August 25, 2008
Canal houses in Amsterdam and in many other Dutch cities have a very big “aaaaw” factor. Marie-Louise Groot Kormelink, owner of Kast van een Huis, combines this with “fun and hip things for your kids that don’t come from that Swedish furniture store”.
It is designer children furniture that can be custom-ordered, mixed and matched, and is very Dutch.
(Link and photo: kastvaneenhuis.nl)
August 24, 2008
Does steering your bike into Dutch traffic make you feel like you’re navigating a stormy ocean, hundreds of miles away from the nearest shore? Are you consumed by dark longings of burning villages on Java? Does the idea of paying shareholders with pepper and cinnamon instead of cold hard cash turn you on? Relive the days of the Dutch East Indian Company with these handsome VOC bicycle bags!
The “Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie” (often abbreviated till VOC) was an extreme successful Dutch Company which transported goods oversea. Transporting goods is for many Dutchmen still a daily job, with this difference that nowadays it takes mostly place by bike. Enough reason for Basil – the producer of bicycle bags – to translate this into an unique concept: the double bag VOC! This VOC-bag has an archaeological tinge and refers to the period of the VOC, the time the Dutch ruled the seas.
Basil will show the double bag VOC at Eurobike 2007 in Friedrichshafen, Germany, from August 30 till September 2. No word on when it will be sold.
Via Dagelinks (Dutch).
Tags: bags
August 23, 2008
Earlier this year, at age 62, traffic engineer Hans Monderman died of cancer. The Wilson Quarterly profiles the man behind Shared Space, the counter-intuitive idea that dissolving the artificial segregation of pedestrians, cyclists and drivers can make traffic safer.
And Monderman certainly changed the landscape in the provincial city of Drachten, with the project that, in 2001, made his name. At the town center, in a crowded four-way intersection called the Laweiplein, Monderman removed not only the traffic lights but virtually every other traffic control. Instead of a space cluttered with poles, lights, “traffic islands,” and restrictive arrows, Monderman installed a radical kind of roundabout (a “squareabout,” in his words, because it really seemed more a town square than a traditional roundabout), marked only by a raised circle of grass in the middle, several fountains, and some very discreet indicators of the direction of traffic, which were required by law.
As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn’t struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic process—stop, go—the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic.
What I assume to be Monderman’s own Youtube videos are still up. In them, he explains what Shared Space is:
Via BoingBoing. Photo by Jerry Michalski, some rights reserved. (See also my adventures with traffic wardens, and this bit about letting people choose their own paths.)
Tags: driving, roads, roundabouts, traffic
August 22, 2008
During the Stratego championship this week in Kiev, Roseline de Boer from Baarn, South Holland is the first woman ever to become world champion at the board game Stratego. It was also the first time a competition was organised for women. Roseline’s brother Vincent de Boer who won the world title last year, also competed in Kiev. He ended up in third place.
According to Wikipedia, the modern version of Stratego was originally published in the Netherlands, which would explain why the Dutch have apparently always won the championship, the Dutch Stratego Association explains.
And maybe champions run in the family, too.
(Links: rtl.nl, strategobond.nl)
Tags: board games, Kiev, Stratego
August 21, 2008
Retrothing draws attention to this 21st century reworking of the very first arcade console by Martijn Koch. Quoting the designer:
“I created Retro Space especially to honour the design of the first ever arcade cabinet (1971’s Computer Space). The perfect machine to mark the end of the marvelous time in gaming history.”
Retro Space is shipped with over a hundred licensed games, and “all the emulators needed to play your old 8 and 16-bit disks and cartridges from the attic”—which is usually a way of saying that it includes MAME. It also doubles as a home entertainment system, and will stream audio to your stereo set, video to your TV, or play either itself. Holy Neiman Marcus, where do I order?!
August 20, 2008
Dear lazyweb. As I am a complete troglodyte in matters of taste and style—something I am obviously trying to mask by using fancy words for “caveman”—and I need to make myself a small cabinet to keep magazines in and drinks on, I find myself looking for “open source” furniture. And finding none. Indeed, the closest I am getting so far are the designs of De Stijl giant Gerrit Rietveld, who apparently created some designs for cheap furniture made out crates during The Crisis of the 1930s.
The Rietveld-Schröderhuis website mentions a brochure made by Rietveld for the Commission Concerning Household Education and Family Leadership called Meubels om zelf te maken (Furniture You Can Make Yourself), created around 1943, 1944, but probably never published. Oddly enough, Paul Ket has low-res scans of this brochure on his website, and Brian C. Keith has even created detailed plans for some of Rietveld’s furniture (some of Rietveld’s designs are public domain in the US, I don’t know about the legality of the rest). If you’re too lazy, Rietveld’s grandchildren sell some of the designs as construction kits.
But to get back to my question: do any of you know open source furniture that I could use?
