Supersizing History

Zaanstad is not an historic city like Amsterdam, Delft, Leiden, Alkmaar or Hoorn. These were cities not only because they acquired ‘city-rights’ very early in history, but also because they were enclosed by a physical defence structure: a thick wall with gates, with the possibility of access from the roads around. This encircling wall gave safety within and also heightened the value and price of every square metre of building ground within it. Because of that, streets were not wider than strictly necessary and the market square not much bigger than the surface that the local market demanded.

In the second half of the 19th century, a law made it possible to destroy the defence walls to give way to the need of the cities to expand, add new institutional buildings, neighbourhoods and industrial areas. However, planning strategies throughout the 20th century guaranteed the continuation of these historic city cores as compact and lively centres of a broad mix of functions: government and other institutional functions, universities, schools, law courts, living quarters, commercial activities, exchange of goods, exchange of knowledge and finally leisure.

Zaanstad developed in a different way and because of that has a very different character. The River Zaan was running slowly through a peaty swamp in early medieval times. The peat land was completely uninhabitable until people started to dig ditches. By doing so, the water level in the peat lowered, the peat dried and was used for burning and slowly a landscape of fields developed on which cattle could be kept. The River Zaan ran through a valley between two areas where the peat was at its highest. On these higher peat lands, Oostzaan and Westzaan developed in a linear way along and on dikes parallel to the Zaan.

From the 12th century, the construction of dikes along the River Zaan created a safe and dry possibility for settlement. On and behind these dikes, a city fabric of houses, windmills, docks and wharfs developed. From the 16th century, industrial activities pushed living quarters aside. Behind the dikes, perpendicular to the river, along the ditches in the former peat, rows of houses were developed along a path. This is the basic structure of the historic villages on the Zaan, like Zaandam, Koog aan de Zaan, Zaandijk and Wormerveer. These villages developed spectacularly in the 17th century, as the application of the crankshaft in windmills created the possibility of sawing wood in an industrial way; a novelty that was forbidden in nearby Amsterdam by the wood-sawing guild. Very quickly, lots of windmills were spinning on both sides of the Zaan River, providing the wood that the Amsterdam shipbuilders of the Dutch East and West India Companies needed. Besides the sawing of wood, products like oil and wheat were milled and the Zaan villages developed as the first industrial area in the world. When Napoleon visited Zaandam in 1811 and saw a landscape of 1100 windmills, he said: “C’est sans pareil” (‘This is unparalleled.’).

In 1974, and not to everybody’s pleasure, the city of Zaanstad was created as a move, by joining the seven villages of Assendelft, Krommenie, Wormerveer, Westzaan, Zaandijk, Koog aan de Zaan and Zaandam, each with its own specific history and identity. To make sure that all the villages were treated equally, the decision was made to build a new city hall in the geographic middle: in a new low density suburb, in the middle of nowhere. Accordingly, a political strategy was applied to leave every village with its own village-like identity. So it was clear that Zaanstad was a very special collection of landscape lines of development, houses, windmills, wharfs, food and wood industries, but it certainly wasn’t a city. It lacked a sense of a central core; a heart was missing.

Around 2000, Lord Mayor Ruud Vreeman, a social democrat with a trade union background, led the city government to the conclusion that a drastic change of policy was needed. His analysis was that Zaanstad as a whole was losing more and more jobs. Jobs had been mostly at the level of labourer in the food and wood industries and most of the old-fashioned factories needed less and less people or simply shut down.

A new move was needed. The decision was made to leave the policy of equal villages behind and to allocate Zaandam as the main centre of Zaanstad as a whole. To attract modern creative industries, a better-educated workforce was imperative: so schools had to be built. To keep these young, well-educated people in Zaanstad, more housing and a more attractive centre was needed, with a city-like mix of functions such as local government, shopping, housing, education, cinema, cultural activities, hotels, leisure and so on.

Zaanstad developed in a different way and because of that has a very different character

A programme for the redevelopment of the existing, austere, poor looking and almost dead centre of Zaandam was written. The centre of Zaandam had developed through the centuries in a western direction from the place where a dam in the Zaan had been built and where two sides of the river joined forces.

