Friday, October 14, 2016

my private amsterdam... in het oog


live at your own risk in the back garden shed,
downtrodden by division rules and rained on for a year...
"all the birds have built a nest except me and you",
while we are still waiting for the boot out the front door...




within a dry home, there are new houses supplied,
but none has come to occupy these pre-fab boxes...
despite the fluttering banners to attract the eye,
do they guarantee "transitional/life-giving/preciousness"?




it is more futile now to labour for the mighty euro,
when the one cent can no longer be strung along...
a horse to the rescue when the canals overflow,
if all the money in the world cannot save you...




better build on water and trust the bridges to hold,
or sail again for borneo to clear more jungleland...
the amsterbird stays lodged up in her treehouse,
watching for T and H to return to their lovenest...


Sunday, September 18, 2016

my private rotterdam... a cinematic vérité




on noordereiland shielded from the fists of war, from the hands of modernists...
the statue hails the swan afar, the benches still in quiet alliance


the street lurks silently beneath twinned abodes, fluttering hand-wrung flags...
the lace curtains part involubly, a face retreats ever so slightly


the artists occupy in abandonment, fortifying such with caked canvases...
leave directives in graffitied code by the door with no handle


the chandeliers are now a little too bright, the music a little less unctuous...
where the girls with velvet skin still lounge in bordello poses


the masked troll is standing guard, crypto-divining with a partial snake...
against a green door of no return, against a bricked in desire


from borneo load unloaded in crates and bales, hallowed island spice...
on ships beknighted upon tipsy seas, guided far by jungle drums 


and they keep coming to partake awhile, within the great columnar space...
of dudok's insured grace, the master planner and the grandmother


climbing high to an attic room over the river maas, on a chair upon the stage...
to face a crowded stance of such architectural contrivance


where along the river's edge, the three catharses float upon another stage...
to beckon those that sail forth through the flowing night



Sunday, August 28, 2016

my private rotterdam... the cinematic presence


in between watching films at the architecture film festival in rotterdam, I wander by dramatic structures old and new, floating heavenwards with monstrous glowing fruits let loose in the luminescent sphere of the markthal...





waiting for my ship to sail from the dock of the holland america line building, now transformed into the hotel new york, I dine in a lost era on a moonlit evening overlooking the wilhelminapier...





de rotterdam soars skywards in vertiginous splendour while I am lifted to the seventh heaven floor where the glamour set rises to the occasion and sometimes confuses the sunrise for the sunset...




drawn into the courtyard of the museum boijmans van beuningen by the black and white stripes swirling towards a mirror-framed folly, the alice in me slips through the slats and disappears into another dimension of dutch eminences...




enormous grey and yellow cubes of the kubuswoningen tumble precariously towards the square but manage to balance each other into place before being just great big boxes cluttering up the shaken ground...




it is enough to just skirt around this divine modernist villa, now the chabot museum, and to trace the pure geometry, the orderly arrangement and the pristine whiteness, still de stijl even in today's stylistic jumble...




finally, my ship has docked, but the rotterdam no longer sails out of rotterdam and the captain has left the bridge; the river breeze cools the decks and those passengers who embark can pass the night on a calm phantom sea...



...and in the morning the tri-colour flags of the netherlands will again flutter briskly against a clear northern sky...


Tuesday, August 9, 2016

my private rotterdam... cinematic mise-en-scène




I arrived in Rotterdam with a 75-year-old story on my mind, a story that my father-in-law had told our family many times and then written about vividly in his ongoing memoir. 
He was sixteen years old when he witnessed the first German Luftwaffe landing on the River Maas while standing on the Oosterkade bank of the river directly across from Noordereiland (North Island) where I was staying at a lovely AirBnB (and where my father-in-law's father had his office as the manager of a ship-building company).
His brother had even managed to photograph the event before his camera was confiscated by a Dutch policeman who was soon shot down by the invading Germans. A few days later, Rotterdam was bombed into submission and the Battle of the Netherlands was quickly over, but Holland remained occupied until 1945.
The camera was retrieved from the dead policeman and returned to the family later on that same momentous day, but the film had been removed - and to this day, my father-in-law does not know if it had been destroyed or stored away and forgotten about, proof of a personal historical experience now perhaps lost forever.


