SWEET & SALT Water and the Dutch NAi Publishers Tracy Metz & Maartje van den Heuvel 5 Introduction 6 Water in Pictures 13 From Seascapes to VJ Art Sweet, Salt and Saline 22 Conflict 44 Dikes and Polders 74 Concord 96 Big Water 122 Profit 144 Wet City 172 Pleasure 196 Catastrophe 224 Myth 246 Water and the Dutch 280 Bibliography 288 INLEIDING / 7 INTRODUCTION / 9 No element is as intrinsic to the Dutch cultural being given room (a friend). Polders are being identity as water. A look at maps of the Nether- allowed to flood, dams are being opened, resi- lands spread over the centuries is enough to dential developments are being built in and realize how defining water is for this delta. on the water, dikes and dunes are being slot- When a storm surge hits, the Dutch watch ted into each other, rivers are being widened. anxiously to see whether the rivers are going to Engineers and designers are learning each overflow their banks again. They handle water other’s language, and creativity in relation to ingeniously and with great know-how when water is getting a new impetus. they want to control, repel or guide it. They use For Tracy Metz, born in the USA and a resi- it for profit, at sea or in the port that is the link dent of the Netherlands for over half her life, between the maritime world and the economy her travels around the ‘water world’ provided a in the hinterlands. They enjoy the beauty of fascinating look at the making, and the ‘make- water and can derive intense pleasure from ability’, of the Dutch landscape. She has been swimming, sailing or ice skating. writing for years on urban and spatial planning The know-how and technology with which issues, but the world of water was a major the Low Countries have dealt with water have revelation for her. During a year as a Loeb Fellow long been a source of wonder for the rest of at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she the world. Now that the climate is changing noted the great interest of the international – whether or not this is temporary or systemic, community at this university in what they caused by man or part of a natural cycle – water call ‘environmental planning’. There is also is muscling in from all sides. It’s raining more wide-spread curiosity there about how the often and more intensely; rivers are swelling; Netherlands, with its long and strong planning sea levels are rising. All eyes turn once again to tradition, is formulating a response to climate the Dutch: how are they dealing with this? And change – a response the rest of the world hopes what can the rest of the world learn from them? to benefit from as well. For this reason, each In this book, journalist and author Tracy chapter in this book includes an illustration Metz goes in search of an answer. She describes from abroad, to show that the Netherlands the metamorphosis now underway in the Dutch is not alone in this. After her fellowship, Metz landscape as a new relationship with water is initiated a two-year collaboration between the being fashioned. The Dutch engineers (hydraulic Dutch government and Harvard, under the aus- and otherwise), hydrologists, dike wardens and pices of which students produced innovative all the other specialists quoted in her texts have plans for dealing with water in the Dutch cities experienced a veritable revolution in thinking in of Almere and Dordrecht. Tracy Metz was recent years. At the national level, keeping out a member of the second Delta Commission, and curtailing the water (the enemy) is making not as an expert but as a representative of way for an outlook in which the water is in fact society at large. The knowledge and experience INTRODUCTION / 11 she acquired during her tenure on the Delta about landscape design, it is exciting to see Commission strengthened her conviction that the extent to which the visual arts and media there is a big, important and fascinating story culture can serve as inspiration. to tell about the ‘new water’ in the Netherlands. This book seeks to grant readers and view- The Netherlands as we know it was con- ers access to a world that concerns them quered by human hands from the sandy and directly and that is undergoing fundamental muddy river delta – and therefore it was an change. It sweeps them along in its authors’ expression of culture from the start. The admiration for the delight, ingenuity and crea- technology that keeps our feet dry is now tivity with which the Dutch deal with water – be joining forces with spatial planning, landscape it physically, with actual water in the landscape, design and nature conservancy. Designing a or mentally, with its representation in art. It is Netherlands that can withstand the vicissitudes also an invitation to planners, policymakers of the climate not only features a security and and designers to immerse themselves in the economic dimension, but also an aesthetic and multiple meanings we have ascribed to water cultural side. through the centuries, and to draw inspiration The contribution of art historian Maartje van for the management, preservation and con- den Heuvel fits in with the latter. For this book stantly changing use of the Dutch landscape. and for the exhibition of the same name at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, she examined how the Tracy Metz connection with water has found expression in Maartje van den Heuvel the visual arts and media culture. This theme was the central focus of her exploration of visual traditions, not just found in works of art in museums but also recurring as ‘visual com- munication’ in today’s media. She previously curated the exhibition ‘Nature as Artifice’, on landscape in the visual arts, especially pho- tography and video, which toured internation- ally. Water has continued to intrigue her: aside from a landscape aspect, it has a symbolic significance at a deeper level. Throughout the ages artists have attempt to represent this fascinating side of the fluid element, whether they painted Dutch East India Company ships on canvas, waited endlessly at the water’s edge with a photo camera until the light reflected in it just right, or filmed water nymphs under the surface in videos for VJ art. Her explorations took her from museum storage depots, where she picked out naval battles and ship portraits for the exhibition by flashlight, to the studios of artists for whom water is a daily subject of artistic contemplation, like Jan Andriesse’s houseboat on the Amstel River. The varied selection presented here in five themes gives the viewer insight into the repre- sentation and conceptualization of the Dutch water landscape. These themes (‘Conflict’, ‘Profit’, ‘Concord’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Myth’) alternate in this book with the chapters by Tracy Metz (‘Sweet, Salt and Saline’, ‘Dikes and Polders’, ‘Big Water’, ‘Wet City’ and ‘Catastrophe’) on the new design challenge for the Netherlands. 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Sometimes graphs of situations a city administration would this is done for beautification, as in the restora- rather not see: a young girl ploughing her way tion of old docklands and canals; but often it is through the water in a flooded street on her born of necessity. As a result of climate change, bicycle; two people, sludge up to their knees, it rains more often and harder; sewers cannot bailing out their cellar – all to make Rotterdam handle the load and streets are flooded – even residents aware of the water in their city; its rivers swell and overflow the quays along their pleasing as well as its frustrating aspects.