Tags: De Stijl, furniture, open source, Rietveld
Recently completed, Villa Peet is described as an experience in contrasts. These contrasts create a sensation of entering into new worlds through a series of “rabbit holes”. The lack of doors inside gives the ground floor a sensation of continuity in order to keep the spaces clearly defined.
If you look around carefully, Lelystad, capital of the province of Flevoland, is one big garden of architectural experiments. As a big polder established as recently as 1967 (the last Dutch province), it has room galore to let architects, like these cute bunnies, roam free.
(Link and photo: plataformaarquitectura.cl)
August 19, 2008
Ella Vogelaar, Minister for Housing, Neighbourhoods and Integration, wants to force builders to produce an outdoor space (balcony or garden) and bike shed for every apartment built. An earlier obligation to do so was dropped in 2003. Vogelaar claims the market insufficiently provides the need for outdoor living space and bicycle storage, and so she is making the provision of this part of the building code, the complex set of rules governing the construction of buildings.
The ministery’s press release refers to an extensive study into how the Dutch live, the Woningbehoefte Onderzoek (Study into Living Needs), suggesting that this research was somehow the basis of the minister’s decision. Although I could not find anything about a shortage of bike sheds or balconies, I did find this interesting little pie chart (with small typos original typos introduced by me, now removed) on page 11 of the results of the Woononderzoek Nederland 2006, entitled “Types of outdoor spaces that houses have”:
| Balcony plus garden | 15% |
| Garden | 58% |
| Balcony | 23% |
| Communal garden | 1% |
| No outdoor space | 3% |
August 18, 2008
It doesn’t matter what media you read, any recent article about Dutch education tells you how really bad it is. One ex-teacher, Peter van Kranenburg, decided to do something about (read: cash in) and start, according to Dutch newspaper Trouw, the Netherlands’ very first private elementary school. Located in Bussum, North Holland, Florencius started today and has four students of 8 and 9 years old and seven staff members. It costs 12,500 euro a year, which is not cheap. Florencius is of course hoping for more students and plans to open more school in Arnhem and Haarlem.
If I am not mistaken, most Western countries have had private elementary schooling for ages. I wonder why it took so long for someone to be done here. Rules? Willpower? Embarassement? Starting any private venture is usually proof that when money is put into something, it makes things better.
I went from a high school with 2,500 screaming students to one with 125, not counting the 25% that get kicked out for bad behaviour in the first year. What happened?
(trouw.nl)
Tags: education, private school
August 17, 2008
A book that has been in my personal library since I was a kid is the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook. No, not the fictional one, a real one (although I am not certain about the actual name, since I lost its cover).
Wikipedia describes the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook as follows: “In Disney’s fictional universe, The Junior Woodchucks are the Boy Scouts of America-like youth organization to which Donald Duck’s nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie, belong. […] Junior Woodchucks always carry with them a copy of the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook, a fictional guidebook filled with detailed and pertinent information about whatever country or situation the Woodchucks find themselves. Its depth of coverage is remarkable, considering that it is a small paperback book.”
In the pre-internet age such bottomless founts of knowledge were a popular fantasy. The most famous among them being the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which appears in the novel of the same name by Douglas Adams, and the Memex device by Vannevar Bush, which is widely credited as being the precursor of the World Wide Web. (An early version of the web was called Enquire, after the book about everything, Enquire Within Upon Everything, which I helped proofread for Project Gutenberg).
In the 1970s somebody published an actual version of the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook in Dutch, in slightly larger than pocket format, and I bought a second hand copy of it. I have long since lost the cover, the front matter and the first fourteen pages, so I am no longer even sure about its title. Presumably it ran along the lines of Walt Disney’s Jonge Woudlopershandboek. In the same series the now defunct publisher Amsterdam Book published “Walt Disney’s Groot Goochelbook” (Walt Disney’s Book of Magic), which contained magic, scientific and occult tricks. It was published in 1973, translated from a 1972 Italian version, and resembled the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook in size, paper type and so on, so I am guessing both are from the same publisher and the same time.
What I always found remarkable about this real life version was its depth of coverage. The guidebook went into all kinds of subjects that are useful for trekking: how to make a camp fire (it even goes as far as differentiating fires depending on what you want to cook), how to tell time by looking at flowers, how to estimate distances; then into guidelines useful for the city dweller: how to dry a book (if the pages are stuck together, put it in the oven!), how long to sunbathe (a table shows the time for each body part!), how to take care of your record collection; and also into more esoteric lessons on what names mean, how to decipher blazons, the meanings of onomatopoeic words, and so on.
As a kid, I thought the guide on how to remove stains from clothing was worth the price of the book alone.
(Images from top to bottom: how to make campfires, how to make book-ends from a card board box, how to use flowers to tell the time.)
Tags: books, camping, disney, hiking, woodchucks
