Google Maps recently updated various cities within Europe, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Of course, Europe being much more dense, has caused privacy problems for Google as seen in a row exposed by the BBC News in the UK. While I’ve snooped through some of my favourite spots in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, I’ve yet to explore the limits of what Google has made available online. It seems that some of the secondary cities such as Utrecht and Maastricht still lack the service. Given that the cameras are placed high above a moving truck, there are few (or no) views of pedestrian streets; and perhaps Google should think about capturing Amsterdam by boat?

UPDATE: I’ve added a map with the cities where street view is available. The recently added Oxford, London (Millenium Dome), Rotterdam (Ben van Berkel’s Erasmus bridge) and Amsterdam (Mirailles, West8 & Co. at Borneo) are not yet on it. Even more recent are the additions of Cannes, Zaragoza and the Amalfi Coast. Whatever Google’s criteria for inclusion are, we agree with them.

Experimenta Design is an existing festival from Lisbon that has been invited to Amsterdam for the first time starting this September (2008). With a great line-up of events and conferences, the festival is very promising. The Droof Event 2: Urban Play aims to attack the streets of Amsterdam with urban interventions. And of course, any reason to visit Amsterdam is great.

About the festival:

After 4 successful editions in its native Lisbon, ExperimentaDesign, the international Biennale dedicated to design, architecture and contemporary culture, was invited by the City of Amsterdam to branch out to the Dutch Capital. As a result of this, ExperimentaDesign will now take place in alternating years in Lisbon and Amsterdam, each with different programmes.

In 2008, Amsterdam hosts its first edition of the Biennale, from 18 September to 2 November, under the theme Space and Place – Design for the Urban Landscape.

ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam 2008 highlights urban culture as the playground for the global citizen. The world’s cities are not only home to over half of the world’s population, they are also a metaphor for today’s cultures and a testing ground for new forms of conviviality and interaction. Throughout its three core exhibitions, the Biennale turns the spotlight on innovative urban design as a process of social action, exchanges and experiment.

As in previous editions of the Biennale, ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam 2008 promises to set the city’s pulse racing with a challenging, multidisciplinary programme that combines exhibitions, urban interventions, lectures and debates. For over a month and a half, the Dutch Capital will be host to a fresh selection of international talent, buzzing with playfulness, interactivity and creative energy.

During the Opening Week – from 18 to 21 September – Amsterdam is the ultimate place to be, as the Biennale launches with four days of lively exchange of ideas held in emblematic venues throughout the city.

About the theme – Space and Place: Designing for the Urban Landscape:

For the first time in history the earth’s population is more urban than rural. This means that for most people on this planet, the city has become their natural habitat. When in this context we speak of growth and blossom, terrain and flow, or use other natural metaphors, we speak in fact of engineering, architecture and design. We talk about the city as a landscape, that we have created ourselves and continue to shape.

Shaping a place is as much about imagining it as it is about building. Look at a child playing and you can recognize an arch-instinct shared by all living beings. Stepping over an imaginary line, and closing a virtual door behind him, the child says: now I’m in my home. If he has only sticks and stones to play with, he will use these to demarcate the difference between inside and outside, between a place and its surrounding space.

In design for the urban landscape, such symbolism meets the existential needs of the city’s inhabitants, who use it to define their habitat as a place to be. ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam 2008 focuses on the new urgency with which we consider urban public space. We highlight the latest strategies for enhancing public places as theater of public conviviality. From informal – and sometimes illegal – interventions which reclaim the street as the meeting place for independent citizens, to proposals by architects and designers to develop the city’s public space as a playground for social interaction. Plus reflections on how to transform a neutral space into an individual place by an international range of cutting-edge designers.

ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam 2008 invites designers, architects and other creatives from all over the world to meet their audiences in one of the finest urban playgrounds of all: the city of Amsterdam.

XML is a contemporary cultural practice specialized in Architecture, Research and Urbanism. From its base in Amsterdam XML is involved in worldwide cross-disciplinary projects with an emphasis on cultural analysis. XML’s projects are fuelled by a reflection on the contemporary city as source of cultural production. The work has been rewarded several prizes amongst which most recently the first prize in the Europan 9 competition Almere.

We currently invite people to apply for a position as trainee in our office in amsterdam. Candidates should have finished at least two years of relevant design education. Further requirements include:

- excellent model-making, drawing and render skills
- strong graphic and design talent
- willing to actively contribute to the rapid growth of our young office

Applicants for this vacancy should send their cv, motivation letter and portfolio(pdf) to hr@x-m-l.org.

