Building Option and our name…
Hey all!
Today I visited the TV Rijnmond building with a small horde of real estate agents. The building is a 40’s modernist building that isn’t good enough to be a monument, but it was visited to see if it would be or not. It isn’t the perfect building, but it does have atmosphere, it’s centrally located (click here for map) and offers some interesting options.
The building is a former headquarters for the regional TV station ‘TV Rijnmond’. Don’t get any hip thoughts, they’re a tiny operation, the building is only 1000 m2. It’s 5 stories high, a tower-like thing as each floor is about 150 m2. There’s two annexes tacked onto it at the back. Each floor is highly subdivided, with the largest room to my estimation being no more than 40 m2. This means it interferes with some of our visions and ideals. The way I see it is that it could be used as a interim solution, which isn’t as expensive as a full-fledged building for the period where we’re trying to group together everyone. We can still work together quite well, there’s a small roof terrace with kitchen which used to be a private apartment that can serve as pingpongtable location and funness space.
To my tastes, it’s rather a fun building. Not for disabled or handicapped people though, as it’s riddled with stairs and level changes. The rooms are light and have original steel subdivided windows like the Van Nelle factory. It has all sorts of nooks and crannies, it has a wooden elevator you can easily fit a garden gnome in. Or a big bag of cookies. It has a tiny hidden central circular staircase and… a roof terrace! (yes I mentioned that but I’m loving it).We can do all kinds of stuff to it since they are going to gut it after we would leave anyway for restoration. We can break down any non-bearing wall, construct funky installations and use the kids from the daycare center out back for science experiments.
The state of the building is poor. There’s very bad and damaged carpet in most places, not all windows close very well, and it’s full of old cabling, the odd chair and desk, and other crap we might make use of. The price quoted to us translates to about 100 euro per square meter per year, which means we need about 30 people to keep the rent low… but then each person has quire a lot of space (25+ m2). A few rooms can’t really function as work space because they’re small. We could reserve some rooms in the basement which has low light for work-shop or shady purposes. We have to take into account a high energy bill due to the napkin-thin windows and steel cold-bridge window frames.
Our name
We’ve called the initiative ‘Kubus’ for a while for want of a better one. But really, it’s kinda stupid, and we wanted to have all of you participate in naming the organization, possibly related to the building we are to occupy. But since a final building doesn’t seem very wise to occupy because of financial reasons, we are likely to go into a temporary building first. This means we don’t need to wait to go into one to think of a name… Hereby I open the Kubu-Naming project as our first official one. Everyone is invited to suggest names, so put on your thinking hat, use recreational drugs, pet the cat, whatever works for you, and reply to this message with some really awesome, wacky, rediculous and possibly useful names!
See pictures:
, 