The Unmapped Amsterdam Guide

Dear guest of Suite 242 at De L’Europe Amsterdam,

In line with your unconventional experience in our suite, we want to spark your curiosity and inspire you to explore Amsterdam in an intuitive and emotional way.

Every place we discover is always unique to ourselves, even though we share them with countless other people. We attach our personal feelings and unique unrepeatable moments, including smells, sounds, clouds, and emotions inside us.

We are attracted by the inner narrative that places can transmit, mostly when this is hidden. Like liminal spaces, where the abundance or absence of references will force us to complete the narrative ourselves, to construct a meaningful answer, to uncover other perspectives, and thus to enrich both a place and our own soul.

Edition 1:
Temporary Design

The Unmapped Amsterdam Guide is a map without ways but instead full of stories about places we have a connection with personally. We invite our guests to get lost and discover their own memorable places and moments.

I am excited to curate the first edition of our quarterly unmapped guide, and share with you my obsession for temporary design.

Rushing through the city, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, or better said the buildings through the bricks. Endless series of windows, doors, facades, screens, stairs, curtains, and advertisements or the lack thereof. This series of unintentional aesthetics makes you look at our city from another perspective.

To me, works under construction are the ultimate expression of liminality as they — figuratively as well as literally — embody the transition from what was to what is about to come.

Cris Bartels, Strategy Director at D/DOCK

Windows

Eyes are the window to the soul, which might suggest that windows could be considered the eyes of buildings. They shut, they wink, and are fundamental elements of architectural beauty, reflecting the essence and character of a building.

Doors

Marking the threshold between spaces, doors serve as physical and symbolic boundaries. Even something as mundane as a temporary door reflects our experiences of separation, transition, and belonging.

Facades

Keeping up appearances, facades play a crucial role in shaping the visual identity of a building and the relationship to its surroundings. Temporary facades bear echoes of the past and hints of the future, revealing layers of architectural history as historic elements are uncovered or juxtaposed with modern materials.

Screens

Like expressive haute couture draped around the bone structure of catwalk models, temporary screens soften the rigid framework of a stone building. This interplay of the ephemeral and the enduring blurs the boundaries between the interior and exterior spaces.

Stairs

Transporting people from one level to another, stairs are a practical example of liminal space. However, around the Amsterdam canals, stairs also have a symbolic function of leading people to the piano nobile, symbolising their social status by elevating them above society.

Curtains

Anything temporarily obstructing the view from outside to inside and vice versa could be considered a curtain. Whether it is a patchwork of cardboard boxes, custom made shapes of paper for each pane of glass or an abstract expressionist art piece in mixed media.

No News

The medium is the message poetically embodied by blindfolded traffic lights. Empty billboards in the middle of nature, advertising that we have everything we need. Imagine the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum without De Nachtwacht.