Tagged: history

Stained glass windows in the front facade of Steiger Church in Rotterdam during Open Monuments Day

12. September 2017

Open Monuments Day 2017 in Rotterdam: Churches, Shelters and Other Heritage

On 9 and 10 September, doors opened that usually stay closed. It was Nationale Heritage Day, or as we call it in the Netherlands: Open Monuments Day. Although the name is still singular, the event now covers the entire second weekend of September. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of Rotterdam heritage during those days. But fortunately, the program offers new surprises every year. And sometimes it’s fun to revisit a monument as well. Schielandshuis I had been in the Schielandshuis, the only 17th century building in the city center , when it was still Museum Rotterdam. These days,… Read More

Spherical panoarama, or little planet, made of twelve photographs taken at the lawn in the little park in front of Saint Lwarence's Church in Rotterdam

Digital art / Photography

19. June 2017

A New Park, a New Panorama: Saint-Lawrence’s Planet

There was a time when I made a lot of spherical and tubular panoramas but the last one, at Kruisplein, dates back to over a year ago. There are two reasons for this. First of all, those little planets are actually quite time-consuming. Well, Photoshop takes a lot of work out of your hands, but you still have to work hard to eliminate minor irregularities, fill in missing information, and tweak details. Secondly, I became a lot more critical in choosing locations. I am looking for special places, geometric shapes, beautiful compositions or other reasons. And I just do not… Read More

Artist impression of planet Earth, seen from a location at 50.000 kilometres above the Netherlands, showing the Northpole, Europa and Africa

Space art

17. April 2017

Rotterdam, Netherlands, Europe, Earth, Universe

April 22, the birthday of this blog entry, is Earth Day. There is no better day imaginable to talk about satellite and astronaut photographs of our planet. History The first satellite in orbit around the Earth was, in 1957, the Russian Sputnik-1 (which in fact simply means Satellite-1). However there was no camera on board. The first pictures of the Earth were made a few years later , on April 1, 1960, by the American weather satellite TIROS-1. Since then, our home world has been photographed many times. Some of these images have become iconic, like the Earthrise photograph from… Read More

Black and white photo of a two year old boy and a young goat, made in the summer of 1964

Photography / Various

19. August 2016

Six Decades of Photography

There are people – though they must be very old by now – who have witnessed both the first plane and the moon landing. A similar feeling comes over me when I think of how photography has evolved during my life. I have turned my archive upside down and made the following reconstruction. It will probably sound very familiar to anyone in their fifties or older and is hopefully informative for anyone who is younger. For convenience, I’ve summarized it into Six Decades of Photography, though I missed part of the first decade, and we still have to bring the… Read More

Interior picture of the basement of the Orange Bridge after adaptation to a hotel suite, with double bed and ship stairs.

Design / Visualisation

30. April 2016

Sleeping in a Bridge Keeper’s Cabin in Schiedam

In Schiedam, at a stone’s throw from my place of birth, is the Orange Bridge. This structure from the thirties spans the New Harbour. Since early this year, the bridge keeper’s cabin is managed by fellow photographer, local resident, architecture lover and Schiedam promoter Jan Sluijter, who uses it to organize exhibitions and other events. Here’s a pre-announcement: on 2 and 3 June there’s an exhibition about the architecture of Dudok, including my Bijenkorf triptych. A suite in the basement Under the bridge keeper’s room is a basement, which is accessible via a ladder in one of the towers of… Read More

Huf Building, a national monument from the reconstruction era, photographed from the square near Saint Lawrence Church, late in the afternoon, with the building and its lighting reflecting in Delftsevaart

Photography

14. March 2016

The Reconstruction Top 10 – Rotterdam Highlights from 1945-1970

The the post-war reconstruction period of Rotterdam lasted roughly from 1945 to 1970. That doesn’t mean that there were no empty spaces left to fill after that. But still: in those first 25 years after the Second World War, the center of Rotterdam changed from a barren plain back into a bustling city. And in that quarter of a century a lot of exceptional buildings were built in the city. That calls for a (extremely subjective) top 10. Historical layers It is a common misconception that Rotterdam is not very interesting in terms of architectural history because all history has… Read More

Impression of Dudok's Bijenkorf department store and windmill de Noord possibly reconstructed in Miniworld Rotterdam

Visualisation

15. October 2015

The Windmill Will be Reconstructed! But not on Oostplein

Well over a year ago I made a visualization of the reconstruction of the windmill on Oostplein in Rotterdam. A brief summary: the mill survived the bombing of 1940 but burned down in 1954; plans for rebuilding were voted down by the City Council because the windmill was standing in the way of progress. Since then, Oostplein has been the most desolate square of the country, or at least of Rotterdam. Reconstruction of the windmill would be a way to give the place some of its former allure again. Guerrilla marketing A guerrilla marketing campaign that I did together with Gyz… Read More

Spherical panorama Bourtange, The Netherlands

Digital art

27. April 2015

The Link between Bourtange and Rotterdam (and between a Pentagon and a Sphere)

A few weeks ago I was in Bourtange, the well-preserved fortified village in the Dutch province of Groningen. At least, I’ve always thought that Bourtange was a nicely preserved piece of history. But that’s not entirely correct. For more than a century, the fortress was completely gone and Bourtange was a boring farming village. In the nineteenth century, the fortifications were demolished and the canals were closed, which happened in many places in those days. Reconstruction Not until the sixties of the twentieth century came the idea to rebuild the fortress. In the seventies and eighties that idea was carried… Read More

Fragment of the double street map of Rotterdam which compares the streets, blocks and harbours of the city in 1939 and 2014

Cartography

27. October 2014

Rotterdam: a Tale of Two Cities

Anyone who studies a street map of Rotterdam before 1940 gets confused. Rotterdammers today would have a hard time finding their way in that pre-war city. Not only the buildings are different, also the street plan has changed beyond recognition. There are in fact two different cities. Those two cities share the same location but are separated by time. With a breaking point at the day of the bombing: May 14, 1940. Of course, other cities have also changed enormously since, say, the 1930s. But nowhere are the differences as dramatic as in Rotterdam. The destruction of the street plan Not… Read More

Artist impression of Windmill De Noord, reconstructed on the refurbished and greened Oostplein in Rotterdam

Visualisation

30. July 2014

Rotterdam, Oostplein: Return of the Windmill

If you would like to rebuild all the lost monuments in Rotterdam, you are faced with an impossible task. It may not be desirable either, all this nostalgia for an idealized past. We must move on and build cities that are an answer to the challenges of our time. However, I would like to make an exception for windmill De Noord on Oostplein. A relatively small structure, so it’s easy to realize. But the impact on the square and its surroundings would be enormous. Rotterdam 2040 A while ago I saw on Vimeo the movie Rotterdam 2040, created by Gyz… Read More