Whereas the Zaan River used to be the artery of the Zaandam area’s industrial activities and created cohesion among the villages of the Zaandam area, the provincial highway and the railway have now taken over this role. Just as the construction of a bridge over the Zaan once created an urban centre, a new connecting bridge for cyclists and pedestrians was required to be built over the railway line and the provincial highway. On the west side the new schools and a substantial housing programme would be built and needed to be connected to the programme of the new city centre development on the other side of road and rail.

With the dam and bridge over the Zaan River and the new bridge over road and rail on the other side, a barbell model was created in which the centre is reached, stimulated and attracted from two sides. On both ends sufficient parking must be provided to bring this centre to life.

Starting in 2001, a master plan for the redevelopment of the centre and surrounding areas was made by my firm, Soeters Van Eldonk Architecten. This master plan was not the product of the architect, solely and creatively working in his ivory tower, but was the result of a series of workshop sessions with specialist planning officials from the municipality, developers of a vast shopping and housing programme, representatives of two housing corporations, the railroad real estate development company that owned important grounds, and two owners of adjacent buildings that needed to be completely or partially demolished and redeveloped. In the workshops the knowledge, aims, ideas, presumptions and proposals of all these different representatives were shared and openly exchanged by the architect in his role as the ‘drawing secretary’ of the meetings. Every workshop led to a number of drawings that were to be discussed in the next workshop, and commented on and changed for the next, and again changed, till the series of workshops could be completed with finalised drawings in which all the representatives recognised so many of their own ideas, goals, programmes and calculations, that a deal between all these different parties could be struck. The master plan was ready.

The comprehensive plan was made for a large area under the name of Inverdan. For a much smaller area, around where road and rail had to be bridged, a far more elaborate and detailed plan was developed. The aim of this detailed plan was to make one vital connection between the west side of these barriers, where a housing quarter of 4000 units and a vast added programme were foreseen in the Inverdan scheme, and the east side where a concentration of shopping, parking, housing and hotels were needed to revitalise the existing shopping street. This dead street was too wide for convenient two-sided shopping. Its dimensions originated from two paths with housing on both sides of a ditch perpendicular to the Zaan River. In the 20th century, the little canal was filled in and the street was given the name ‘Gedempte Gracht’, which means ‘filled-in canal’. Only seven years before, several glass shopping boxes had been positioned in this wide street. These boxes proved to be a complete mistake, since they separated the two lines of shops even more. It was not very difficult to come to the design decision to tear down these boxes and to bring the water back in this street by re-excavating the canal.

The Gedempte Gracht was a linear space with small and big buildings on both sides, placed not on a purely straight alignment; so the new water surface was planned at a slight angle with the building line, to enhance the oblique view on the sequence of buildings of different size and age. A series of bridges, some flat, some arched, were introduced to connect the two shopping sides. To shorten the long view line of the canal a few small traditionally-styled kiosks were positioned on main crossings. The section of the re-established canal was designed by Simon Sprietsma as a quay at the south side and as a narrow strip of lawn on the other side of the water. The green slope was lifted along the northern, sunny sidewalk to the level of a brick wall to sit on and sloping down to almost water level, thus showing off the green areas to pedestrians on the other side. To hide the ugliest (mostly modern) buildings from the view, trees were planted as ‘cache misère’ at strategic points on both sides of the canal. In the newly developed area at the west end of the existing buildings a ramp climbs on one side, while the quay continues at level on the other side, each at one side in a narrow canyon between buildings of a different scale. From the wide space of the Gedempte Gracht, we arrive here in a space that is narrow enough to make eye contact possible between pedestrians on both sides of the canal.

Gordon Cullen’s concept of ‘serial vision’ is applied here by slight changes in the direction of pedestrian movement at the north side. Every 50 metres the view line is directed at a specific part of the buildings that contain the public area. It is as if the pedestrian is skating in long strokes through the slightly twisted space between buildings. Facades, like faces, ‘look at you’ or ‘welcome you’ when you are approaching. The whole routing for pedestrians and bicyclists is accompanied in a ‘ponte vecchio’ way by buildings that address the public space. Both above the road and above the rail, the bridges have the feel of a city street, contained by fronts and functions. Above the road, running water cascades and if you’re near the banqueting halls of the hotel you completely forget that you are walking or biking at seven metres above road level.

