Symbiopsychorhinoplasty

The Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘town-site city region’ the ‘Nwit’ is two intersecting lines forming an ‘x’ with a circle drawn around the stroke tips. A crossroads, a meeting, an encircling moat. It’s a lovely design, it speaks: a city is the place in which travellers stop. The meeting of people is a constant. Sites, more than the buildings that stand on them, are what should be searched for. It’s useful to think of architecture as dress, meagre, always used for an end. The sites where train stations stand are as sacred as any consecrated site. The iron barred carriages of the travelling exhibition (zoo, slave, circus, freak) shared the dust beaten ground blended out by cattle traders. During the industrial revolution, train’s were led to run into these centres, ossifying them as sites. Life begun to catch on, architects followed. If an architect managed to shoehorn themselves into a commission they were set, a single building could cement their consistency of thought. Look at Cuypers’s ‘Centraal Station’ in Amsterdam. Cuypers, with his love of Indonesian ruins and his grand plans, what’s more ruinous than the weather? And now with new weathers - winter in summer! The dressing of the site came at a time when mass building was coming into its own, the long site lines now unique to the world but particular to the Dutch encouraged big building. Good artists do not ascribe a cohesive view, a cohesive view would be to call (and build) canals as ‘waterways’ houses as ‘places of residence’ and parks as ‘green’. Amsterdam is not that, it’s curvilinear rings map onto everything. They are moat-canals, storage-houses, park-gardens - this is done by placing the castle-station at its centre, letting cohesion happen. What’s the equivalent of a ‘job for life’ for a building?

The sites of Sybold van Ravesteyn show a builder of human-like spaces for animals and animal-like spaces for humans. This is not cohesive, this is an oddity. And he was treat as such, the badge of honour that Van Ravestyn wears is that the Dutch loved to knock him down. Before the war he built a variety of projects, an office space for an insurance company, gas stations (twenty made, one remains near Arnhem), the renovation of an Art Nouveau theatre in Dordrecht, a holiday home in Bergen-aan-zee, water towers (gone), signal towers (only one remains in Maastricht), small town train stations (out of commission), a dining room on the SS Amsterdam (scrapped), the Rotterdam zoo. In his early career he fell in with the curving track of the Amsterdamse School for several projects, Kerkrade railway station housed blocky little platforms and brick buildings. The curves that you see in his later works do not come from this tradition, but from the Baroque, Van Ravesteyn has more in common with the harmony of beauty (his later buildings undulate and breath how an organ squeezes and releases, there is action and counter-action) not the beauty of deformity that the Amsterdamse School took from the Gothic Revival. What he did take was their reliance on brickwork standing for the civic and the near constant statuary associated with this branch of architecture. In Amsterdam there are four hundred expressionist bridges. Working in tandem, they provide the ways out and the ways in to civilisation, the artisan, the engineer, the architect. Instead of the needless erection of certain individuals, In Amsterdam you can find (I list, but it is not exhaustive) cookie cutter stars, little girls in dresses, enlarged craniums, horses straddling men, whiskered Eastern dragons with human palms, all cut from stone, all rendered in Krop’s not of this worldly figuration. I’m glad a Dutch architect was able to extract this vernacular and progress with it. Even as he veered into the Niuewe Zakelijkheid his vision was to employ stone cutters and metal workers to split any part of the building’s ends. Like a brasserie performing Service à la Russe, nothing comes in between the meal and the gut. Ornamentation is an in-between gesture, the human is left to perform conversation.

Inbetween the wars he built a variety of projects, an office space for an insurance company, gas stations (twenty made, one remains near Arnhem), the renovation of an Art Nouveau theatre in Dordrecht, a holiday home in Bergen-aan-zee, water towers (gone), signal towers (only one remains in Maastricht), small town train stations (out of commission), a dining room on the SS Amsterdam (scrapped), the Rotterdam zoo. In his early career he fell in with the curving track of the Amsterdamse School for several projects, Kerkrade railway station housed blocky little platforms and brick buildings. The curves that you see in his later works do not come from this tradition, but from the Baroque, Van Ravesteyn has more in common with the harmony of beauty (his later buildings undulate and breath how an organ squeezes and releases, there is action and counter-action) not the beauty of deformity that the Amsterdamse School took from the Gothic Revival. What he did take was their reliance on brickwork standing for the civic and the near constant statuary associated with this branch of architecture. In Amsterdam there are four hundred expressionist bridges. Working in tandem, they provide the ways out and the ways in to civilisation, the artisan, the engineer, the architect. Instead of the needless erection of certain individuals, In Amsterdam you can find (I list, but it is not exhaustive) cookie cutter stars, little girls in dresses, enlarged craniums, horses straddling men, whiskered Eastern dragons with human palms, all cut from stone, all rendered in Krop’s not of this worldly figuration. I’m glad a Dutch architect was able to extract this vernacular and progress with it. Even as he veered into the Niuewe Zakelijkheid his vision was to employ stone cutters and metal workers to split any part of the building's ends. Like a brasserie performing Service à la Russe, nothing comes in between the meal and the gut. Ornamentation is an in-between gesture, the human is left to perform conversation.

