Tactical urbanism generates so much buzz now—what with cheeky-smart interventions like scaffolding seating, recliner benches, and recreational parklets—that it’s easy to forget how pedestrians usually get shortchanged in the urban scheme of things. After World War II, Rotterdam remade its city center with larger-than-life modernist principles in mind, installing big works of infrastructure fringed with big buildings and, in the process, cutting central Rotterdam off from its northern districts. To improve their lot, residents are turning back the clock to 1854, when the city architect proposed a plan based on public walkways. “He planned canal promenades as a way of structuring the city,” says Kristian Koreman, principal of ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles). Now, of course, any pedestrian amenities must preserve traffic patterns, so ZUS designed a sky bridge that will knit the city center back together. Read more!

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In his first foray into urban camouflage, Otten transformed this electrical substation in Rotterdam with hi-res photos on aluminum panels.

Here’s a neighborhood-beautification strategy that doesn’t require any code changes, construction crews, or red-tape hassles. Using only tile, mirrors, hi-res photo prints, and paint, the Dutch designer Roeland Otten camouflages urban eyesores—usually aged bits of infrastructure—by dressing them up as the much-cuter shops, trees, and sidewalks that the offending structures obscure. Unlike the loud statement of yarn bombing or this weird gnome project, Otten’s urban interventions improve the streetscape by diffusing, rather than attracting, attention. Check out the pictures!

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Project: RDM Innovation Dock

Architect: Groosman Partners Architecten

Location: Rotterdam, Netherlands

Housed in a former machine hall in the heart of Rotterdam harbor, Groosman Partners has suspended an office complex from unused crane tracks that, with its radioactive-yellow interior, could have been plucked from a sci-fi movie. Inspired by urban shelving units, the architects designed the first component to be expandable, with the ability to stack more office “shelves.” Accessible by an external staircase and elevator, the office complex is currently being used by a local school as well as companies in the “building, moving, and energy” industries. Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

Photos: Theo Peekstok

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Hans van Heeswijk Architects’ concept for the Meandering Tower House.

It’s not often that a European architect approaches American-style tract housing with anything resembling desire. But on a tour of the modernist developer Joseph Eichler’s homes in and around San Francisco, the Dutch architect Hans van Heeswijk was taken with the region’s hilly expanses of single-family homes. Imposing that style of development onto the already saturated Dutch Randstad—the urban super-region comprising Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht—is obviously out of the question, but California’s spaciousness got Heeswijk thinking about how to build a Dutch residence with the same sense of air and possibility. Read more!

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OMA’s massive De Rotterdam complex, an interconnected “vertical city”and the largest building in the Netherlands, topped out last week. To mark the event, OMA Rotterdam office posted a time-lapse on their Facebook wall that condenses three years of construction in under two minutes. Partners-in-charge Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon were on the site to celebrate what is a major milestone for the project, which began in 1997 and is finally slated for completion in 2013.  Click through for the video!

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image © artinfo

There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on in light of the latest art heist in Rotterdam, and someone thinks Rem Koolhaas is to blame! No, the starchitect did not jump in and burglarize the place, but securities expert Ton Cremers thinks the Kunsthal museum’s design, by OMA, helped those who did. Last week thieves broke in and escaped with seven important works by the likes of Picasso, Matisse, and Monet—and according to Cremers, the burglars succeeded because of the building’s transparency. Read more.

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The Dutch firm MVRDV has just completed its latest project: the Book Mountain and Library Quarter, both part of a larger plan to breathe new life into the town of Spijkenisse, located within the Rotterdam metropolitan area. Read more!

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Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedom Park. Image via www.facebook.com/fdrfourfreedomspark

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedom Park in New York City is finally approaching completion, with the official opening scheduled for October 24. The latest photographs convey the unmistakable mastery of space demonstrated by the architect Louis Kahn, who designed the park right before his sudden death at 73. Kahn’s only project in New York City, the park embodies the architect’s reverence for President Roosevelt, with whom he shared the desire to enrich the lives of all people.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, Kahn’s belief in the social role of architecture is the subject of a new exhibition running September 8, 2012, to January 6, 2013. Suggestively titled “The Power of Architecture,” it is staged at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) in Rotterdam. Read more.

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Last summer saw the completion of the 747 House, a villa for the jet age in every sense. With a floating curved roof comprised of a pair of recycled airplane wings, the house has all of the angular geometries and sweeping, gestural forms characteristic of the Californian expressionism found in Googie architecture of mid-century America, but without any of the crassness that came to color the movement. The architects were able to achieve a coherent aesthetic and model that fully incorporates the recycled materials, allowing them to inform the entire design at every step, from conception on through detailing. Following that example, 2012Architecten have designed a playground using only discarded wind turbine blades. Sounds dangerous…and awesome. Continue.

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Restoration work is by nature a glum affair. Not only does the work usually disrupt the visual and aesthetic continuity of the building(s) it obstructs, but it also warps the public space before it. Don’t you remember your first trip to, say, Paris, storing up your anticipation for weeks on end prior to that long Atlantic crossing, Hollywood films playing in your head and Jacques Brel ringing in your ears, only to find the Notre Dame blemished by an unseemly graphic tarp that grossly mimicked the now-hidden facade? Paris would never be the same again (not that that’s a bad thing).

Not the case with 2012 Architecten‘s temporary facade at the Stadskantoor, Rotterdam’s central administrative office. The architects were asked to design a public artwork that would span the expanse of the building facade while repairs were made and a secondary building we constructed nearby. They responded with a “vertical garden” comprised of stacked potted plants nested within window frames. The plants were arranged into naive arboreal forms, which were nurtured by collected rainwater. Aside from the garden, the architects also installed two basketball courts and street furniture to flesh out the new public square. The whimsical design, which was completed last spring, was commended by city officials as an example of how the municipality will orient urban change to come.

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