Artikelen

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  Jacob Roman, een innovatieve ontwerper?

  We know less about the architect Jacob Roman (1640-1716) than his reputation would suggest. From 1681 he was Leiden’s city architect and subsequently, from 1689 to 1702, architect to Stadholder-King William III. Partly as a result of these official posts, it is difficult to form an accurate picture of his output. In his commissions for close friends of Willem III he collaborated with Daniël Marot and Steven Vennecool. He moved in the highest social circles, was well informed about recent architectural developments and had access to the Bibliotheca Thysiana in Leiden, which housed all relevant contemporary architectural treatises. He was able to consult these works even before 1689, when he followed Willem III to England, where he studied the work of Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren at first hand. After his return to the Netherlands, his architecture took on a more austere classical form. This is evident from the new facade for the town hall of Deventer from 1694, the specifications for which are referenced for the first time in this article.

  Roman is also important because of his role in the design of fountains and the introduction in the Netherlands of sliding windows and a new kind of roof construction in which an all-round hipped roof was combined with the possibility of realizing a large formal space below it. He had already employed this in 1681 for Hofje Meermansburg in Leiden, and in 1694 he used it again for the town hall in Deventer. It involves the use of a kings post in the roof construction, whereby a braced middle post eliminates the need for a central support in the room below. It turns out that rather than discovering this Italian-inspired solution during his time in England, where such roof constructions were then being used, Roman had already read about it back in Leiden, courtesy of the treatises available in Bibliotheca Thysiana.

   

  We know less about the architect Jacob Roman (1640-1716) than his reputation would suggest. From 1681 he was Leiden’s city architect and subsequently, from 1689 to 1702, architect to Stadholder-King William III. Partly as a result of these official posts, it is difficult to form an accurate picture of his output. In his commissions for close friends of Willem III he collaborated with Daniël Marot and Steven Vennecool. He moved in the highest social circles, was well informed about recent architectural developments and had access to the Bibliotheca Thysiana in Leiden, which housed all relevant contemporary architectural treatises. He was able to consult these works even before 1689, when he followed Willem III to England, where he studied the work of Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren at first hand. After his return to the Netherlands, his architecture took on a more austere classical form. This is evident from the new facade for the town hall of Deventer from 1694, the...

  We know less about the architect Jacob Roman (1640-1716) than his reputation would suggest. From 1681 he was Leiden’s city architect and subsequently, from 1689 to 1702, architect to Stadholder-King William III. Partly as a result of these official posts, it is difficult to form an accurate...

  Ronald Stenvert, Edwin Orsel

  58-79

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  Het verhaal van een andere tekenwijze. De structuralistische architectuurtekening in Het Speelhuis van Piet Blom

  Dutch Structuralism was an influential tendency in post-war Dutch architecture and urban design. Structuralist designs and buildings are made up of repetitive elements that can in theory be adjusted in both size and function. They take social relations as their starting point and have the potential to promote interaction between the buildings’ users. The way structuralist architects like Aldo van Eyck, Piet Blom and Herman Hertzberger drew broke with the tradition of previous generations. They adopted new forms of representation, the most striking being the so-called spreektekeningen (drawings annotated with speech bubbles), hybrid drawings and brightly coloured grids. This article explains the significance of these drawings by relating them to architectural education at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture in the mid 1950s and through analysis of the design method, the role of the drawing in the design process and the way the drawings were perceived. It will become clear that they were the result both of a specific design method and of the ambition to enable the architectural design to communicate with society in a new way. ‘The story of another way of drawing’ can be traced back to a deliberate deviation from the Dutch government’s bureaucratic regulations, which were designed to foster an efficient building process aimed at the rapid alleviation of the housing shortage. The grids and patterns, the bright colours and speech-bubble drawings were intended to present a different picture from traditional housing designs and can be interpreted as an alternative to that bureaucratic and pragmatic building practice. Although much has been written about the emergence and importance of Dutch Structuralism, the role and significance of these new forms of representation have not previously been studied.

   The different style of drawing is evident in Piet Blom’s design for Het Speelhuis en Woningenwoud in Helmond (1972–1978), which is the focus of this article. In the design file for this mixed cultural and residential project, the structuralist drawing appears in various forms and functions and during different phases of the design process. It is, as it were, a sampler of the new visualization methods. More particularly, in these drawings of Het Speelhuis scheme, Piet Blom combined two extremes of architectural representation: a mathematically designed order and an intuitive and subjective architectural impression. The mathematical drawings based on a geometric system were for Blom a means of getting a grip on the complex spatial designs he envisaged. He then supplemented his abstract patterns and grids with speech-bubble drawings and collages. In so doing Blom entered a different world – that of an individual desire, struggle, communality and sensibility – aimed at communicating his design in a more human and accessible manner.

