Marks

A Leporello for the Binckhorst forgotten monuments

We wandered looking for the stories first unseen to the naked eye. We looked for marks that proved the autochthonous inhabitant of Binckhorst, and the ruins that are the trace of an industrial past shifting to a service based and housing area. Our monuments are rather unconventional, Mac and Donna, The Angry Lady, Crossfit Ninjas, they are examples of the stories that, after widening our perspective on the area and being sensible to it, we discovered.

Falling in

love with

walls, gates,

steep

streets

as

a

mild

compen-

sation

this is our stretch gingerly chosen

it works for each all and what we do

Gancho's kids run the margin

'tween walkway and bus lane

snatch a purse phone necklace

While researching the Binckhorst area in Den Haag for the master 1 studio of Methods&Analysis, a literary/narrative excursive helped to get a better understanding of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. 

The result is a local newspaper which articulates a future perspective after the redevelopment of the area.

... these places have emerged

from sand and stone 

We received the following call for papers from our colleagues of the Association for Literary Urban Studies / Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies:

(Un)Fair Cities. Equity, Ideology and Utopia in Urban Texts

University of Limerick, 12-13 December 2019

We received the following call for papers:

“Phenomenographies. Describing urban and architectural atmospheres” of the Ambiances Journal. The issue is coordinated by Mikkel Bille, Federico De Matteis, Tonino Griffero and Andrea Jelić

The deadline for the submission of full papers is 14 April 2019.

Our proposal Writing Urban Places. New Narratives of the European City has been accepted by the European network grant COST. We are much looking forward to collaborate with our international colleagues on this four-year research project, of which you will find a summary below. 

By Jacob Voorthuis

Place a placeless point

where you might be

and another on that tree;

Measure and trace the movement

of the line

throughout a single day.

Last Tuesday, October 23rd,  we gathered to celebrate the first two issues of the Writingplace Journal. The afternoon offers a series of  inspiring talks, both about the trajectory of the Writingplace project at large, and about the content of the journal issue. 

October 2018

Imagination can take us to unthinkable places and face a whole world that could only be dreamt of. It can take us to a city under the sea in the midst of chaos or to a tyrannical and savage empire over the clouds, in which the slaughtered are thrown from the heights above, just to fall into the ocean to a city in the midst of chaos.

October 2018

October 2018

how to shape

boiling rice vapor

petrichor

August 2018

an architecture that means no good

indifferent to beauty and comfort

hopeless

July 2018

THE GARDEN & THE BOTANIST

BOTANY

‘Botany, branch of biology that deals with the study of plants, including their structure, properties, and biochemical processes. Also included are plant classification and the study of plant diseases and of interactions with the environment.’¹

June 2018

I effuse into the

voice of your breath,

not only in words,

May 2018

The sound of the gale woke them up

before dawn

warm bunk beds behind they tiptoed through the darkness

across the hallway downstairs through the kitchen of the old, old house

March 2018

I saw the small boy sitting on the ground outside

next to the porch of the old, old house

he was playing with a twig

January 2018

Presenting a double reading of architectural spaces, this article aims to bring together works of the architects Alvar Aalto and Rogelio Salmona and identify some shared themes in their architectural approaches.

December 2017

is the poet closer

to understanding place

than the architect?

December 2017

(Canción del Adiós ¹)

A mist built by artificial fireflies

is unwinding

around his fragile presence,

as an embodied quivering

near an unreachably free Seagull ²,

first – in flights aerial,

second – in hoverings embraced.

November 2017

These rooms I’ve been describing are mostly bedrooms; meaning rooms where a bed is used to sleep, or “slaapkamers”, as they’re called here.

November 2017

I

in that it speaks

it tells of time

of its founding fathers

of the builders, with words and stones

November 2017

“I couldn’t say I’ll make it the same or I’ll make it different, there were no things to copy, nobody knew what a line was, straight or curved, or even a dot, or a protuberance or a cavity.

