You want to feel safe, not lost

Green, everyone loves green. Especially in the spring, when in that joyful explosion of nature the sunlight falls gently through the canopy of the trees. So when Henk Hartzema was commissioned to sketch the new contours for a large business park in Leiden, he thought of a green oasis with buildings detached in the polder land.

That was twenty years ago, and now look how it turned out.

In the empty meeting room of his office in Rotterdam – he is the only one at work on Fridays – urban planner Hartzema takes the yellow figure of Google Street View in hand with his mouse and flies over the 1,5m diameter screen over the landscape of hundred hectares. “This whole thing is the Bio Science Park.”

He lets the puppet float over red cobblestone roads with green magins. Because red contrasts so beautifully with green and contrast gives you something to hold on to. A sidewalk a sidewalk, a street a street. Grip on the world – which is already so elusive for many.

Every single tile and how it is located is familiar territory for Hartzema. You become part of a place if you come there twice a week, for twenty years. And he still never gets bored. It’s about the big, but also about the small. “Here the university campus. Here is a café. And look, picnic benches! People put it there themselves.” Rebounding: “That’s how we imagined it”.

The yellow doll hovers over Naturalis – “have you ever been there?” – and all those buildings, not by his hand, are organically grown miniatures in his framework. Some of the buildings, especially companies, were already there. He had no influence on it. And he tries to limit his influence on the new one. Keep it simple, one material, is his advice to the architect. Think ‘face’ but also ‘back’. Company name not too big on the façade. Keep it small. Manageable. Eye level, everything eye level. He can’t repeat it often enough. Keep the world, again, clear.

“Look at this one being completely aluminum.” He zooms in on a building. “And this one, all black, next to that green wall.” Smile. “Super clean.”

And of course letting go is difficult. You are a designer. You want to grab, control. But the time of great urban planners such as Berlage, le Corbusier, an entire district in one hande, is over. The world is already quite finished. It is now mainly retouching. And puzzling. Especially in the Netherlands, where everything has to be different every time. We puzzle a lot there.

“And this boy…” Hartzema has the puppet land at a large international company. “Only wanted to settle here if there was a fence around it.”

But he is not in favor of that. Because if one is allowed a fence, the other wants it too. And before you know it, everyone behind those fences is doing their own thing. While, his world must be touchable. So, after a lot of bibbling, the architect finally lifted the building a meter and put a concrete edge underneath, anti-ram raid. But sometimes you have to fight hard to get it done.

Henk Hartzema, founder of Studio Hartzema, has always been a viewer. As a child in the back seat, he always wanted to be in the middle between brother and sister. The whole trip stands, including ten hours to France. Look forward.

He was born in – hup, doll northwards, to a village surrounded by a horizon of fields – “Houwerzijl! Groningen! Middle of Nowhere.” Look, in this house. And here the presbytery. And when they went swimming, they did it in Elektra. “A hamlet with one house.”

There was nothing in Houwerzijl, except community. That is the essence of a village. Everyone understands each other, because everyone knows the same world. And everyone, no matter how different, realizes: we have to do it together, because there is no one else. And because there are so few impressions to gain, every impression – wind, smell, rain, sound – hits twice as hard. You feel, you see, you smell. You remember.

Hartzema’s world grew bigger and bigger. From Overijssel to Utrecht to Rotterdam, Milan, Manhattan. He feels at home in the big city. The chaos, the craziness. The realization that a city is never finished and that there is a new promise behind every street corner. The corner, so important! And so neglected! All those buildings that just go cold, distantly cold, around the corner. Without turrets or frills. “As if it doesn’t matter.”

A city is so different from the countryside. All those impressions of cars, trams, crowds, honking is too much. You close yourself off. Earphones in, gaze down. Understandable, but also a pity. You experience more superficially. And if you’re not careful, you’ll become numb. Or worse, you get uprooted. That is also what public space can do to you.

The realization that he should not design buildings, but especially the space around them, arose when Hartzema was lectured by teachers of landscape architecture at the end of his studies. They showed the French Baroque gardens with their symmetry and fountains and then – completely different – a meandering garden in British landscape style. You can design anything with exactly the same elements, he understood. But what sensation, what feeling, you want to evoke, is what counts.

He lets the puppet fly southwards and land on the station square of Rotterdam Central Station. Designed by a former colleague and “one of the most beautiful places in the city”. Because, cold from that station, as a visitor to the city on that immense square, you don’t have to do anything at all. “The city is at your feet. But here is… Nothing. Smell.”