  Dutch Structuralism was an influential tendency in post-war Dutch architecture and urban design. Structuralist designs and buildings are made up of repetitive elements that can in theory be adjusted in both size and function. They take social relations as their starting point and have the potential to promote interaction between the buildings’ users. The way structuralist architects like Aldo van Eyck, Piet Blom and Herman Hertzberger drew broke with the tradition of previous generations. They adopted new forms of representation, the most striking being the so-called spreektekeningen (drawings annotated with speech bubbles), hybrid drawings and brightly coloured grids. This article explains the significance of these drawings by relating them to architectural education at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture in the mid 1950s and through analysis of the design method, the role of the drawing in the design process and the way the drawings were perceived. It will become...

  Dutch Structuralism was an influential tendency in post-war Dutch architecture and urban design. Structuralist designs and buildings are made up of repetitive elements that can in theory be adjusted in both size and function. They take social relations as their starting point and have the...

  Ellen Smit

  80-103

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  Plannen over de grenzen heen. Een vakgebied in wording op het Internationale Stedenbouwcongres van 1924

  In the summer of 1924 close to 500 people from 28 different countries visited Amsterdam in order to into immerse themselves in the town planning challenges of their day. Dividing lines separating national developments were transcended in substantive discussions about an emerging discipline. At that time, urbanization was generally perceived as a rapid, autonomous and disastrous process that resulted in unmanageable metropolises with a rapidly declining quality of life.
  During the conference, special attention was paid to ideas on regional planning: plans that spanned municipal and provincial borders and called for an interdisciplinary approach. This article focuses on the content of the debate on 3 and 4 July 1924. The papers, or ‘preliminary reports’, that preceded the conference have received a fair amount of attention, but it is the substance and atmosphere of the discussions themselves that reveal the openness and collegiality of the international exchange of knowledge.
  The conference in Amsterdam was no isolated event: an international urban movement, or ‘Urban Internationale’, had been developing in the background since 1910. Various Dutch and foreign organizations were part of a broad international network engaged with the issue of urbanization. Many well-known foreign experts attended the 1924 conference; as such it could be seen as a point of intersection in the multi-dimensional network. The debate covered such topics as housing, traffic problems, conflicting interests, land policy and public green space inside and outside the city. The main topic in 1924 was the possibility of tackling urbanization and ecological issues across administrative and disciplinary borders. At the time, regional planning was a relatively new concept in the Netherlands; the inspiration for such plans came primarily from England, Germany, France, Belgium and the United States.
  A second and even bigger conference in Amsterdam took place in 1938: the International Geographical Congress, with some 1200 participants from 36 countries. Participants in the relatively small Landscape section of this congress considered to what extent the resolutions of 1924 were reflected in Dutch practice. It transpired that in the intervening years many regional plans had been drawn up and the evaluation of interdisciplinary practical experiences had highlighted numerous difficulties that were still topical.
  The 1924 town planning conference appears to have been a unique occasion during which multiple urban movements collaborated and in so doing reached a broad audience of town planners, architects, engineers and above all (Dutch) administrators. The involvement of the last group led to a pre-war upsurge in regional plans. As far as the Netherlands was concerned, the 1924 conference can be regarded as the starting point of the rich tradition of regional planning, and perhaps even as the germ of post-war spatial national planning.

  In the summer of 1924 close to 500 people from 28 different countries visited Amsterdam in order to into immerse themselves in the town planning challenges of their day. Dividing lines separating national developments were transcended in substantive discussions about an emerging discipline. At that time, urbanization was generally perceived as a rapid, autonomous and disastrous process that resulted in unmanageable metropolises with a rapidly declining quality of life.
  During the conference, special attention was paid to ideas on regional planning: plans that spanned municipal and provincial borders and called for an interdisciplinary approach. This article focuses on the content of the debate on 3 and 4 July 1924. The papers, or ‘preliminary reports’, that preceded the conference have received a fair amount of attention, but it is the substance and atmosphere of the discussions themselves that reveal the openness and collegiality of the international exchange of...

  In the summer of 1924 close to 500 people from 28 different countries visited Amsterdam in order to into immerse themselves in the town planning challenges of their day. Dividing lines separating national developments were transcended in substantive discussions about an emerging discipline. At...

  Anne Schram, Kees Doevendans

  104-122

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