November 2017

I

there are hardly any streets

- paved, with houses

on each side -

October 2017

Sometimes, the fragmented flow of the narrative comes to a limit of vulgar sincerity. The overlapping of thematically heterogenous windows reflects mutual permeation and influence of the design problems. The porous depth of their materiality is most visible through the closeperception of its (locally) organic appearance.

October 2017

when fire turns to stone
and streams stutter

October 2017

Mr. Quiñónez came in first thing in the morning, carrying a small plastic bucket, a sturdy broom, and a small shovel. Slowly, he swept the concrete slab with short, sharp strokes, uniformly directed towards a specific point on the slab.

October 2017

- embracing and enfolding

a Balance

between

a novelty and

September 2017

The image of this room is quite foggy in my mind, perhaps because I was mostly sad there.

We’d moved from what was supposed to be our dream home, to this much smaller, very cramped flat. Life had suddenly shrunk to a tiny room, which I had to share with my sister.

August 2017

standing still in water

in their frame of basalt from former times:

the poles, like gentlemen turned into stone

June 2017

an infinitesimal

almost capillary fissure

on the thinnest layer of coating

has stared back at me

May 2017

light entered through the coloured holes
blue and green and purple patches
of time, turning around the tower

May 2017

1. Car

Wet cobbles, the shuddering car creates weird noises, might want to slow down a little.

Drizzle on the windscreen

Can’t see a thing,

the rhythm of the wipers connects to the song on the radio.

May 2017

Elio was a man made of time and space, that is light, as everybody knows.
He lived alone in a circular house, he had a room for each day of the year, each one with a dawn door to enter in the morning and a dusk one to retire at night.

April 2017

Landmark/Statue

I am Admiral Jose Prudencio Padilla Lopez, leader of the Colombian fleet, liberator of Santa Marta and Cartagena, scourge of the Spanish admiralty.

April 2017

In Ljubograd,

built most perturbedly

is the love among the birds.

April 2017

From the threshold, I could see the cleanliness of the terrazzo floor, made with irregular cuts of marble of different sizes and colors, no bigger than the palm of my hands; cast in place with a mix of white cement and smaller granite pebbles, and polished to a glossy shine.

April 2017

Mr. F woke up one morning like many others. It may have been Sunday, but then again, Mr. F is not one that makes a difference between work days and weekends, he’s a lucky one. Lets assume though that it was Sunday, for the sake of all the other fellows who abide to the seven day week.

April 2017

Man, myth and material meet in four places in Bogotá.
A series of four poems.

~

April 2017

A wall to the east
to catch the new sun
through the jagged peaks.

March 2017

Europe offers an abundance of fictionalised landscapes and cities. The growing research area of literary geography and literary cartography aims at visibly rendering such complex overlays of real and fictional geographies.

March 2017

March 2017

March 2017

To dream a world of words
and words that are worlds.
To play with memory and feelings,
the mind’s hand searching,
feeling, grasping; scraping.

March 2017

‘I became very interested in the paradigm of science, where you affirm something
and want to prove it, and your only chance is to provide your listeners with the tools
of your research so that they can verify your hypothesis.’ ¹

March 2017

where does one reside when

floating above trees or seas from place

to place, arriving in a silent night, exchanging,

February 2017

Man, myth and material meet in four places in Bogotá.
A series of four poems.

~

CEMENTERIO CENTRAL

February 2017

Georges Perec wrote:

"What does it mean, to live in a room? Is to live in a place to take possession of it? What does taking possession of a place mean?

February 2017

Cramped and literally full of nooks and crannies.

Not a clean floor plan for sure.

Instead a convoluted set of little additions subtractions protrusions cuts.

February 2017

I hear the groanings of a warm mountain scent,

-solar flares casted through celestial pillars;

the windows, filled with forest, birds and clouds

are flowing under the wound,

January 2017

Long before satellite navigation, GPS and sonar techniques, our brave sailors relied on a network of light signals, warning them for shallow waters, unexpected cliffs or harbour entries. The duty of maintaining and keeping up these light sources was a difficult and respected job that went hand in hand with the latest engineering techniques of the previous 23 centuries.

