Rotter(damn)

Over the past several weeks I've been working with my pals on a sustainability evaluation of a new development in Rotterdam, dubbed M4H. The project involves interviews with relevant stakeholders involved with the development, and yesterday the team and I went over to Rotterdam to conduct our last interview, as well as do a site visit. The city of Rotterdam is a very unique place it turns out. Like many European cities it has a long history, but its development has been punctuated with intense bombings during World War 2, which left it's city center completely wiped out and ripe for redevelopment. As a result it has become a place of architectural experimentation, which gives visitors the sense that you are in a sort of theme park, wherever you look there is some new oddity to admire. 

Iconic "Cube Houses"

This was my first time in Rotterdam, but my teammates Constantina and Jessica have both spent significant time living and working in the city, and proved to be excellent tour guides. 

We started the day biking around to take in the city, hitting some highlights of the city and exploring Jessica and Constantina's old stomping grounds. It became quite clear to me during this excursion that the city is indeed changing rapidly, as Constantina was constantly remarking about how this building and that are different/gone (reminding me of how my parents comment on the ways Portland has been changing every time I'm in the car with them). Later in the day during our interview, Monica Adams, our
interviewee, quoted Giuseppe Tomasi, saying "everything must change in order to stay the same", in regards to the constant evolution of our built environment, this could not be more true. Even in these extremely old European cities, where it often feels like stepping back in time, buildings, infrastructures, cultural norms, and everything are constantly evolving in order to keep up with an ever changing pace of life. It can be that when you leave a place you once considered home, coming back can feel much like meeting an old friend for coffee with whom you haven't spoken to in many years. I fully expect to be greeted in a similar fashion whenever I find myself back in Portland. 

"Free" Farmers Market

How existential. Anyways, we rode around the city for a fair few hours (to the chagrin of one of our less experienced cyclist teammates Modjeh. Sorry!), stopping once at a sort of farmer's union rally (it ended up being like a farmers market with the delightful twist that everything was free! Nevermind that they were the evil GMO farmers garnering public support. Free food is free food)

Wooden Escalator

Maastunnel

My absolute favorite part of the ride was taking the Maastunnel which transports you under the river in a delightful, well lit, clean 1000 meter tube, perfect for giddily racing through at top speeds (which I'm happy to report I got to do not once, not twice, but three times in one day). Not the best part, but a close second is the fact that you must descend the 20 meters to the tunnel via wooden escalator (circa 1942). 

The interview with Monica was held at her architecture firm, which itself is housed in a converted warehouse space in the M4H development. It is a truly amazing workplace that pushes the limits of shared-spaces. I haven't been to many arectacure offices, but this one was very amazing, almost made me wish I could be an architect, just to be able to work in a place like that. My favorite part of the complex however, was the shared kitchen space. It is a commercial kitchen with around a dozen workbenches, shared by different caterers and a restaurant in the building. Honestly, looking at it and hearing Monica talk about how it works brought actual tears to my eyes. One thing (of many) that I will take away from this day is that when we focus more on sharing things that are typically privately owned (kitchens, vehicles, production spaces, anything really), there is so much more opportunity for community building as well as more opportunity for creativity to happen. Very few people can facilitate an opportunity to work in a commercial kitchen or have the means to start their own garden, but when these infrastructures for sharing are available, there's much greater equity of opportunity in the development of creativity.

Yummy word salad up there. To wrap up, we ended with a night that consisted of three bars, one birthday celebration, one pool game, two bike chain malfunctions, and one (minor) bike crash. What a day. Definitely one for the books.