After the war his remit (barring one church and another theatre renovation) was exclusively building train stations in cities*, in which he built five. Van Ravestyn was chosen to rebuild Rotterdam Centraal after it was bombed, this was his last work and his largest in terms of clout (the larger the city the larger the site). Let’s talk Rotterdam Centraal, the 1957 dressing. A concrete half moon facade with grey office block towers brackets a glass lobby. This is a deception. The ‘art nouveau but functional’ style meets you as soon as you enter. It ripples, as if you yourself are the pebble, from the buildings front to the buildings end - the roofs of the platforms that hosted trains were said to have mimicked butterfly wings. These two opposing kinds of modernism, in one building, proved to be a case of double Dutch. Speak to a Rotterdammer who knew the building, and they will express solicitude akin to the way familial is implicated whenever one of its members turns to drink. “It was beautiful" “I see why it had to happen” The family fails, the state is brought in. When one diy’s their own inebriation they play a gambit, how can they cheat the system? The possibility of the establishment finding them out does not worry the drunk, what the worry is, and what Van Ravestyn failed to account for was the audience, they could tell he had had too much. The design is all facade, it’s architecturally thin. This was not the gentle push needed to swing into the sixties, for a nation known (and increasingly coming to be defined by) its tolerance, it’s either sobriety or cannibalism.

In what was to be a black hole gesture, Rotterdam demolished the building in 2007 and with the same hand, awarded Rotterdam zoo ('Het Blijdorp') its much belated Rijksmonument status.

To design for a specific demographic is not new. The social terms that Van Ravestyn was designing under meant that he was designing for the new breed of human known as ‘the commuter’, birthed from the railroad ties, this was the same breed that helped Holman-Hunt’s paintings acquire that ‘natural deterioration as deterioration naturalised’ look*. The commuter naturally wedged open the ability to work on the way to work, and to not work on the way to work, and not to work, stay off. Leisure time became a perceived dichotic to the commute. Whilst you were not working on the way to work you would also see, hear and sense people not working, going on leisure time. Animals born away from home. Full of nature, sold up the stream, dead. Monkey bars (They are always placed next to the slide) are a foray into zoo space. The first half of the term colours you for what you are: knuckle dragging chimp, the second half, despite describing a noun, interpolates you for what you could be. Safety replaces opportunity, safety causes pity; for the body not in danger has the ability to create pity, untouchable.

You enter the park as the money leaves your pocket. You puppet child limbs, for those feelings of deep sadness, trickery and wonder, where can they go? Just like the endlessly recoiled pinball that falls into circular abysses, those feelings do not leave the body. You’ve lost, three more spheres appear.

A symmetrical building. Baroque concrete is nipped out, its wings splayed. The complex encloses (in what is a child’s understanding of wonderful geography) tigers on one side, lions on the other. This is an adhesive application of knowledge, the architect pupates the child who walks the perimeter of the convex constant wall only for a concave building to appear - showing his first ever big cat scratch-stretch its forepaws on a column. Continue the walk and the same building appears with a new species, continents are nice things, just a short walk away. Eight doric columns line the curved symmetrical verandas, columns for monkeys, they live there now.

Walls on the outside separate you from the haves and the have-nots, walls here are all half-knocked in size. This separation induces the same kinds of trespasser poetics any walled garden produces, from Eden to Buckingham. This cursory feeling is ideal for the parent, who through traipsing the curvilinear maintains a constant sight line - unbeknownst to the child who finds the half wall lay out exhilarating. Trespassing is key to a race's progress. All advancements are in some way, an incursion on new ground. It is the reason why 2nd and 3rd generation skateboarders still prefer the ‘spot’ in comparison to the ‘park’. Van Ravesteyn designed the rocks for the red panda exhibit out of concrete, complete with faux-silts that mimic how they would have been cut in a quarry. As the skaters who occupy at the brutalist-adaptive Southbank Centre or the sub renting fauna who inhabit different enclosures, figuring out who designs for who is like looking into an incestious gene pool.