January 2017

The Wounded Pot

A belly a wounded pot

Perforated

January 2017

I stand in a well, an opening in the solid linearity of the rest. I reach up.

My strong core of four pillars glows from within, while I am suspended in a constant

balancing act – holding platform after platform joint by steps (how many little steps?)

January 2017

Even before entering the flat, one could have a glimpse of the room where I fell in love with books form the hallway, where two old blue Schindler elevators and the stairs of the building landed. Facing this hallway, and the narrow patio it overlooked, was the room’s window, with its gorgeous glass louvers, in the style of the 1950s.

January 2017

They used to make fun of me, standing in this awkward corner of the plot, neglecting the alignment of all the other houses.

December 2016

Grumpy old attic

December 2016

where I faced death

“My Father’s house has many rooms...”

- John, 14:2

Above the room where I faced death was a high, pitched gable roof, built with rustic wooden beams and trusses, covered with slightly overlapping asbestos-cement # 6 Eternit corrugated sheets, hooked with a few steel, mostly corroded clamps.

November 2016

in a world of rooms to meet
we meet and we pass by
lives hardly touch but coincide
we then remain in signs

October 2016

The room where everything fell apart had a semi-circular floor plan, pivoting around a spiral staircase, outside.

The stair landing paved with grey linoleum gave way to a broad threshold, with two white wooden doors, each with a rectangular moulding with concave curved corners.

October 2016

The room where I was truly happy made a sharp corner, on a Flatiron-ish second floor. One entered facing the corner, through a deep threshold, between built-in closets, with dark brown triplex doors and detailed glass applications on their upper halves.

September 2016

floating above clouds between two lands, from the open and ambiguous, back to the organised and ordered.

June 2016

upon losing center I have noticed

that the effort which keeps a world in place

also threatens to bring it down

June 2016

Take 1. Saturday, around noon. After heavy rain.
Character: Heka, Jack Russell, 2 years old
Heka gets out of the car and takes the first hill as a crazy rocket, not minding the wet grass streaking her belly. Immediately, she disappears out of sight.

May 2016

Evidence: Inventory of Evidence Collected at the Crime Scene

April 2016

up north, in Jutland

daylight strengthens

March 2016

Kent State University College of Architecture & Environmental Design (CAED) has organized theGraphic Novels / Novel Architecturesymposium to explore constructive and projective relationships between architecture and comics. 

March 2016

The House of Books series indeed ignites a whole series of reference projects: houses of books, houses for books, small libraries, installations and pavilions literally or metaphorically building upon the knowledge constructed in books.

March 2016

In the years that followed the 1974 Revolution in Portugal, the country received several political refugees from Chile and Argentina.

March 2016

If I were to build a house where we would meet, my reader, it should probably be a house of books, of meeting thoughts. On the ground floor: books for daily use, to talk, to find common ground. Architecture books, some older heroes, some brave new worlds,...

February 2016

Two joints articulate the division of the Andes, as it moves northward across the Putumayo basin. The “knots” of Pastos and Almaguer, disentangle the thick thread that comes all the way from Tierra del Fuego into three distinct claws, obviously named Western, Central and Eastern cordilleras.

February 2016

When a silent speck of dust of yours
passes next to my soul,
like ink
I overflow inside me,

January 2016

a harbor is a place to depart from
the restless mind
finds an anchor point
in water, wind and expectation

January 2016

I will talk to you about BEAUTY AND SADNESS.

December 2015

some cities were founded by chance

comfortably reclined against an old meander

a protective hill, a vantage point

December 2015

One of the harbor cities in Europe in a constant process of transformation is Tallinn, Estonia. Simultaneously front and backside, the coastal area north of Tallinn city centre is an ambiguous place.

November 2015

How silently hollow are

the bricks that flow through lonely walls,

like a stony droplet over eyelashes,

October 2015

again I leave

the land between our lands

the city where our story lingers

October 2015

Stockholm is fractal. Those who live there inhabit smaller and smaller islands, with an increasingly ambiguous relationship to water, before they scatter out, like the pollen resting on the waters surface into the fractal dust that is the archipelago.

