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Once known primarily for its infamous red-light district, Amsterdam is fast becoming a destination for design buffs

By STEVE KORVER
Special to The Globe and Mail - Saturday, June 7, 2003 - Page T9

AMSTERDAM -- Amsterdam's Old Centre is the largest historical inner city in Europe. It may also be the most ingeniously designed: The concentric canals -- which, to the visiting French writer Albert Camus, resembled the "circles of hell" -- not only hold the waters at bay, but also keep visitors forever circling in toward the city's geographical centre: the red-light district. In the past this helped keep salacious sailors nicely compartmentalized and the rest of the city freer for locals. Today, it continues to deviously herd such potential troublemakers as British football hooligans and Canadian hash tourists.

Now, Amsterdam is welcoming a new brand of visitor: the modern design/architecture buff who regards the city as a centre for cutting-edge architecture, design shops and galleries that exhibit fewer conventional artists and more graphic and Web designers.

As a "global village" -- half of its 730,000 inhabitants are immigrants -- Amsterdam and its homegrown products are proving very effective at speaking to an international audience, especially Japanese, Italians and Scandinavians.

The sheer geometrical tidiness of the Dutch landscape is readily apparent when descending into Schiphol Airport. At times, the view goes so far as to resemble the tightly graphical -- and very Dutch -- paintings of Piet Mondrian in the way that all of the parts are equal and humble to the whole through the balancing of austere precision with almost pure abstraction.

Of course, with a long history of dense development, the Netherlands' uncanny organizational skills evolved long before Mondrian helped formulate De Stijl, one of the 20th century's most influential design philosophies, and one that continues to reverberate in such disparate disciples as Ikea and the rock band The White Stripes.

Certainly such old-school local painters as Rembrandt and Vermeer have enjoyed centuries of respect for the way they could escape the two-dimensional nature of their canvases. Today, the same collective savvy is being applied by architects seeking to escape the 2-D nature of this small and flat land, and by graphic/Web designers out to rein in the near-infinite spatial possibilities offered by the Internet. Few can deny the power of such long-established architectural marvels as the gabled canal-side houses that reflect the city's past as the richest harbour in the world, or the Gaudi-like swoopiness of the socialist Amsterdam School of the 1920s.

Periodicals are now foregoing Los Angeles and Singapore as primary architectural visionaries in favour of the contemporary Dutch model, which is regarded as both pragmatic and futuristic in the way that it blurs the boundaries between building, urban and landscape planning, and in the way that it regards nature as an artificial construct that needs to be nurtured.

While such pundits as superstar architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas have long preached the word, it was not until the architectural firm MVRDV unveiled its creation for the Hanover World Expo 2000 that the movement found its ultimate visual: the almost transparent Dutch pavilion dubbed the "Dutch Big Mac". The building's prime ingredients include dunes, cafés and shops on the first floor, flowers on the second floor, an oak forest on the third floor, a theatre on the fourth floor, and watermills and windmills for electricity on the roof.

And to prove that this was no flash in the pan, a completely different Dutch pavilion -- featuring VMX Architects' temporary bike shed, which now sits outside Amsterdam Central Station -- went on to win first prize at the Venice International Architecture Biennial in 2002.

The influence of the Big Mac's multilayered transparency can already be seen in the shoe-shaped ING House on the drive into the city from Schiphol. The building, completed last fall, is the first finished product in the Zuid-As area, projected by the end of 2004 to be the city's new business heart, boasting architecture on par with Berlin's Potsdamer Platz.

Meanwhile, in the former squatters' paradise of the Eastern Docklands, the finishing touches are being put on a boardwalk and waterfront redevelopment project.

The city hopes that the future haven for shoppers, foodies and culture hounds will finally divert visiting photographers from the eternally photogenic red-light district.

Already, Copenhagen is applying many aspects of Amsterdam's Eastern Docklands redevelopment -- and even employing a few of the same architects -- to its own waterfront.

Any tour of the area should begin on the sloped roof of Amsterdam's first modern architectural landmark, the green, Nemo science museum, built in a shape that suggests a sinking ship, by architect Renzo Piano. From this vantage point, your gaze moves toward the wave-shaped, glass passenger terminal for cruise ships; past the former warehouse Pakhuis Amsterdam, which has been reinvented as a showroom for Europe's top furniture designers; and to the primarily residential KNSM island, which may appear from a distance to resemble a designer prison.

Once you get there, however, the bisecting canals, funky bridges, old boats, artist's studios, and singularities such as a designer coffin shop are considerably more charming than a prison.

