Saturday, June 13, 2015

Rotterdam & Breda

Saturday June 13, 2015

Joe's old co-worker Isaac at PACCAR in Washington was in Eindhoven working with DAF so he tagged along on our Saturday daytrip excusion to Rotterdam. We took the train to central station. 
Rotterdam Centraal Station by Benthem Crouwel, MVSA Architects and West 8 which opened in March 2014. The new station was necessary to meet a growing number of travelers. 




More architecture info and better photographs:
Rotterdam’s High Speed Train (HST) is 20 minutes away from Schiphol and 2.5 hours away from Paris. The hall roof is clad in stainless steel and gives the buildings its iconic character and serves as a proper entry from the urban landscape.  The roof has the largest application of solar energy in the Netherlands and in Europe. The solar cells reduce the station’s CO2 emissions by 8%.
First we walked toward the Blaak Station, to the new Rotterdam icon, Markthal, an open air fresh food and hardware market, the first covered market in the Netherlands realized. The arch contains apartments with views of the ground floor market space below. The combination of apartment and fresh market is the first anywhere in the world. MVRDV won the competition in 2004 for housing, parking and a market hall. Instead of a typical 2 residential towers with a dark market hall in between, the arch form with 2 open inviting but closed off to weather conditions on the ends. The glass façade is a cable net, the largest of its kind in Europe. The interior is bright and colorful with art inviting those in. There is no backside to this building. All service entry for the market and restaurants occurs below ground. The basement also houses an Albert Heijn grocery store, Etos drug store and Gall & Gall liquor store. The elevator to the residential apartments on the 3rd to 11th floor changes in size and location due to the curve of the structure. There are 102 rental apartments and 126 sold apartments. Each has its own outdoor terrace the full width of the unit and due to the arch shape the 24 top floor penthouses had a very wide roof terrace. Half of the apartments have windows into the interior market.
Markthal by MVRDV 









More architecture info and better photographs: http://www.archdaily.com/553933/markthal-rotterdam-mvrdv
I wasn’t able to spend the time taking the quality photos today I normally would but with a fussy baby, this was the best I could do.
Cube Houses


Wittehuis
Red Apple 


Joe and I both commented that we could live in this city. I love when Joe embraces the urban lifestyle that architects crave. 
Niewe Maas River
Eramusbrug and De Rotterdam by OMA 


De Rotterdam by OMA (Rem Koolhaus) is a mixed-use ‘vertical city’. There are 3 stacked and interconnecting towers of 44 floors at 150m tall and 100m wide. The building has a shared plinth with the lobbies to each of the towers. Even though it’s massive scale, the shifting blocks has a changing appearance from different views in the city. When Jackie was here in October 2011 the concrete structure was only constructed up to about the 8th floor and minuscule in size compared to the KPN building by Renzo Piano to the north.
De Rotterdam program
Crazy cantilever on inntelhotels
Kunsthal, an art musuem by OMA (Rem Koolhaus) which opened in 1992, was recently renovated by them after a 2012 major art theft of Picasso and Matisse.

Museumpark 
Now that's a big bend-over screw ;) 
Het Nieuwe Instituut


Folding shipping container by Holland Container Innovations in Museumpark
Pauluskerk by English architect Will Alsop in 2013
We went to Chinatown to eat at Tai Wu for dim sum
Brooklyn loved watching the fish tank while we finished eating.

We didn't really have much else nearby that we wanted to see in Rotterdam so since the train home was passing through Breda, we decided to get off and explore some more. 
We walked through Park Valkenberg
Kasteel van Breda (Breda Castle) is surrounded by moat. It is now home to the Koninklijke Militaire Academie (Royal Military Academy) for the Dutch Army and Air Force. 



Grote Kerk Breda – Onze Lieve Vrouwe Kerk Breda 




Grote Markt
We enjoyed some beers at Heeren van Breda before heading back to Eindhoven. 

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Brooklyn 8 Months

June 6/7, 2015

Jackie forgot to take her monthly photos on Saturday but she remembered on Sunday the 7th.
8 month old cutie sitting with her stuffed dog 
Brooklyn look this way! Brooklyn now scrunches up her nose when she finds something funny
Brooklyn’s over the shoulder look. Her tongue is always out now. 
Hard to get a still picture of this little squirmy girl! 
Happy girl scrunching up that nose again 
Brooklyn will be crawling any day now 
8 month old Brooklyn wanting to be on the go, not sitting still for photos

Joe made the best dinner recreation from our time in Tuscany: homemade pici pasta, veal meatballs, pork sausage in a red sauce and garlic bread.
Video of Brooklyn begging for more pasta! This is one spoiled 8 month old.