built, but their current state is more than deplorable. Just take a look at the town spa in Zábrdovice (B.Fuchs, 1931) or the Machnáč bathhouse in Trenčianske Teplice (J.Krejcar, 1932).
We spent our last night on the banks of the Rhine in Düsseldorf, Germany, from where it is a short walk to the Insel Hombroich open-air museum, founded in the 1980s by the construction entrepreneur and patron Karl-Heinrich Müller. He needed to create an exhibition space for his growing art collection. However, he decided not to approach an architect, but the artist Erwin Heerich, who gradually built 11 pavilions in half-timbered masonry in 1982-94 (other buildings by the painter and poet Per Kirkeby and the sculptor Thomas Schütte were added later). These sometimes remain empty and serve as walk-through exhibits. At the turn of the millennium, Müller also bought a nearby retired NATO base, where he attempted to replicate a similar scenario with the help of world-renowned architectural luminaries (T.Ando, A.Siza, R.Abraham), but there can be no greater difference than the difference between a long-cherished garden overseen by a local artist and a hastily revitalized military base via a host of foreign stars. In some ways, it was reminiscent of the diametrically opposed contrast between historic Amsterdam and modern Rotterdam that we were able to experience a few days earlier.
The two main destinations of this year's architecture tour were the outdoor museums, where art and buildings merge with the man-made landscape. Another insight was also that quality buildings do not necessarily come from the pen of an architect, but rather from a person with a sense of place, composition and materials. The five-day stay in Holland was a quick taste of the variety of contemporary architecture on offer. It was intended to encourage students to subsequently embark on individual journeys or consider a work or study placement under the Erasmus+ programme. In a busy programme we have had to miss a number of cities, which we hope to be able to rectify in less than eight years' time. Groningen, Eindhoven and Maastricht are already waiting.
| Inserted by | Šmídek Petr, MgA. Ing.arch. PhD. |
|---|---|
| Inserted |