The enjoining Borneo-Sporenburg peninsulas have utilized lots of varying sizes to inspire a veritable who's who of global architects to come up with contrasting approaches to low-rise living. While a water square, complete with a floating art-house cinema, is still to be completed, there is already plenty of other eye candy: the raised and geometrically wonky Whale residential complex, gravity-defying bridges, and Amsterdam's most eccentric architectural street, Scheepstimmermanstraat, where each façade -- whether sleek titanium or splintery plywood -- is more wacky than the next.

This summer will see a new tram running farther east toward the next frontier of experimental residential living, Ijburg. By their completion in 2012, these seven artificial islands and their navy of houseboats will be home to 45,000 residents. It will showcase both Dutch landscape architecture that seeks to maximize space for both leisure and wildlife, and residential architecture that fuses design with the latest in environmental friendliness.

But for now the area has only a few dozen pioneering families, a floating information centre with an outlook tower, a charming shed of a restaurant, a temporary geodesic dome for theatre, and great expanses of sand that hipsters are already rating as the "beach to be at" this summer.

Tourists can also head to the satellite city of Almere, with its Rem Koolhaas city centre, or farther afield to Amsterdam's competitor in both soccer and design, Rotterdam. Flattened by bombing during the Second World War, Rotterdam provided the fresh canvas on which Dutch architects and urbanists could strut their stuff.

Hence, Rotterdam is taking much of the credit for Amsterdam's current architectural renaissance. While there is some truth to that scenario, the current stature of Dutch architecture probably has more to do with trial and error. As a long-prospering country, the Netherlands can afford to experiment; whenever an experiment failed, it was simply demolished and replaced with another experiment.

Amsterdam's design offerings also have the advantage of being easily exportable. In fact, a case can be made that this painfully scenic city sometimes resembles one huge gallery.

While critics worry about the inner city becoming some sort of Golden Age Disney World, the requirement of construction projects to dedicate a percentage of their cost to paying for public art has resulted in such modern treasures as frolicking brass iguanas, a houseboat appended with an ample breast, and the stained-glass of cartoonist Joost Swarte,who has just crossed over to architecture by designing a remarkable new theatre in Haarlem.

There are also many notable shops and galleries, specifically Frozen Fountain and Droog, but also generally those located along such eminently wanderable areas as the "nine streets," Haarlemmerstraat and Kerkstraat. Visitors can also opt for the generic department store Hema with its shockingly hip and cheap selection of designer knockoffs.

The perfect endpoint to such wandering is the city's former gas works, Westergasfabriekterrain, which will reopen this summer as a culture and arts complex, complete with water- and cypress-accented landscaping.

With all of these offerings stored in one's head (or carry-on luggage), visitors can return home to study how Amsterdammers have dealt with the near-infinite possibilities of cyberspace. The history of Dutch design has always fluttered between intrinsic orderliness and a strong desire for personal expression. The Web plays into this by requiring a certain order to deal with the sheer mass of the information while at the same time flaunting its own democratic sense of the individual.

The Amsterdam scene is quickly developing its own unique yet universal visual language. Certainly the nation's art colleges, not to mention its architecture and design schools, have helped this process by not only allowing artists and designers to study together, but also allowing up to one-third of its student body to come from outside the country.

It's little surprise then that there has been a major influx of smaller ad agencies, such as StrawberryFrog and 118, that are taking full advantage of this global talent pool for their international campaigns.

And the city's tourist board -- perhaps motivated by the fact that such traditional crowd-pullers as the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum are due to close for several years of sweeping renovations -- has now jumped on the design bandwagon, prominently promoting that aspect of the city in its new campaign.

Of course, it could be just another plan to compartmentalize tourists away from the packed inner city.

IF YOU GO

Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum is a one-stop shopping place for magazines, maps, newspapers, periodicals, guides and Amsterdam-centric design and architecture books. Phone: 31 (20) 622 62 48; Web: http://www.athenaeum.nl.

Arcam Gallery is both a gallery and an organizer of tours and lectures that champion Dutch architecture. A new harbour location is opening this summer. Phone: 31 (20) 620 48 78; Web: http://www.arcam.nl.

Frozen Fountain is a long-established design shop with interior products by the likes of Eek, Arad, Newsom, Hutton and Starck. Phone: 31 (20) 622 93 75; or visit the Web site at http://www.frozenfountain.nl.

Droog is an internationally acclaimed Dutch design collective that just opened its own Richard Hutten-designed shop; visit the Web site at http://www.droogdesign.nl.

[jsoto3]

excellent article! thanks garrett. it is so true that amsterdam and rotterdam are architectural/urban playgrounds. the dutch and the spanish are currently the most influential architectural/urban theorists and practitioners and will likely continue to be for a long time.