And that’s impressive, when you consider that cities are getting fuller. More people, more impressions, more commerce. Especially on a station square, focal point of all centrifugal force. “But this square” – Hartzema blows out softly – “belongs to no one. That gives a sense of freedom.”

Urban planning is the psychology of public space. And urban planning is composing. First collect all the elements that define a place and then puzzle it.

Take such a station square, not a comfortable environment like – say – Blaricum or Wassenaar, designed in such a way that you experience a sense of control. A station square is a conflicting environment with cars and cyclists and trams that run over you if you are not careful. Taxis, spring roll vendors, McDonalds’, Burger King, protests, vagrants, a work of art, drivers who want to unload, NS employees who want to smoke. The wind.

And you have to deal with all those elements because together they make reality. And that is what Hartzema likes best. The sketch for a new design is often in his head after just one visit. But after that, he still has to convince all users of such a place. That the world he invents is more beautiful than the existing one. And that only involves a lot of talking. With everyone. “Because everyone is right.”

Hartzema puzzled in Venlo, where he sketched the contours of an exclusive residential area with a cycle path right through it, intended for everyone. He had a valley dug out and laid the path in it so that the villa residents look out on it from above and – even without fences or hedges – feel unthreatened. Hartzema puzzled over the new main entrance of the Amsterdam UMC, where many visitors already enter with an increased heart rate, under a ceiling of twenty meters high. Such a space can feel empty, displaced, uncanny. But also spacious, relaxing and free. Provided it is composed correctly.

There he worked with soft colors. And tiles on the floor, from grandma’s home.

Hartzema has now put together at least twenty spatial puzzles. Twenty pieces of the Netherlands with which he has fused. And now he thinks he knows what people think is a nice world. That is, universally, an environment that feels free, wide and spacious, but also warm, tangible, cozy and friendly. “You want to feel secure.”

But such a world is not self-evident.

Hartzema has the puppet land in the new urban planning of Amsterdam Nieuw-West. Large, sturdy buildings with apartments at the top and a glass shop plinth at the bottom. But look: downstairs the curtains are closed everywhere. And taped windows everywhere. A physiotherapist you can’t look into. A gym hidden behind advertising stickers. “Nothing happens here at eye level. No bakery, no coffee corner, no vistas, no windows.” He calls it “the plinth disease” and more and more cities are suffering from it. Result: people withdraw.

And let the puppet land – hup, south – in the vicinity of Berkel en Rodenrijs. Settlement of De Zweth. Holland at its best. “Bridge, mill, dike.” But a hundred meters away – zoom out – is a gigantic distribution center. One big gray mass with countless narrow carts in the parking lot. “Picnic land.”

We all didn’t pay attention for a while, he says. Because while everyone was busy with our cities, we neglected our characteristic hinterland. Solar parks, wind farms and distribution centers were built there. We let the cities expand, each time adding a new housing estate, and now they are growing almost against each other in that polder land. Just turn right from Berkel en Rodenrijs onto the N470. Two ultra-roundabouts next to each other. “Center of this region. Five, six, seven lanes. Double left, double straight ahead. You have no idea where you are anymore. Because it is so meaningless. So anonymous.” No man’s land.

And if you destroy public space in this way, take the soul out of it, then people prefer to experience the world from their homes. Or their car. They turn inwards.

Hartzema sees the biggest retreat movement – okay, one more time the puppet – in Zeeland, where the population is even shrinking. Where the whole of the Netherlands stores its “hardware” there. A full power strip. “Here, all those high-voltage pylons.”

While Zeeland is actually so beautiful.

The pinnacle for every urban planner is the design of a new city. And to turn the tide in Zeeland, Hartzema recently signed one. City on the Sloe, 30,000 inhabitants. With a cozy center and lots of water and residential areas in the green. Whether this city will ever rise is the question – not all Zeelanders are enthusiastic – but he himself would like to live there. Houses with small façade gardens, benches with peonies next to them. That makes us Dutch, he thinks, “really intensely happy”.

Deep down, he is convinced, the everage Dutch prefers to keep the curtains open. Just as he walked past the windows in the village in the evening and could follow the TV everywhere. Because the Dutch are group people, and our cities are built on that. “That’s in our DNA.”