September 2015

After so many sketches, there is one that remains. Made almost two decades ago, the connection that very sketch has set in motion is still vital. An elastic connection with that land of rocks and water, of trees and human, architectural gestures.

August 2015

how they entangle, intertwine

with one another

with the space they occupy

August 2015

Hidden….,
Out of sight , out of mind. I find you
crawling your way up

July 2015

Testing the limits of the obvious

July 2015

PROPOSAL FOR A MARITIME MUSEUM, NORWAY.

July 2015

(Novara, MapaMudo by Luis Carmelo)

The cities drawn by Luis Carmelo, a Portuguese writer with several books published and founder of the online creative writing school EC.ON, began by being a humble mode to reinvent his own pace.

June 2015

it could have been the blank, mute wall

faced for hours

revealing a simple truth

June 2015

Only in pain

Have I noticed

How irregular is the floor

June 2015

We gathered in a restaurant I remembered, in a town where I had lived. Its windows facing a small canal, on its side a quiet alley. We sat around a wooden table in the back of the room, on what seemed to be a former church bench. Some paintings of Venice -where some of us had been, last year- on the walls.

May 2015

At the department of Wohnbau at the RWTH-faculty of Architecture, we design more than just houses, we particularly focus on the study of dwelling. We see dwelling as a verb, an action that is influenced by culture and forms the basis of house form and architectural expression.

May 2015

In her grand english townhouse, Jane Darwell found a pigeon timer and “A Book of Dovecotes” by A.O.Cooke. These heirlooms of her grandmother created a fantastic dreamworld in her mind,  a forgotten world, in which pigeon breeding has been existing for thousands of years and is still remaining active in pigeon racing events today.

May 2015

I heard about that place from a friend, a place from which one apparently leaves happier and more beautiful. She gave me a business card, written in an old font with only a phone number, no name, nor address. Today nobody would make their business cards look like this anymore. Everything about it seemed to come from an old forgotten time. Yet it made me curious.

April 2015

I am no longer sitting in the living room. I am in a place I have been, but never tread.

April 2015

1.

low, low horizon

why do you challenge my soul?

March 2015

Sometimes, when encountering a piece of architecture, we recognize it, not because we have seen it before but because it suits us, personally.

February 2015

1.

The symposium Against the Grain[1], organized by Bureau Europa in collaboration with the faculty of architecture at the RWTH Aachen, opened a space for the reassessment of a crucial question: “Is narrative architecture still relevant to the current condition?”[2]

February 2015

The long corridor with all the doors. The floor was slippery. You could slide a long way. North and south. The afternoon sun and the leaning tower. The evening sun and the treetops. Behind every door another home. Another bed, another closet, another desk. But yet the same every time. My home is red, your home is blue, but together we paint our home yellow.

February 2015

Trees crowned yellow and red

The air bright with damp leaves

A dry pond, with water all around

February 2015

We watch the school parade from the balcony.

Even in broad daylight, kids march holding broomsticks crowned by colourful paper lamps. We’ve seen these lamps lit at night, and heard the oldest boys raising havoc since dawn.

January 2015

Recently, the renovation of Alvar Aalto's libraryin Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia) has been completed. When I visited the building in 1998, it was in serious state of decay. Below, my impressions of that encounter in words and photos.

January 2015

5 years ago

my life weighed 26 kilograms

and fit the 50 x 34 x 81 centimeters of a suitcase

November 2014

At some point, the strongest figures simply start mutating in front of the careful observer, becoming each other, mindless of where they stand.

October 2014

The city is a field of narratives. Like in a narrative, the city exists through movement; the unfolding of events. Related ephemeral themes as transience and temporality are not properly captured by the formalistic and visual preoccupation of our profession (Havik, 2012). Therefore it is relevant to research the dynamic qualities of the narrative in relation to the intrinsic dynamics of urban life.

