mark minkjan

For the April issue of @thearchitecturalreview , I wrote a review of Amsterdam’s de Nieuwe Meent housing co-operative. The project was self-initiated by a collective in response to a tender for co-operative housing and designed by Time to Access @timetoaccess (icw Roel van der Zeeuw Architecten) in a collective design process.

Thank you @selj for being generously open about the origin story, the ambitions, and the struggles and compromises along the way. Thank you @miranec_ and @andrea_verdecchia for talking me through the architecture and what it’s like to design unconventional housing. Thank you Sander Voogt of Amsterdam’s Land and Development Department for providing insights into the tender process, the city’s housing policies, and piloting co-operative housing stock. The great photos are by @rubendariokleimeer , the others are mine. (The graph is from @platformwoonopgave ) Thank you @eabeaumont for the sharp editing. Get your copy of AR April 2026: Universal Housing.

On Easter Sunday, we gathered one last time. Children and grandchildren around his bed. Pa was tired, communicating in short bursts, but still cracking jokes and cuddling with the grandkids. He kept believing in recovery right until the end, while those around him had a hard time doing so. Stubborn, but also strong and hopeful. He said he wanted his body to go “whooff” — up into the air. Not buried. We laughed hard. Also from relief, finally he talked about his ending. He worked hard his whole life, almost 50 years at more or less the same company. He put in long days. The number of times he called in sick over that half century can be counted on one hand. Wherever he could, he enjoyed himself. A craft beer on a terrace, a rolled cigarette, his barbecue, listening to Cuby & the Blizzards.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ That Sunday evening, mum stayed with him while the rest of us went to watch the Easter bonfires. The Twente landscape was dramatic, almost epic: sky red and pink from the setting sun, black clouds hanging in front of it, smoke drifting horizontally through the trees in the hard wind. Short downpours. It felt like the heavens were opening. My sister stood with her husband and kids at the bonfire on the Mageler Es in Den Ham, not far from where Wim grew up. I drove with Sarah, Tali and Simo toward Espelo, on the way home. Spring fires were burning left and right. During one downpour we had to pull over, the windows fogged up too much to see. Pa also had to catch his breath a lot that day. But he told mum he thought he was going to be alright after the end. Two millennia ago, the Germanic peoples in the region already lit fires to celebrate a new season, new life. The fires also marked the start of hard work ahead. It will be hard work for us too. He would have turned 70 in June. The Germanic peoples apparently also drank well at their spring fires. While the Easter bonfires were still burning late that night, Wim had his last whisky. He loved a whisky on Sunday evening to close out the weekend. With that Sunday whisky he closed out a whole life. 💎

ARTISANAL MICROCLIMATES Free workshop + lecture with Centrala (Warsaw, Poland) in Rotterdam. We are pleased to welcome architects Simone De Iacobis and Małgorzata Kuciewicz of Centrala for a program exploring low-tech, climate-adaptive approaches to thermal comfort. Organised in collaboration with Studio Verter, whose studio Thermal Practice runs this semester at RAVB, the program connects research, education and practice around alternative understandings of comfort in architecture. WORKSHOP — 6 March (10:00–17:00) At the former Hunter Douglas grounds in Rotterdam-Zuid, participants will observe microclimates and natural phenomena in situ. Centrala’s Artisanal Microclimate methodology emphasizes active observation, experimentation, and designing processes rather than objects — situating architecture within gravity, wind, light and water. 10–20 participants (students, architects, designers). Apply with a short motivation (max. 150 words) via [email protected] LECTURE — 7 March (16:00-18:00) at Leeszaal West, Rijnhoutplein 3in Rotterdam. Centrala presents their work on low-tech thermal strategies, including The Clothed Home, examining textiles as seasonal tools for climate-responsive domestic space. The lecture is followed by a conversation with Studio Verter, Studio C.A.R.E., and everyone attending. Register via [email protected] Join us in rethinking comfort beyond energy-intensive systems. Centrala’s visit is made possible with the support of @nieuweinstituut International Visitors Programme.

On my way!