From the 28th of August to 7th September, we will finalize the One Land Two Systems project with a series of public events, workshops, and spatial, social and cultural interventions in Ein Hawd. The project aims at exposing the situation of the unrecognized Palestinian villages in Israel, and at the same time finding alternative planning solutions.

Check the Press Release PDF, or read more at www.one-land.org.

The latest exhibition in the temporary location for the Stedelijk Museum CS will be a show curated by Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) which includes his own work situated amongst other artists. The show is entitled, Presence of Mind, and will run through June 20th – September 30th, 2008. While previous works will be included, the show will also include the museum’s recent acquisition, an installation by Tillmans titled, Stedelijk Room.

In the forthcoming exhibition at the Stedelijk, Tillmans reveals the connections between his own work and that of a number of kindred spirits in the art world. Some, like German artist Isa Genzken, with whom Tillmans has exhibited on a number of occasions, share his free and easy approach to images and materials. Others, like René Daniëls and Daan van Golden, are artists who constantly redeploy their own stock of images in new ways. Tillmans also creates a dialogue between his own experiments with the abstract qualities of the photographic image and the work of Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Robert Mangold and Niele Toroni. The socially committed, political aspect of his oeuvre is reflected in his selection of Roberto Matta, Peter Hujar and Timur Novikov.

The new installation, Stedelijk Room, will be a collection of his work combining:

[...] abstract images with portraits, landscapes, still lifes and townscapes. Tillmans even includes odd references to Amsterdam/The Netherlands, such as his self-portrait Mosshat (1988), made during a period in Amsterdam in his twenties, and a photograph of a painting of William of Orange. There is also an image that refers to one of the first abstract compositions he ever made, on the occasion of the 1998 From the Corner of the Eye exhibition at the Stedelijk. Iconic works from Tillmans’ oeuvre included in Stedelijk Room are Lutz & Alex, climbing tree (1992), police helicopter (1995), man pissing on chair (1997) and the black-and-white image of an intertwined group of friends Arkadia I (1996). In contrast to these earlier photographs, there are also recent, large-scale abstracts like Freischwimmer 118 (2005) and Silver 50 (2006). Finally, Stedelijk Room includes three tables covered with montages of photographs and cuttings from newspapers and magazines which are in permanent dialogue with the images displayed on the walls.

This friday at 16:30 an interesting exhibition opens @ the Casla in Almere. It will feature the winning projects of the Eenvoud Competition, the third edition for an experimetal neighbourhood in Almere. Its predecessors, “De Fantasie” and “De Realiteit”, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Reality’ were held back in the eighties and their results are still worth an excursion. More information on that below.

“De Éénvoud” or ‘Simplicity ‘is the result of a competition held in 2006. The brief was to design a freestanding and simple low-cost house, expressing their own wishes and ideas for dwelling. The winners got the possibility to build their design on a beautiful open spot in the woodland of Noorderplassen-West.

The twelve winning projects, amongst which an ornithologist’s house, a rubber house, a convertible house and a scaled version of the Unité d’Habitation were submitted from The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal and Sweden. The houses will have a permanent character, with a minimum of building regulations. Some of the projects will be built by the designers themselves; nine projects are still open for clients to join in.

The Exhibition “De Éénvoud” opens the 28th of march and will run until 10th of may 2008 @ Architectuurcentrum CASLa, Weerwaterplein 3, 1324 EE Almere Stad
Open Tuesday to Saturday between 12.00-17.00

The Predecessors
“De Fantasie” and “De Realiteit” were meant to stay only for five years, but as always with experimental projects, they usually last longer than permanent houses. The houses are used either for permanent living, as holiday homes or studios.
They are part of a number of special residential neighbourhoods in Almere, amongst which such ridiculosities as The Regenboogwijk (Rainbow Quarter), Stedenwijk (City Quarter), Muziekwijk (Music Quarter), Filmwijk (Movie Quarter), Parkwijk (Park Quarter). De Realiteit and De Fantasie have arguably yielded the most striking architecture. De Realiteit comprises seventeen projects on the Noorderplassen lakes, while nine houses make up De Fantasie on Weerwater.

De Fantasie
De Fantasie has developed into a beautiful and tranquil neighborhood on the southwest shore of the Weerwater. Because of the involvement of the people in this area it has the feel of a holiday resort. The intention was to build homes which were to be demolished after five years. However, due to the project’s success, the houses are still standing. A striking design in this quarter is ‘Hard Glass’, by architect Jan Benthem of famous dutch office Benthem Crouwel. It was one of their first projects, now they are building every major train station, airport etc. This project, ‘Hard Glass’ is a glass, cubic villa which has been lifted off the ground by a construction of steel tubes. The living quarters inside the cube resemble an aquarium. The type of doors also used on ships divide the villa’s rooms.
The VVV (the local tourist information office) in Almere has a CASla route description through De Fantasie which you can enjoy without a guide.

