By Gabrielle Kennedy / 26-03-2009

Amsterdam, a mere village by big-city standards, has been a European hub of creativity for over 700 years.  It’s favourite designer, Marcel Wanders, enamoured by the support and stimulation his city provides, is producing a book, “Amsterdam Creative Capital,” to acknowledge and celebrate the centuries of creativity that have gone into making his city the place it is today.

“Creativity results in a smart city,” writes Wanders in his introduction.  “A healthy city, a city where people want to be and stay … the creative class prefers to settle in open, tolerant societies that are unique and authentic, and that have a rich cultural history.  Smart cities make sure that they meet these preconditions and focus on the creative economy.”

Which is Amsterdam whose own rich and inventive past unfolds in the book, the 20% prototype of which is now ready.  Designed with all the Wanders flavours his fans have grown to love, it’s an homage to a city and to the people who call it home.

The book is a mix of interesting graphics, unexpected layouts and images randomly dispersed with page numbers directing readers to the relevant text.  Classical paintings lie alongside cartoons, as well as old and original photographs taken especially for the book.

“When we started doing research we discovered that there was just so much to go through,” says project manager and principal contributor Willemijn van Herwijnen.  “It was a complicated process discovering what really was creative.”

By that she means devising the strict criteria that the team of fifteen used to judge work.  It had to be creative, original and to have made a real and widespread difference to the human condition.  There had to be an overwhelming sense that without this creative invention, a real problem would exist.

Some inclusions are Fokker, the airplane designer whose work paved the way for today’s Boeing 787 and Opland, the cartoonist who designed the famous 80s anti-nuclear protest symbol. Jan Swammerdam pioneering scientific discoveries about the human body are in, and of course the VOC (Dutch East India Company) – the first multinational and public limited company. The renowned Amsterdam School of architecture is in as well as hot chocolate, everyone’s favourite winter drink invented in 1828 by Johannes van Houten.  John Adams, the USA’s first ambassador to The Netherlands, made it as well as the philosopher of freedom, Baruch de Spinoza, and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, which dates back to 1611 and was the world’s first.

On the reject pile are notable inventions like the first yacht and marina.  “We know these are from Amsterdam and it is just so frustrating that we couldn't discover who the inventor was,” says Van Herwijnen.  Neither Nobel prize winner Heike Kamerlingh Onnes nor the father of modern education, Jan Amos Comenius, made it because although both spent a considerable amount of time in Amsterdam, it wasn’t the city where either of them did their most noteworthy work.

Initially, the team started with a list of 2000 names and from there they started to cull.  That meant talking to experts, reading history, going through archives and asking for advice.  All the way through, decisions had to survive the severity of Wanders’ instincts.  “Sometimes he’d just say no,” Van Herwijnen says.  “He’d say, ‘but is this really creative?  I’m not feeling it.  I don't get it,’ and we would have to take it out.”

Eight or nine months shy of the final print, there are currently 200 entries in the pile, which needs to be narrowed down to 125. “Thankfully that process has become easier,” Van Herwijnen says, “because we have become more and more clear about the criteria.  Early in the process, I’d get so personally hurt after spending hours and hours on a certain entry only to discover that the work wasn’t truly original.  It had already been done somewhere in Asia.  It’s easier now because I can sense much sooner what is and what is not gong to work.  We know what we are looking for.”

As the final decisions are being made, Van Herwijnen, who was hired by Wanders specifically for this project and who now heads up the studio’s new publishing wing, flips through the prototype with infectious enthusiasm.    Every detail from the colour of the blank pages to the font of the page numbers is explained with passionate detail. One immediately gets the impression that this book, which will be sold at cost price (25 euros), is about as genuine as this industry gets.

“We aren’t doing it to make money,” says Van Herwijnen. “It was supposed to break even but actually, because Marcel is such a perfectionist, it will end up losing money.  The important thing is that Marcel sees it as a gift back to Amsterdam for all the support it has given him.”

On working with Wanders, Van Herwijnen is unashamedly complimentary: “He is a genius,” she says.  “His insights and ideas always make things seem so obvious and easy, which of course they aren’t. And like a child, he always asks questions.  Before going into a meeting with him I make sure I have every answer to every possible question.  The more I get to know him, the better I can anticipate his questions, but still, every time, he manages to ask something that I haven’t thought of and I have to admit that I don’t know.”

“Amsterdam Creative Capital” is the first book by Marcel Wanders Publishing.  It will be self-distributed and sold through the Moooi Gallery in Amsterdam and online.  It is a book about a city, made with love, and for its people.   It’s written for those working within the city’s creative industries so that they can better understand who their predecessors were and how they helped give this city the artistic atmosphere it has today.

It’s also for those who wonder why some cities just have that special indefinable touch that makes it feel like home.

Images: Top page – “Amsterdam Creative Capital” 20% prototype, main image Fokker’s planes, the trading ships of the VOC, and Jan Swammerdam’s red blood cells.

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