Marpole in the global context

A great tool to show the way the city feels on the ground is to map the block form and the street and open space in black and white. White is open, black is the block form.

Marpole urban fabric -- note the short end of the block points south -- an exception throughout most of Vancouver.

What happens when you compare the block size and shape of other major cities of the world to that of Marpole?  The strict grid of New York above meets the water in fanatic accordance to the superimposed anti-topographic streets.

Stockholm's grids somehow face its harbor, without becoming slave to rigid right angles.

Berlin's squares are dissected by diagonal avenues and impressive wide-open parkland.  Oh yes: a river runs through it.

Amsterdam (here shown with north-south upside down) fits its canal belt entirely within the confines of Marpole's boundaries -- everything that the word Amsterdam connotes fits in the footprint of Marpole. "Coffee shops", red light district and Anne Frank House. Canals that spread like ripples from the harbour on the IJ river.

Key conclusions: the Fraser River flows through Vancouver. Our streets and urban zones look out over it -- but sadly never help us reach it. The world is full of better examples of approaching their major rivers.

Perchtenmask

The Dutch do dessert like no other. There's poffertjes - tiny puffy spheric doughnuts; stroopwaffles - syrup sandwiches; vla - pudding in a litre-sized tetrapak. But oil balls take the cake. They're a traditional New Year's Eve treat made by plopping a dollop of yeast dough in hot oil. They're become little floating islands of donut that contain raisins, apple or currants and covered in sugar. This germanic traditional sweet was native to Holland and in the dead of winter eating oliebollen was a survival must.  If you feared the goddess Perchta - the wizened witch Bertha - then it was said her sword would slide off your greasy oliebollen belly and you could avoid evisceration. Nothing like pastry with imperative.

In a land variously at or under the level of the sea there is but opportunity to prick the land with trees and buildings. In all truth, the buildings are also a form of tree, as buildings are built, largely, on pilings throughout the country. If the great palaces of the hill-towns of Italy are accreted pathways and terraces of the everyday life of Italians -- the Dutch sprouted their halls from the rich earth.
In a moment of need I wondered: how does plumbing work here? The cardinal rule of most plumbers is that water will always run downhill... I suppose it will run downhill, underwater, if need be. Questions to be answered.

The immediate and intimate truth it that the open window to the street exists! Often I saw frosted windows instead of lace curtains, but it's indeed a "blinds-up" culture. Listing brick buildings crowd together along the street and canal. There is no shortage of lime trees... Although in Stockholm, the Tilia are still in flower. Here those little nuts are being formed. Against every major roadway, there appears to be a ditch, full of duckweed and reedgrass, and the best are bordered with trees.
The canals are remarkable. The low boats of the canal, the cogs, the tjotter, some converted as hotels, apartments and party-locales. A string of incandescent lights flicked on, as I passed a long barge. Sandwiched between a motorcraft and a canal barge, a nosey gull perches on a sunken hull in the morning grey.

It’s humid and my skin feels sooty.

This summer's Amsterdam studio was enlightening.  I'm migrating some of the content written for the course here to keep this personal blog alive:

"...the 'voorhuis' or front house... was high, light  and open as a living space... The inner hearth, however, was intimate and enclosed... The dual nature of this domesticity was to characterize the city for centuries to come: on the one hand the cordial openness of the merchant who meets his customers in the front house and will close neither shutters nor curtains at night, on the other, the contained, private life of the inner hearth, that curious atmosphere which the Dutch delineate with the word gezelligheid, the snugness which is soft on the inside and hard on the outside." Geert Maak 1994.
This blog gathers information and insight into the Dutch city of Amsterdam Noord as part of a multi-disciplinary field study by graduate students from the University of British Columbia's schools of planning, architecture and landscape architecture. In anticipation of disparate workspaces -- and long-distance collaboration -- Alex S., Allison S., and Caelan G. will be your hosts and authors on this blog. It is both a reportage and documentation of the process of our inquiry.
The above quoted passage from Maak's "Amsterdam" in translation from Harvard University Press can be counted as an authoritative commentary on the architectural concept of gezelligheid, it demands the question: what snugness is expected in public spaces? (digression: this term is considered untranslatable - a combination of convivial, cozy, fun, quaint, or nice atmosphere - and perhaps it is the definitive term in Dutch culture). Indeed, if there is a character to public parks, streetscapes, plazas and playgrounds in the Netherlands - and in Amsterdam Noord specifically - will we find this characteristic duality?

Vancouver's Coal Harbour public art project - an aluminum shack.

If I were to characterize the design of parks in my native Vancouver or in the alentours of New Westminster and even Victoria, I would suggest that a British colonial coziness is the leitmotif and a rainforest dankness is the climatic result. A romantic primordiality pervades the west coast of Canada, at least where the colonial hangover is tenacious. New developments, in Vancouver's downtown or those built or refurbished in recent memory, express a kind of geometric spatial concept ... at worst this is a kind of attempt at tabula rasa modernity that ignores topographic imperatives and at best is a kind of geometric worship that is commendable in its thoroughness. Not at all cozy in a 19th C sense.

It would seem as thought the Netherlands could express this planar geometry best -- after all "God created the earth, the Dutch created the Netherlands". Will the cool exterior of the Dutch spirit and their whole-hearted modernism be evident in the design of the public realm? Am I too concerned with the details of a long-since-past movement? To keep myself current: is gezelligheid the word that will characterize and describe post-post-modern?
Amsterdam itself, spatially expresses a coziness. Concentric rings of canals, roads and community point to the IJ - whose currents sweep past spilling over with commerce and industry. It strikes a balance of mercantile pragmatism and baroque geometry. Meanwhile, medieval corridor-alleys exist for residents to tuck into life, beer or dinner.

IJburg in the foreground and the "blue heart" of metropolitan Amsterdam projected for the waterbody in the background.

And what of the Noord? It was once considered a city-gate on the IJ - in the 1958 plan the IJplein was to concentrate civic functions and focus transportation needs in a public plaza. It would also have created a central focus -- water-based -- to balance the original city centre to the south. This was largely ignored. However in a 2007 plan to redevelop the eastern islands - IJburg - a central open recreational waterbody was planned. This would form a "blue heart" of the Amsterdam metropolitan region: the Noord would bound the north edge, Amsterdam centre the south and IJburg the east. This represents a significant turn toward the water. It would introduce a cool, enclosed plane from which to look out to one another, interpellating the shores, but with the possibility to retire home through the villous canals and roadways. This last is a regional gezelligheid.