To attract modern creative industries, a better-educated workforce was needed: so schools had to be built

The glory of the villages along the Zaan exists more or less as a memory of the past. A strategy was therefore needed to move the new development of Zaandam and its centre out of the massive shadows of its bigger, richer and ever famous neighbour, Amsterdam. For this reason a study about the history of the typical characteristics of the villages along the Zaan was done, in search of their ‘genius loci’. Of course, the history of the landscape development and the importance of the water system was found as typical, and much later the emergence of warehouses, wood-sheds, ship-yards, windmills, factory buildings and churches, but many of these building types existed all over Holland. More specific and distinguishing for the areas on the Zaan River were the small houses, built out of wood with their decorated fronts in green and white, addressing the paths and streets. You can find these houses all over the place, and the permanent exposition of a large series of them, together with a range of windmills, on the Zaanse Schans, made them famous all over the world. These small wooden houses are very much like those singled out by Robert Venturi, in the publication Learning from Las Vegas, as the ‘decorated shed’.

An ‘image quality plan’ was written to give direction to the architectural language following the genius loci of the Zaan, and the document was added to the general master plan, that was to be the basis of the ultimate designs for the realisation of the built volumes. Of course the city counsel first had to be convinced of the master plan and of the decision to emphasise local identity by the application of elements of the traditional architectural language of the Zaan area. This was successfully done by explaining that the entire world around us seems to be building in an overall anonymous language of glass and steel, without any local historic references, and that in this worldwide competition the longest and the biggest will evidently win the race, but will add no pleasure, no identity and no liveable environment to the locals. Poor little Zaanstad was in no position to even enter such a competition. The choice of the language was decided.

When I was appointed supervising architect in a team of planners of the municipality, individual architects were chosen for the different buildings in the development area. I acquired the commission for building the city hall and bus station on the narrow strip of land between road and rail. The city hall is designed as a series of workhouses on two sides of a central path. Flexible work places are situated in the houses and contact, interaction and small meetings occur in the backbone of the central path. The building addresses the small square in front with all the public functions available: public hall and reading room of the municipal archive at ground floor, wedding room and counsel hall at first and second floor. The mayor holds office in the wedding tower, while the aldermen, dreaming amateurs, have their offices in dormer windows in the attic.

Although the idea for the hotel, as a stacking of small traditional houses, was developed by me, as were the organisation and massing of the hotel at its location, the municipality objected to me actually executing the design as architect, because of my role as supervisor of the municipality. A performing architect had to be found and ultimately to be contracted by the hotel. The hotel and the city hall perform as the eye-catching buildings in the present development. Both relate to the local traditional language in a specific and different way. The hotel elevations have become three dimensional by the protruding of half volume houses out of the facades. For the design of the city hall, local architectural semantics were applied on designs of famous international architects Robert Venturi, Louis Kahn, Renzo Piano, I. M. Pei, Herzog and Demeuron, Aldo Rossi, Adolfo Natalini and Rafael Moneo, in the same way as the origin of the false front of the traditional Zaan style house can be found in the example of the Santa Maria Novella in Florence by Leon Battista Alberti.

However, the development of the Inverdan area today is far from finished. After 15 years, the development is only halfway. Over the railway a new station entrance with a hall bridging crosswise the bridge for pedestrians and bicyclists is designed and soon to be built. There will also be shopping and a vast housing development opposite the hotel and a cultural centre that will be in the front of the city hall and will complete the enclosure of the square between them.

So far the strategy of the master plan has proved to be successful. The number of visitors is constantly growing. For the first time many tourists are being seen in the centre of Zaandam. Along the Gedempte Gracht, shopkeepers and owners of buildings have joined in the trend and are making plans for new elevations or completely new buildings in the style of the Zaan.