2025 space bits. 2 Big timber buildings make cities smell nice. 3 Wolfgang Tillmans’ dismantling of conventions and of Centre Pompidou’s architecture that both illuminates the unseen and normalises the exceptional. 4 The post-commodity, feminist, anti-racist architecture of De Nieuwe Meent. @timetoaccess 5 Facilitating a storm of conversations between architects and others from all over the world at Tirana’s @breadandheartfestival . @loom.ooo 6 Schiedam’s low-carbon high tech 1785 Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. 7 A spatial performative presentation of Loom’s investigative journey along the Rhine River, at Goethe Institut Amsterdam. 8 Louis le Roy’s construction waste ecologies at Verbeke Foundation. (Eco-cathedral by Sven Verbruggen and Martijn Megens.) 9 How a gutted warehouse can be reactivated with precise interventions by @benweir.arch at @dehoopspace 10 Two exhibitions designed by @sarah_vandergiesen opened on the same day at Kunstmuseum Den Haag and Dordrechts Museum (still on show). @adegproto 11 Anexpensive flower pot but it’s social housing! @stefanoboeriarchitetti 12 Imagining a commons-based future for distributed data centres for the book Acid Clouds with @michielviersel and @annedessing 13 How to fill in gaps in the historic inner city, with Bureau Lada, HOH Architecten, Studio Anna Torres & studio ventura, and Studio Ard Hoksbergen. @loom.ooo 📷 @annaodulinska 14 Laboratory for Insurrectionary Imagination at Independent School for the City @school_for_the_city 15 how to dismantle and reconfigure mass-produced soviet housing blocks into grounded architecture with @rytis.b ‘s graduation process. @academievanbouwkunst 16 Learning what happens when a starchitect designs a social housing project in Beijing from Xu Weichao. 📷 @tijnvandewijdeven @nieuweinstituut @madarchitects 17 Making an audio production to look at the city differently with others in a listening tour. @loom.ooo @rietveld_sandberg_research 18 Stadsgrond is developing ways to make architecture less destructive and more grounded. 19 OMA’s spectacularly mundane affordable housing in Tirana 20 Staging the RAVB grad show with @md2__architects at @huidenclub

Opwallen: new space for the old city Is there any space left in the historic inner city? People often say it has become homogenised, frozen in time, and simply unaffordable. And they’re not necessarily wrong. Amsterdam’s Wallen area, also known as the Red Light District, is the most densely built part of the city. It suffers from tourism, but its also one of the most complicated and richest fabrics. It may feel overly crowded. And the demand for space seems always larger than what’s available. But there is still space for much-needed affordable housing, cultural renewal, and socio-ecological densification. Since 2024, Loom has been investigating the area’s gaps – space above existing one- or two-storey buildings. Twenty-six of these gaps have been mapped, amounting to roughly 4,200 m² of development space. With the Opwallen project, we aim to use this residual space to add a contemporary layer to the city centre and reinforce its social, cultural, and architectural fabric. Over the past months, four selected architecture teams explored possible ways to fill the gaps, resulting in a creative and realistic spectrum of ideas: Bureau LADA, HOH Architecten, Studio Anna Torres & studio ventura, and Studio Ard Hoksbergen. From 12–14 December, the research and the four proposals will be presented in an exhibition at Oudezijds Voorburgwal 136 in Amsterdam. The opening is on Friday 12 December, from 17:00–19:00. See you there! @loom.ooo @rene_boer_ @michielviersel Project teams: @hrsak_lada @natali.aguirre.mo @igorkokosic @hoh_architecten @jarrik_ouburg @bramvangrinsven @freykehartemink @studio.anna.torres @_studio_ventura_ @studioardhoksbergen @mareschut Photos: @annaodulinska Research drawings: Anna Torres Supported by @stadsdeel.centrum.amsterdam

Stadsgrond is developing ways to make architecture less destructive and more grounded. It sources earth from building sites in Rotterdam and turns it into construction materials. The earth is sorted, raked, dried, mixed and compressed into bricks. Unlike regular bricks, these compressed earth bricks don’t need to be fired at enormous heat in large kilns and they can disintegrate into soil after a building’s life cycle. It’s a zero-emission production process. They also do rammed earth floors and walls, clay plaster and other earth building materials. All this stuff is healthy and safe to build with and live in, and creates comfortable interior climates (perfect humidity, sound insulation, temperature buffering). The @stadsgrond production facility is currently set up in Rotterdam’s monumental Ferro Dome. Here, Stadsgrond works with recent immigrants to the Netherlands.

On the riverbank in Ooijpolder, east of Nijmegen, we sat between two crumbling brick walls — remnants of a 19th-century field oven — listening to birds nesting in the firing holes where peat once burned. The clay beneath us had travelled down from the Alps, carried by the Rhine, and fired into the bricks that built our cities. A brick is a river without water. As part of Loom’s confluencing investigation into living with wetness, my research traces cycles of soil becoming architecture, and back again, in places along the Rhine: from fertile floodplains to quarries and kilns, from extraction wounds to wetlands whose scar tissue now bursts with life. Clay layers need millennia to form yet are cut away in the blink of an eye; the resulting bricks, that required carbon massive emissions, are discarded within a generation. What if we built as the river does — slowly, regeneratively, and always in motion? You can listen to the interview and listening exercise in the Leaky Turns podcast, or read the full essay “The Regenerative River” in Loom’s publication Rhine River Rehearsal. The publication features @michielviersel @radna @rene_boer_ @katiatruijen ’s takes on wetness too, which you can also listen to in the podcast alongside @annedessing and @mugeyilma whose wonderful takes on water which are also included there. Find Leaky Turns in your podcast app. Send a note to [email protected] to get the PDF of the Rhine River Rehearsal publication or to buy a hard copy for €20. The photo of the Leaky Turns listening tour is by @konstantin_guz / thank you @stadsgrond for the rammed earth brick / thanks @rietveld_sandberg_research @goetheinstitut_niederlande for the support

