Date: 19 October 2022
Time: 15.00 – 17.00 CET
Venue: e-Lab (0.16), BG1, Media Studies, UvA
Participation: in-person or online (a Zoom link will be sent upon registration)
Registration: here
The Amsterdam Time Machine (ATM) together with Creative Amsterdam: An E-Humanities Perspective (CREATE) organize a Salon to discuss how historical knowledge about the management of urban challenges in the past is a potential source of inspiration to design sustainable solutions for the future.
They do so with speakers from the Amsterdam Time Machine, Arcam (Architecture Center Amsterdam), 3DAmsterdam, and the Friedrich Schiller University (FSU) of Jena. These partners have collaborated at the pilot project ‘Living with water in Amsterdam’, which aims to collect, analyze, and visualize historical data on water in the city. The project has materialised in an exhibition at Arcam showcasing interactive installations of the past, present, and future of Amsterdam’s relation with water in the Kattenburg area. The FSU Jena has made available a semi-automated pipeline and a prototype VR application to visualize historical image-based reconstructions of disappeared buildings.
Background: Living with water in Amsterdam
The project Living with water in Amsterdam aims to collect, study, and visualize historical data on the relation of the city with water and to increase public awareness of the Amsterdam water system. The project is a collaboration between Arcam (Architecture center of Amsterdam); the Municipality of Amsterdam; the Waternet water board; the University of Amsterdam ATM team; the AdamNet foundation of Amsterdam libraries and heritage institutions; and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS).
A first, concrete result of this project is the exhibition ‘Fluid Matter – Designing with water in Amsterdam’, which opened at Arcam on 8 July and lasts until 27 November 2022. The exhibition showcases several installations on the history and future of waterways in the Oosterdok/Kattenburg area of Amsterdam, created by AUAS students of the MA Digital Design in response to an ad-hoc design challenge. The task was to create a physical 3D map of Oosterdok/Kattenburg, which would visualize potential scenarios for future developments based on data of different nature. The resulting installations represent concrete instances of how historical data contributed by the ATM provides knowledge and inspiration to create awareness of contemporary challenges in urban planning and offer potential solutions to them.
To this end, the ATM has collected maps and historical data from the City Archive of Amsterdam (SAA). This information has been added to a thematic version of Amsterdam’s “digital twin”, created by the Municipality of Amsterdam, which, thanks to the addition of a time slider, allows users to visualize variations in water levels. As additional (2D) layers in this 3D environment, users can switch to other thematic views, such as the historical maps of the Amsterdam waterways from a birds-eye perspective, or the economic values of the waterways as reconstructed through a comparison of the taxation on houses in the canal belt in the 17th and 19th century.
Furthermore, thanks to a collaboration with colleagues from the UrbanHistory4D project in Jena and Dresden, the pilot has tested and made use of a workflow employing photogrammetry for the virtual recreation of historic buildings in 3D. Buildings in the Oosterdok that are no longer standing, such as the Marine Palace, which got demolished during the construction of the IJtunnel in the 1960s, were reconstructed as 3D models with historical photos as attire and shown on the map thanks to the addition of an interactive time slider.