October 2014

between land and water
between dancing and falling
between dream and thought
between now and later and then

September 2014

ometimes you come across a story that is deceiving and confusing, but does it in a convincing and attractive way. „S.” is such a book.

September 2014

the (slimy) skin of the eyes

grows thicker

with time

scar tissue

September 2014

The classics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through.

July 2014

hidden in the forest

made or found

the space of filtered light

the rhythmic sound of hammers

June 2014

(Nothing but) Flowers...

- the Talking Heads

Bizarre is to lose shape.

For reasons irrelevant, form  sometimes (simply) disappears.

Not that I don't recall or mind the differences that exist between places; no!

June 2014

this city breathes. its alleys open to hidden squares, the sharpened sunlit houses, a water surface, a passage, then, enclosed again. light penetrates in courtyards and casts moving water patterns on a wall. half open doors invite me in and from a corridor a window leads to water.

May 2014

behind that rusty door, small steps lead to an open space where light enters through broken windows full of dust.

April 2014

Sometimes, I wander through these houses, hide from heath between their thick walls, sit barefoot at their verandas and let time disappear. Generations of characters pass by; one comes to sit next to me and tells a life-story, another is only noticeable in the movements of banana leaves and a hint of melancholy.

April 2014

The heat of the sun is nearly audible. My shadow disappeared.

March 2017

For every new beginning something has to end
A tree sheds its dead leaves,
becoming nutrition for new life.

March 2014

i plant my tree

not on the slope

March 2014

behind the blueish/green scaffolding screen

an exchange unfolds

within a variation on a theme

February 2014

Their first work was white, mostly; a series of small apartment buildings crowned by raw ceramic roof-tiles and grey crushed granite chips, plastered under the window sills as accents for the facades (rendered with a rugged, extremely abrasive finishing known as “pearl-ite”).

February 2014

rabbit eyes, you have – all pink

what’ve you been doing?

February 2014

She stood on the threshold of a discovery. The concrete floor of her house was littered with A2-sized tissue paper, 62 times the same drawing, but different, the colours blurring into each other in water.

January 2014

Nine
So many doors
For such a small house

January 2014

Jane Anderson wrote a poem about her impressions of the Writingplace conference. She presented her paper  "Fabrication of the Story Museum" with Colin Priest in the Rescription Session, November 26.

January 2014

after the intensity of the (always partial) end

after anxiety, akin to emptiness

after frustration, after fear

after doubt and hungry, hungry nothingness

comes a sense of stupor

December 2013

imagine a house
where a woman has been

November 2013

"Hadst thou stayed, I must have fled"
That is what the Vision said.

October 2013

This is not a small house. It is only so because here, the immense presence of the landscape makes the house an intimate place. As Bachelard stated, "intimate space and exterior space keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth".

October 2013

She builds houses with books, my girl, she cannot yet read but she knows the constructive power of stories.

October 2013

Following our monthly topic, a recommendation; a literary triptych, to be enjoyed and learned from, on the topic of the house. Read together, as a single, big book, these three approaches provide a beautifully complex vision of the house.

September 2013

"What shall we do, with all this useless beauty..."

- Elvis Costello

August 2013

the buildings act as frameworks

to keep commercial signs upright

they become invisible

August 2013

it climbs, this light, it sings

as if I follow, sitting in a train

the rhythm of passing ditches,

August 2013

because the house was here, forever
somebody said they’d built it

July 2013

“Think of (architecture) not as a set of forms but – and this is not to diminish architecture’s engagement with the world, or its status as a material practice – rather as a professional conference. It has a large and fluid constituency of professionals joined by interested outside visitors, such as artists, philosophers, and scientists.

July 2013

F: We are old.
H: What are you saying?
F: We are old. After all we have been through, we are still here. But why? Why are we here? Nobody is listening.

May 2013

he myself

„If freedom you defend, honor or restrict, within yourself you shall find“

June 2013

They laugh, talk, drink, smoke, looking at the slowly darkening sky over Tallinn at midnight. Young architects, graduated today, looking at the city in which they will operate: intervening, restoring, inventing, revealing old structures and new potential.

