Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Graduation show 2024

GROUND or influential geological origins, architectural membranes and soil stories

The elm tree sways
Pools of rainwater form and flow away again
A shadow (dis)appears
Clouds move by
And ground concerts, diverts and transforms
it is okay to be soft, body
surrounded by the skin of the building
find a crack, open up
sink

Architect Gerrit Rietveld advocated the openness of a building to outside, but in this case outside means being surrounded by tall buildings. Not even the horizon is visible anywhere due to all the human interventions. Upwards there is a feeling of openness to the sky, but downwards there is nothing but grey tiles that close off from the soils underneath. GROUND is an investigation in the dialogue between the static building, the experiencing human and the dynamic environment. It proposes a gentle encounter/embrace with the ground.
Soil sourced from Grondbank, original locations: Haarlemmermeerpolder (clay), Amsterdam Noord (peat) and multiple construction sites in Amsterdam (sand).

Research publication

Architecture of the Rietveld Academie
Starting point of the research is the place I went to 5 days a week for almost 4 years now: the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Fred. Roeskestraat 96. Looking into the history of the place I
dive deeper and deeper into the land and dig my way through soils unfolding their stories. underneath the academy.
Dutch architect and furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld designed the main building of the Rietveld Academie in 1963-1965 not only according to his view on architecture but also his life philosophy can been seen back in the design of the building.
That buildings influence on the people who live and work may seem obvious, but for Rietveld this had far-reaching consequences. Not only in the practical sense of how a building shuts out the world outside  and how people move within it, meet or isolate, but also in philosophical terms. Rietveld's architecture is an expression of his attitude to life.
He was concerned with making people aware of space because he “experiences space as a condition for life”, which we usually do not recognize as such. In our daily lives we simply experience space as a given and we are hardly consciously aware of its life-defining implications.
Space is often regarded as the empty dimension in which our lives take place. According to Rietveld, spaces determine our experiences at a fundamental level. A profound sense of space immediately raises questions about interpersonal relationships and our environment. Therefore, “the expansion and realization of our spatial awareness influences how we live our lives” I read in the Rietveld Conservation and Management Plan. Rietveld considers architecture as space art and, according to him, it is the artist's task to create and sharpen our observations and to enrich our interaction with the environment. By questioning our preconceptions we broaden our horizon and gain a greater appreciation of our sensory experiences.

Thus, according to Rietveld, openness of the building to its environment was very important. This is clearly visible in the design of the facade of the academy. The facade is the membrane between indoor and outdoor space, it determines the extent of openness and closedness of the building and its mental accessibility.  Rietveld enclosed the academy building in a glass curtain wall enabling free contact between inside and outside.

The special thing about Rietveld's curtain wall is that it is not only separate from the concrete supporting structure, but is also transparent over the full height and has no closed parapets.
This uninterrupted transparency gives the building a certain vulnerability, as if it doesn't want to impose itself on its surroundings.
Rietveld chose grey for the inside of the building so the students would be the ones giving colour to the space. In my experience it also allows the outdoor space to be more present through the big glass windows.

Rietveld advocated the openness of a building to outside, but in this case outside means being surrounded by tall buildings. Not even the horizon is visible anywhere due to all the human interventions. Upwards there is a feeling of openness to the sky, but downwards there is nothing but grey tiles that close off from openness to the soils underneath.

Dear ground,
I don’t get you. I just don’t understand who you are. You’re completely covered in cheap concrete tiles. Some of them have moss growing in between the cracks, showing a sign of the fertile soil beneath. But apart from that I can’t tell what's going on underneath the tiles.
Someone told me that the tiles lie in sand brought in from the dunes, and imagine a beach if the tiles would be removed.The pattern is perfectly geometrical, nowhere is there a crack to be seen showing the slow movement of the soil and roots beneath us. I looked up a groundmap of Amsterdam to find out what lies underneath the concrete layer. However when I zoom in on the Rietveld, all I see is a grey area labelled 'buildings'. It seems to me that the only way to really get to know you is by delving.
Inez

3 meters deep, sand and rubble
The top and therefore youngest layer, the layer I imagine as a beach, is sand. This layer did not arise naturally, but is regularly replenished by people to ensure that our feet are dry and the city does not sink. In my research on the soils under the Gerrit Rietveld Academie I looked into multiple sources like the DINOloket (Geological Service Netherlands), archives of Gemeente Amsterdam, Below the Surface (the findings after digging the tunnel for the Noord-Zuidlijn) and Stadsarchief. In those archives I found a lot of information about the deep and older layers of soil, but the origin of the top sand layer was hard to find out.

On the website of the DINOloket, where they have the most detailed results of soil drillings, it was only referred to as "anthropogenic". A layer of sand taken from somewhere else and put here to stabilize. The specific origin of the sand underneath the Rietveld Academy comes from is impossible to find out. Much of the sand Amsterdam is built on comes from places near the coast such as the area around Noordwijk and from around the city.
This happened for example in the Slotermeerpolder. In the 1950s the polder excavated to a depth of 35 meters to extract sand for the construction of Nieuw West. The polder thus became a lake, the current Sloterplas.
Nowadays, 70% of the fill sand is extracted from the North Sea which means that it is likely that the sand under the academy comes from there.

5 meters deep, peat and rubble
10.000 years ago, the North Sea regained ground and swampy areas emerged. Remains of dead plant from the swamps accumulated, compressed and formed into peat. In 1200 the houses of the first people living in what we nowadays call Amsterdam slowly sank into this layer of peat. Every 15 years the house had sunk so much that a new one had to be built on top. Archeologists have found layers of houses stacked on top of each other for as long as people didn’t put foundations under their buildings.

The Grondbank
It became clear where the fill sand came from, but I was still wondering where the anthropogenic beach layer came from, and where the soil that was excavated went.
After some googling I came upon so called “grondbanken (soil banks)”, sites were excavated soils that are either too wet or contaminated by years of industry are collected and cleaned before they migrate to a new location. There are two of them in Amsterdam, one in  Amsterdam-West and one in Amsterdam-Noord. At these grondbanken temporary landscapes are formed by large mounds of earth. Soils that usually are beneath my feet now tower above me. Street signs indicate where the piles of peat, sand and clay come from and soils that are usually below my feet now tower above me.
All soil brought to the Grondbank have rubble in them. Even when you start digging in a seemingly uninhabited forest in the Netherlands you will find bricks, glass, concrete. Soils carrying remains of buildings that once sheltered us from the alive, moving ground.

All soils used in the work “Dear ground,Dear ground,//on fluid geological origins, architectural membranes and soil stories” come from de Grondbank. The clay comes from the Haarlemmermeerpolder, the peat from Elzenhagen (Amsterdam Noord) and the sand is a mixture of sand taken from the beach of Castricum aan Zee and fill-sand from de Grondbank West.

8 meters deep, sea clay
During the Great Ice Age (the Saalien, 200.000-140.000 years ago), the land ice reached somewhere near the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. The ice pushed the sandy subsoil and moraines were formed around Amsterdam, creating a deep pit at the edge of the ice: het Bekken van Amsterdam (The Amsterdam Basin).
For thousands of years there were not such enormous changes in the landscape until 130.000–115.000 years ago, during the Eemian, the climate warmed again and the sea filled the basin. Sand and sea clay were deposited in the basin and when the sea retreated during the last ice age in the Weichselian (115,000-10,000 years ago) a layer of clay remained in
het Bekken van Amsterdam.