Buildings such as the giraffe house start to appear (no giraffes live there now it’s tigers). The giraffe has opened its doors, it is the building (the contracting, the craft, the work) that allows unfettered access. The building’s floor plan is a rectangle with an ‘L shape of glass for the giraffe and the negative space for you. The size of the building mirrors that, with the L shape being a house for a giraffe and the negative space being a house for a human. Engineering becomes a marvel. For what God has placed before us has nothing on what we can come up with. You only need to look at the underside of a ladybug to marvel at engineering. The same way a cat in playful kill tells us of the true sphinx, with stillness it completes multitudes - the giraffe is a substitute for mathematics, the superlative, the ultimate sum. The highest animal and the human, partly co-existing.

The Riveria Hall, which opens both horizontally and vertically from its entrance point, provides the feeling of a train station. Although rationally this does not make sense, train stations peter out, they don’t open up. For Van Ravesteyn this makes sense; deconstruction means creation. This building is an attempt at taking train station language; differences between smoke and steam, trailing electrical wires, the first second and third class, lonely waiting rooms, gendered carriages, and moving it into a new kind of architecture. This building marks the end of the interwar style of Van Ravesteyn, his best period, where he challenged the interpretation of ornament. Van Ravesteyn's project was to mollify a post-war Dutch architectural scene, which in its utopian ideals of rebuilding an equal society, meant a complete levelling of historical meaning; he felt this was rash. Because the nazi’s had proven that the total domination of people was possible, and then showed the proof of it, even small amounts of ornamentation, and the following discussion of their meaning, was considered taboo. For Van Ravesteyn ornamentation was able to “dissolve buildings”, to take you closer to the hand, for the hand of the architect is the hand of the people, an ornament always ends the line, a split end, a crack, a passing of one generation to the other. He took this from the delightful bridges of the Amsterdamse School, providing both an introduction and an epilogue for the citizen. This was a generational view of building, one that was at odds with a Dutch monocultural modernism; for a movement trying to find a modest way to implement a radical shift, a return to ornamentation would not cut it. ‘Verzuiling’* had to be replaced, not reinforced.

An example in how this was put to practice by the Dutch could be the large windows of Randstad homes that came to define Calvinist confidence, these windows were conflated into welfare state houses known as ‘doorzonwoning’, two story houses aiming to give working class people living spaces with lots of light, big glass windows at both ends. The narrow gamut of your friends and family, your pillar, now replaced with a wider than it is tall window, the broad ever-disappearing reach of the welfare state. Gerrit Rietveld, with skin in the game, was preferred at home and abroad. And rightly so, this monocultural modernism improves the Netherlands and is a lesson for an age in which the current architecture tries needlessly to be different instead of being individual. And so the Netherlands did look back to different architectural styles of its past to implement something new, they just didn’t choose this uniquely Dutch style. ‘Baroque formalism’ has now either been relegated to closed-off microcosms, such as zoos and theme parks, or to memory, which the former and the latter also cater to. The choosing of Rietveld and his compatriots over this oddball was the right decision, still, what this has left us with is a fawning for a germanic operatic model of building, short bursts of expression and then back to normal. There was never a concerted effort to take Van Ravestyn’s approach to history seriously, his line remains an interwar elflock. The weird appreciation for the dull theme park ‘De Efteling' is a result of this. There are cases of optimism, Zaandam Centraal and its neighbouring city centre (built 2010’s) practise a special kind of humility one that is unique to Holland, but appropriate for Europe in general. The whole city/station embraces the idea of this part of the world as a wacky tourist resort. It’s shocking and honest in equal measures. Curvilinear Randstad homes delineated, stacked. An admission of tolerance, a start.

*It is unique to the Dutch language that there is no word for the English ‘town', there is only ‘dorp’ (village) and ‘stad’ (city). The cities that Van Ravestyn built stations for, postwar, were ‘stad’s’ more than ‘dorp’s’.

*Literally ‘pilarisation’. An idea implemented in the Netherlands from the late 19th century, one that fell apart after the second world war. The Catholics lived in separate neighbourhoods to Protestants to the Liberals etc.. you were expected to marry people within your pilar, go to the same schools and attend the same sports clubs. A relic of this is the name of the football team playing in the Eredivisie known as RKC (Roman Katholiek Combinantie Waalwijk).

*Doorzonwoning literally translates as “sun through living” ; its actual translation is more akin to ‘sunny house’.

*If you ever look at the figures in Holman Hunt’s paintings they look like wax models with too much rouge on. His animals on the other hand are rendered with such conspicuous detail it makes you wonder if he preferred to be around animals more than he did people. Some people really do like their pets. Whatever the case he had an idealistic view of nature, ‘the shortening of distances’ (the classification of species and sub-species showing diversity instead of a divine order, the reformation providing a personal connection to god) created new ways to collect things, leading to a new collection of people, one that the British state did well to capitalise on through the use of the train to create a leisure/work dichotic, which Holman Hunt’s views came to be in tandem with.