how buildings learn

Luister naar de nieuwste aflevering van Het oog van de storm, de podcast van de RAVB. Architect Sanne van Manen is oprichter en drijvende kracht achter Platform Woonopgave en stelt fundamentale vragen bij het huidige woonbeleid en de rol van ontwerpers daarin. Waarom spreken we nog altijd over “bouwen, bouwen, bouwen” terwijl de grenzen van betaalbaarheid, klimaat, bodem en energie allang zijn bereikt? Wat betekent het als de woningmarkt de grootste aanjager van maatschappelijke ongelijkheid is geworden? Sanne pleit voor een hernieuwde positie van architecten en stedenbouwers: als samenwerkende denkers die integraal kijken, verbinden en verbeelden. Ze bespreekt in deze aflevering met Mark Minkjan hoe Platform Woonopgave uitgroeide van een reeks scherpe vragen tot een actieagenda met concrete oplossingsrichtingen – van wooncoöperaties tot het splitsen van bestaande woningen en het verbinden van woon- en zorgopgaven. Het gesprek gaat in op de oorzaken en effecten van de huidige wooncrisis, maar behandelt ook de kansen voor structurele verandering wanneer ontwerpers hun maatschappelijke verantwoordelijkheid weer actief opnemen en daar ruimte voor krijgen in beleid en de bouwpraktijk. Sanne is oprichter van Studio Meent en werkte eerder bij MVRDV. Ze was ook ontwerpdocent in verschillende studio’s op de RAVB. Op het moment dat deze podcast uitkomt is ze genomineerd voor de prijs Architect van het Jaar 2025 (naast KRFT, KSA, Vakwerk Architecten en Joost Ector). 1. Sanne van Manen (foto: Kirill Emelianov) 3-4. Actieagenda voor Wonen van Platform Woonopgave 5. Actieagenda voor Wonen tijdens IABR 2024 in Het Nieuwe Instituut 7. Bijdrage inspraak Rotterdamse Woonvisie, Stadhuis Rotterdam, November 2023 8. Lancering Actieagenda voor Wonen, Rotterdam Architectuur Maand, 2024

Loom published a new cahier: Rhine River Rehearsal. Over the past year, we followed the Rhine — walking its floodplains, crossing its meanders, tracing its industrial edges — to explore how we might live with water in an age of climate crisis. The river became our guide, test site, and mirror, revealing not only its own shifting currents but also how land, water, people, and stories are deeply entangled. This publication gathers five distinct perspectives — The Ubiquitous, Unruly, Resounding, Regenerative, and Embodied River — in a confluence of essays, images, field notes, and encounters. Together, they form a rehearsal: a collective exercise in reimagining the river beyond control and containment, towards fluid, more-than-human futures. From walking flooded islands and abandoned brickworks to listening at open-pit mines and queering the river’s myths, Rhine River Rehearsal invites you to drift between stories, sediments, and timescales. Rhine River Rehearsal is out now. You can ask for a download of the PDF or buy a copy for €15 via [email protected] Editors: Michiel van Iersel, René Boer, Katía Truijen, Mark Minkjan, Radna Rumping Guest reflections: Dirk Sijmons and Zahra Malkani Photography and visual material: Loom, unless otherwise credited Proofreading: Inte Gloerich and gervaise alexis savvias Graphic design: Karoline Świeżyński Printing and binding: Drukkerij Kaboem en Binderij Hennink, Amsterdam. Published by Loom – practice for cultural transformation Rhine River Rehearsal is an initiative of Loom in close collaboration with the Lectorate Art & Spatial Praxis at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Goethe-Institut Niederlande, Borderland Residencies and Campingplatz Grietherort. Join us for our end of residency event at the Lectorate Art & Spatial Praxis on September 30, consisting of two parts: a collective listening route following our podcast “Leaky Turns: Stories from Amsterdam’s Waterlands” and a conversation afterwards. Sign up via research.rietveldsandberg.nl