 May 2013

May 2013

into the depth of waters

into the depth of times

in ancient times they went here

under this ceiling

bathing in the dimmed light

Arab Baths, Girona.
photo kh 2012

May 2013

As some of the smartest allegories known to man,  a gorgeous three legged description of power comes from the East.

May 2013

...I want to be part of this world. When I woke up, I heard how the city started to pulverize the day between her centuries-old rotten teeth.  At several places in the neighborhood, holes were being drilled. Neighbors screamed at each other through the open windows. In the writings on the wall of the Palazzo across my bedroom I read that no smile can be deciphered. ... I want

May 2013

(In)visibility  can be taken onby many outlooks, but as Portuguese architects, intending to encapsulate architecture and literature, we eventually linked our José Saramago and the living experience in a particular space, though invisible, but certainly not blank.

April 2013

Instead of starting with a blank page, why not start with page full of words and black out all the words you don’t need? Poet Austin Kleon creates edgy poetry with a newspaper and a permanent marker.

April 2013

Tree of Codesis an exceptional book. The pages are full of holes, with occasional words here and there, fragmented and scattered.

April 2013

Arriving in the Netherlands by train from Belgium on a foggy Wednesday morning. The mist a veil over the flat landscape, covering villages, farms and churches in a whitewash , showing silhouettes rather than colors and details.

April 2013

Three older Roma men are sitting on a fountain wall in a small, north Bohemian city. The sun is not shining. Innocent picture it may seem. However.

March 2013

Call me old-fashioned, if you will, but I still yearn for the slow and patient exchange of experience that comes from listening to those who've gathered understanding with time, on the way.

March 2013

let’s us be silent
no more words wasted

March 2013

The asphalt is perfect, a bit of sand here and there.

In the front yard only mud, in the backyard as well. The new houses are standing there a bit awkwardly, side by side. The bricks are clean, tight and tidy.

March 2013

The architectural craft of pasta making.

First, the raw material is carefully piled up to form a small white mountain.

March 2013

Hiding in the shadows of sheltered arcades, I am present yet invisible. I am hiding in  in the sound of heels on polished floors, in the smells of perfume shops behind the doors, in the movement and chattering of schoolchildren passing.

March 2013

Ik neem het vandaag op voor alle onzichtbare gebouwen, de gebouwen die niet genoteerd staan in onze catalogus van het netvlies, de gebouwen die over het hoofd worden gezien, de gebouwen waar het stof van de onverschilligheid overheen ligt.

March 2013

barren, barren

ancient spears

life-long crises

February 2013

The title of this article introduces us to the beautiful thoughts of Christian Bök, a Canadian poet. To write “Eunoia”, he restricted himself by the use of only one vowel for each chapter.

Feburary 2013

‘Eunoia’ is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, and the word quite literally means ‘beautiful thinking’.

February 2013

The street belonged to us, to pirates, cowboys, robin hood, witches and all the other characters I can’t recall. It was the terrain of the samba band, the sound wagons and the drunken harmony.

February 2013

walking on ice towards the island
where three men eat silently
soup from a kettle
a table, a window

January 2013

this street is a sudden silence
I’m woken up by a darker morning light
filtered by snow on the roof window
this is street a wider space

January 2013

this street is a universe

i'm woken up by toddlers from a kindergarden

the apple tree it's called

 December 2012

there is a special way to turn the key,
use gentle force so you won't slam the door

December 2012

December 2012

Sanne Dijkstra

December 2012

style over style, layer upon layer, these houses seem to feed on time

stones and bricks and wooden beams and boards

clad with tiles and bound with knots of iron

December 2012

Het water, het riet, het te hoge gras. Onze voeten worden nat, onze broekspijpen ook. De schapen schrikken en hobbelen snel voor ons uit. Witte wolken in het groen.

November 2012

I live in a house without hallways, in my dreams corridors are always endless, or hidden, or dark and without people, with broken tiles, old doors and age-old porcelain wash basins.