View of the Nieuwe Maas river from the Willemsbrug looking west towards the Erasmusbrug, with the Oosterkade on the right bank across from Noordereiland on the left.

The view from my perch on the top floor of an older apartment house that survived the bombing on the Noordereiland.

The surviving apartment houses on the Noordereiland now dwarfed by the Maastoren (the tallest building in the Netherlands) behind and further down the Wilhelminaplein, OMA's massive De Rotterdam's staggered vertical blocks.

Across the Erasmusbrug is a mid-20th century apartment building where my mother-in-law's parents had lived on the 10th floor for a while.

A flock of swans float towards the Erasmusbrug that is known affectionately as "The Swan" by the locals.

At the end of the Wilhelminapier where the headquarters of the Holland America Line once stood prominently alone, it has since been converted into the Hotel New York which has retained much of the nostalgic design features and furnishings of the historic shipping offices.


"Rotterdam NightTide"
a short film of evening scenes on the Nieuwe Maas river set to the contemplative music composed by my son ENZIO VERSTER.

Monday, July 4, 2016

architecture film festival ROTTERDAM


ROTTERDAM
where my husband's family lived through the second world war years when most of the city was blitzed, but has since mushroomed a compendium of progressive architectural second growth. It is only befitting that this regenerated port city featuring an array of distinctive buildings by daring architects now hosts a biennial Architecture Film Festival to draw design and film aficionados from near and far.

For years now, I had been wanting to visit Rotterdam again and attend the film festival- and here I was wandering the city with stories of my father-in-law's youthful adventures unreeling in my mind before sitting comfortably inside the LantarenVenster theatre to watch a series of films from around the world...



The theatre and film festival venue is located near the venerable Hotel New York where I treated myself to dinner after purchasing tickets for the movies I had planned to see. The building for this hotel and its restaurant had been the headquarters of the Holland America Line situated at the end of the Wilhelmina pier, from where some of our Dutch relatives had sailed off to New York on HAL cruise ships in the 1950's.


On display outside the entrance to the LantarenVenster was a possible solution for the most minimal of urban shelter that is basically two linked together sleeping pods. The so- called BOOMHUTTENFEST/SOLID FAMILY is a social design project by Sander Borsje and Tobias Krasenburg, and consists of two plywood sided "icosahedrons" connected with a crawl through only "corridor" and platforms in each unit for mattresses.





Before the showing of SHORTS: ACT UP - Six Examples from All Over the World of People taking Control of their Space, the AFFR programme director Wies Sanders interviewed Jan Schabert, the director of POJANGMACHA, a 13-minute observation piece filmed in South Korea.

A view of the lobby space of the LantarenVenster where other interviews were also conducted with film-makers and architects.


Temporary festival screens were installed in the PAKHUISMEESTEREN, a long disused warehouse built during the war years, and now in the process of being re-purposed into a hotel to be completed later this year. I accidentally wandered into the official opening of construction in an adjoining space when I went to see what was showing on the multiple screens, (but I was not allowed to photograph the celebratory proceedings).





Rotterdam's very own hometown starchitect Rem Koolhaas' DE ROTTERDAM stacked "vertical city" complex looms colossal over the old warehouse Pakhuismeesteren - a strikingly jarring contrast between a world when tea and exotic spices were shipped over from faraway lands (SUMATRA, JAVA, BORNEO as indicated on its rooftop signs) and stored in such warehouses awaiting distribution and consumption to a world where hypermonumental structures of glass and steel can now "warehouse" the consumers themselves ensconced in such technological luxury that was barely dreamt possible just 50 years ago.

I wonder how my parents-in-law would feel about the architectural metamorphosis that has so dramatically transformed their pre-war hometown into one of the most lauded design cities of the 21st century.