A first-round proposal in the 'AMS design contest'

So I’m leaving AMS Institute as its managing director, per June 1st. It is a bittersweet moment for sure, but creating space creates room for new possibilities. This holds true for AMS Institute and for my personal trajectory. Let me pick the story up where I left it in my first post about my adventures at AMS Institute as we move towards the 10Y anniversary on June 6th. This is post #2.

Gemeente Amsterdam launched the “AMS design competition” by publishing the contest notice on the 2nd of April 2013. It was to be a two-round affair with the first deadline for submission on June 3rd. From my position as executive secretary at Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft , we went to work.

I was fully expecting us to collaborate within the 3TU-framework (back then WUR hadn’t joined yet, so still 3TU instead of 4TU) so this is indeed what I set out to discuss with Dirk Jan van den Berg , the then president of TU Delft. He folded his arms as I had seen him do on so many occasions and said “No, we will work with WUR. I will call Aalt Dijkhuizen ”. And that was that. Karin meanwhile had been in contact with a gentleman called Carlo Ratti . I can just imagine today, having known Carlo for over 11 years that he immediately started painting all sorts of weird and wonderful opportunities. And so with just two calls, the core academic partnership was forged. Now all we needed to do is get the ideas on paper.

On the 25th of April I joined the information session organized by the City. We took a bus tour and drove past the Marineterrein Amsterdam as a potential home for the envisaged institute. It would take another 5 years before we would actually move to this inspiring place. I do remember talking to prof. Smeulders from UvA on the bus. Somehow, we got to discuss how parents seem to think their kids are all brilliant. He proposed violin lessons as a cure, “that’ll teach them”. My second kid had violin lessons :) I must have been in total agreement with prof. Smeulders.

Back at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft and a few weeks on, we collectively realised that the consultant we had hired, wasn’t getting anywhere soon. Nothing wrong with his skills, but it seems the world of universities is just a little too weird to learn in couple of weeks. He did name our consortium DWM (first letters of the academic partners) in what was supposed to be an anonymous proposal. A little cheeky, but fun nonetheless.

And so I took on the role as project leader for the 1st round proposal. Although, we had lost a lot of precious time, together with Carlo and Matthew Claudel at MIT, Chris Karman at WUR and many others, we managed to bring it all together. For sure we overestimated or misjudged quite a few aspects, such as the role of industry and a global network of cities, but it’s uncanny how many things were already described in a way that resembles AMS Institute today (helped of course by the well-defined contest notice). These include the network structure for research, the masters’ degree, AMS as a neutral space for data sharing, connecting lots of partners and so on and so forth. Our proposal also stated that the “constructive and efficient interaction between the city of Amsterdam and third parties” required city staff as part of AMS Institute to function as mediators. Today this seems so logical and natural, but is it really?

One of the things that definitely stuck to this very day is the name of the institute. We replaced the A in AMS. Whereas the “A” stood for Amsterdam in the contest notice, we thought it would be sensible to change it in the national and international context. And as I recall, we already knew Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf , director of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, would be the AMS-jury chairman. I guess the solution for the A just presented itself.

We handed in our bid on time and waited for a confirmation email, whether we would progress to round 2.

Next instalment: the real deal, a Vision and Roadmap for AMS Institute