November 2012

crouched over a pint of stout

he is haunted by sharp memories of a long lost love

November 2012 

We do not rent, squat or own our house; we guard it until it gets demolished. We inhabit a structure of brick, wood and glass that is in transition.

November 2012

The city lost its scents of a century ago.
‘Bad’ odours are expelled from the public domain.
The industry has left the city centre and commerce determines now the flavour of the city.

November 2012

And if I would speak to you, my reader, how would I describe that moment, yesterday, when after a conversation about places and atmospheres I encountered it. And recognized, just like before, that moment of speech, when the city  addresses me directly.

October 2012

In Autumn I travel the most;

to visit cities like Fedora, Maurilia, DespinaandTekla,

To walk along The Street of the Crocodiles,

November 2012

He met her when he was 16. Love at first sight, no, it was not. The first meeting went rather stiff. It was autumn, the streets were covered with orange and yellow colored leaves.

October 2012

serendipity had it, we found a water tower

in the prettiest of cities

and all that I saw there, I am

October 2012

for S.

oh, this silence, overwhelming
for sound, banshee footsteps, forlorn on the dimmest of streets
(running nowhere)

September 2012

Landschap;

ORIGINE laat 16e eeuws.

September 2012

groen

         na blauw

                        na grijs

                                     na wit

September 2018

While riding my bike through the fields between Rotterdam and Delft, I often stop at places where nobody is around. On a bench I explore the scenery.

September 2012

traveling
between reflections

September 2012

before my travel departures I take shelter in the summerhouse of Bjart, an independent shepherd who lives in the land of settlers. he explains to me the hard conditions under which he has to tend his sheep. fall, winter, spring or summer, at 64 degrees north you need to be prepared for climatic conditions, you might need a shelter. 

September 2012

Limitless, bound only by the turbulence of the northern sky (so romantic), I dwell among giants, and the controlled nature of the lowlands, in permanent discovery.

September 2012

I have been living in  Delft for two years already, but I always seemed to be too busy to visit Delftse Hout. It took a moving and a new, Korean house mate, to lead me there.

August 2012

Nicoleta looks worried when a large group of people enters the domain where she and her family have just moved, after their old house became inhabitable. They would like this process to be over as soon as possible, they look forward to the moment when the house is theirs to use. They have collected precious things and brought them to their new place.

August 2012

exhausted by all that is human

I am sheltered

by the depth in your eyes

August 2012

We arrive at the very edge of the village, next to the railway, where the wind has free spell along the new house that seems still alien to this place. Here, we meet Olguta, a woman with a beautiful face marked by a hard life, and Mitiça, her husband.

August 2012

The holy smell of my grandparents' village after the rain

the wrinkled saints, with their faces scared by sun and labour

the voices of the sacred animals, the humble livestock ...

August 2012

Refugio

bell towers have been silenced

stone piles flattened out

leaving an empty network behind

July 2012

way and further

way, he is called, and sometimes further
his signs appear in absence
when steps touch rhythms of earlier lives
she stops and waits. were they to meet here?

July 2012

I heard of places where the light reigns,

where the darkness cannot close a book.

I heard of places where darkness prevails,
only the stairs bring light.

July 2012

While the weaker fear and the poor (at heart) fight to keep the city barren

nature insists, quixotic, on treasuring this jewel

Behind blue tiles, rugged masonry basks in time ...

July 2012

Speed and progress.
Technology to help humanity. Improve, ease, cure.
Order, based upon mechanics that will shape our future.

A new ideal. A new utopia.

July 2012

The following poem was written in summer 2011, after a tour along the Scottish coasts, mountains (bens), lakes (lochs) and winding roads. In these landscapes one senses mythical power, age and wisdom.

June 2012

The stone lady receives me violent. Lovely.

She winks at me, biting her lip, then slaps my face - the cold Mistral. Yes, this is my pilgrimage, one that starts in the world, at its roughest, and always ends in my gut.

