Bijlmer Boogie

(@smibtnofest) • Instagram-foto’s en -video’s

Happy vegan Halloween... #vegancake #vegan #ing #bijlmer #amsterdam #charcoal #gojiberries #matcha #halloween #party #veganchef (at ING Bank Amsterdam) https://www.instagram.com/p/B4SnWExJyqj/?igshid=vx12om1i10u1

A while back I did a post on the recent prevalence of British Brutalism, specifically Council Estates, in music videos. This trend has occurred as part of a wider resurgence of appreciation for the aesthetics of Brutalism. The interesting thing is that many of those videos simultaneously acknowledge - even exploit - this newfound fashionability, and yet also selectively ignore the incumbent gentrification. In many cases the buildings being used as symbols of a gritty urban underclass - such as The Barbican Estate or Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower - now actually comprise privately-held residences with million-pound price tags. The European version of this is addressed in SBMG’s 2014 video, which takes place on the construction site of a regenerated Modernist estate. After years of neglect, the building’s original residents were required to depart to enable demolition, which was then aborted in favour of restoration. Like so many similar projects, the architecturally-award winning re-development maintained the building’s Modernist aesthetic, but not its (less bankable) social ethos: the apartments, now purchasable as Buy-to-Let investments, are no longer aimed at, nor accessible to, those displaced original residents.

The subway tracks in the Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam. The Bijlmermeer, which today houses almost 50,000 people of over 150 nationalities, was designed as a single project as part of a then innovative Modernist approach to urban design. Led by architect Siegfried Nassuth and team

 The Bijlmerramp (Bijlmer disaster), Amsterdam, 1992 On 4 October 1992, El Al Flight 1862, a Boeing 747 cargo aircraft of the state-owned Israeli airline El Al, crashed into the Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg flats in the Bijlmermeer, Amsterdam. A total of 43 people were officially reported killed, including the aircraft's three crew members, a non-revenue passenger in a jump seat, and 39 people on the ground. In addition to these fatalities, 11 people were seriously injured and 15 people received minor injuries. The exact number of people killed on the ground is in dispute, as the building had a large number of illegal immigrants. A great many different ethnic groupings were involved in the disaster. An apocalyptic scene. Several of our interviewees experienced the Bijlmer disaster as a ‘nightmare scenario’. The fact that it happened after dark made the flames even more savage and threatening. With justification newspaper headlines read, ‘...like something out of a film.’ Some of those involved mentioned the bizarre and unreal nature of the disaster. “The Bijlmer of all places”. The Dutch are familiar with the Bijlmermeer - the Bijlmer for short - as one of those areas where contemporary social problems have a way of accumilating. For many people in The Netherlands, the blocks of flats are an object lesson of ‘how to not do it’ as regards of town planning. For many people the very name Bijlmermeer had become synonymous with aggression, crime, drug abuse, urban decay, empty dwellings and other social misery. Given its reputation it was no surprise that many people’s reaction to the news of the air crash was “not the Bijlmer again”. –  Complexity in Urban Crisis Management: Amsterdam's Response to the Bijlmer Air Disaster, Uri Rosenthal, 1994

February 21, 2018