De Realiteit
The ‘temporary character’ is also reflected in the much talked-about quarter De Realiteit. Here too the houses are still standing, as they are a resounding success. De Realiteit lies in a fairly remote area, which has resulted in a surprising ambience. The seventeen houses differ in the materials used and the construction, but mainly in shape. The house created by Dick Bruijne and Gerard Koppelman is a striking design which stands out. ‘A bird is flying underneath our house’ is suspended five meters above the ground in a steel frame. The house itself is a small, two-storied wooden cube. The surface area of the house is small in proportion to the steel frame.
You probably also come across ‘Markies’ a house which unfold from a trailer. I guess you won’t see it there though since its constantly on the road.
De Realiteit is situated on the Noorderplassen and the VVV also has a route description on this one.
Check out the website for more details on the houses.
More photos also here

Amsterdam’s finest photography museum, FOAM Fotografiemuseum, has what should be an excellent exhibition opening on the 14th March. The new exhibit by Daniel & Geo Fuchs: STASI – Secret Rooms runs until the 4th June 2008, and documents the interior spaces used by the East German Stasi.

From the FOAM press release:

From 14 March 2008 Amsterdam’s photography museum Foam presents STASI – Secret Rooms by the German artist duo Daniel & Geo Fuchs. The exhibition opens up the hidden rooms once used by the STASI, the infamous East German secret service, in a series of monumental photos. While much of the former DDR infrastructure has been destroyed, or given an entirely new function, the clandestine spaces that Daniel and Geo Fuchs photographed are still in their original condition. Offices, cell complexes, bunkers, living quarters and interrogation rooms: everything is exactly the way it was before ‘Die Wende’. The typical East European interiors, with their functional furniture and sober colours seem remarkably stylised in retrospect. Yet above all, what this large, intriguing project shows is the symbiosis of architecture, power and impotence.

In January 2004, the Starke Foundation invited Daniel and Geo Fuchs to participate in an artists-in-residence programme in Berlin. Following their successful Conserving and Famous Eyes projects, it was only now that they discovered the full extent of the DDR’s structural heritage in Berlin. Besides the Palast der Republik (the DDR parliament) this consists primarily of offices of the Ministry of State Security (STASI) in Lichtenberg, Bautzen and Hohenschönhausen. Even today many of these places remain practically untouched.

Daniel and Geo Fuchs researched the historical background of these locations and photographed them meticulously with an large format-camera. They used a strict system, photographing each room from the same perspective. Thanks to the subtle framing, apparently insignificant details acquire a new importance and give each picture an unusual interpretation. A red phone, a large, archaic intercom, typically East German furnishings, a solitary calendar; it all seems as if it were deliberately put in place by a fashion-conscious stylist. That the reality is rather more sinister gives these pictures their typically bitter aftertaste: the places we see here are checkpoints, prison cells, and for example the residence and offices of the former minister of state security. Daniel and Geo Fuchs’s extremely precise pictures gradually draw us into the maelstrom as we realise the awesome absurdity of this most recent chapter of German history.

Back in 1992, the young and aggressive Dutch architects that we know so well today, came together to work on a large project in Amsterdam. The Ruimtelijk Scenario Y-Oevers Amsterdam (Translation: Spatial Scenarios for the Y-Waterfront Amsterdam) shows a long list of heavy-hitting architects and urbanists that now largely control the European architecture debate.

The project was carried out by the teams of: OMA, Neutelings, van Berkel & Bos (now UN Studio), Christiaanse (now KCAP) and West8. The model was built by De Rijk Parthesius (including Vincent de Rijk). Even more impressive was the line-up of the teams and to see where each of the members went on to. At times, they started their own offices, as with the case of Alejandro Zaera (Foreign Office Architects), Winy Maas (MVRDV) and Rients Dijkstra (Maxwan). The final booklet for the project reads as a whos-who of contemporary Dutch architecture, and the designs and presentation methods within are absolute precursors to the styles developed by each of the offices throughout the rest of the 1990s until today. You can almost tell which architects worked on which drawings, it’s an amazing period just prior to the launch of the many offices we see today in Rotterdam.

It is one of the most impressive architect lists in the history or contemporary Dutch architecture.