June 2012

High school ends. 800 km journey to the north. A station wagon packed with me and all my belongings plus two proud yet melancholic parents. Station wagon empties and there I am, facing what I thought of as absolute freedom in the tender age of 18.

June 2012

Take off. A turn from Amsterdam. Hanging tilted in the sky I see my coast below. The long stretch of beach along the North sea, the strip of dunes before the land gets organized.

March 2012

I live here. 

The world is flat and straight, and there are no flies. Seasons change, and sometimes bring the miracle of snow.

May 2012

From the beginning of time, this building has been assumed as a representation of the world - its interior keeping the most complete repertoire of contradiction known to man.

The end of the village, the start of your realm.

The darkest of hours, the shadow of the elm.

The space and the time, the cry of the owl.

The tent of the shaman, the nest of the soul.

March 2012

First she brought a toothbrush. Like a twig from another tree, she brought.

Next thing I knew, the drawers of my cupboard were full of her underwear, shower knobs drying slips and my t-shirts squeezed beneath hers.

Je cueillis un nid dans Ie squelette du lierre
Un nid doux de mousse champetre et herbe de songe.

Memory...?

There is one thing that has troubled me for some years now. A feeling that keeps me awake, let's me doubt myself.
I cannot be sure, is it real or not?

March 2012

My brother and me have quite a few things in common, but I think one of the most striking ones is our shared appreciation of my mother's tolerance towards our destroying the living room furniture.

March 2012

I hardly remember when they took the crib away. They simply said I was big enough to sleep on a bed, and the next thing I knew was that they brought in all these boards and started assembling my very first.

March 2012

"Writing the Modern City. Literature, architecture, modernity", edited by Sarah Edward and Jonathan Charley, Routledge 2012.

March 2012

Our tents stood at the edge of a cornfield. It must have been before summer, because the crops were not very high. It was early in the morning when I opened the tent, which I shared with my little sister.

February 2012

The light barely comes into the carcass of the old construction site. This time of the year the vines cover the façade, perfectly substituting the high tech sunshades that were installed here 20 years ago. All this high tech technology to make panels that follow the sun, shade, and produce energy at the same time

A place to write, or to write about? Or a place to write about other places?
This virtual writing place is a strange one - accessible from everywhere, still undefined, immaterial, without a clear shape or size. It is unlike any other writing place I used before.

February 2012

Part of anexhibition and selected for a conference in Prague, Mark Proosten and myself wrote the essay "Space is only words". It is an essay based on both our graduation projects for our Master degree in architecture.

February 2012

It is impossible to decipher it, basically because there is no single number that can round this building.

Its construction consists, since the beginning and all the time, of an endless addition of partial solutions to specific problems. Therefore there is no way to compare it to anything else.

February 2012

In no particular place (of no particular kind either – preferably, though, any prosaic and ordinary setting is best), this shape suddenly appears, sometimes.

February 2012

ations. That's the place. No, wait. I mean, I have never thought about it before, but if I could choose my three favourite writing “places”, then it would be my lap, agony and stations.

December 2011

The most recent group in the msc2 City&Literature series has just presented their results. This term, the course was given by Hans Teerds and Klaske Havik, and focused on the reading of landscape as a public realm.

December 2011

that is the strange part
that it is nowhere black
and nowhere really white
it is just how the light falls

December 2011

Architects are trained to draw, to express themselves through images, models, pictures.

Writers are trained to express themselves through language.

But we have two hemispheres on our brains that work so well together when we give them the chance. So why not try?

December 2011

The course City&Literature, taught since 2006 at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft, offers ways to use writing as a creative and critical tool to approach architectural and urban questions. The use of literary exercises allows heightening students’ perceptual receptivity and awareness of spatial experience, while the continuous exchange between the different modes of operating provides new means for site research and design.

December 2011

Writingplace is a platform aiming to explore alternative ways of looking at architecture, urban places and landscapes by the means of literary writing. Initiated as spin-off of the city & literature course at the TU Delft, writingplace facilitates communication between writing initiatives at school of architecture, as well as between practicing architects, writers and researchers who wish to explore the connections between these fields.