Vierkant eiland in de plas, Prinsenland, Rotterdam, 1993-1996
“You must see everything in the material, everything that happened, everything that almost went wrong. I don’t allow masking the cracks, or brushing away the traces of sand, because they are the language of the concrete, of the image, you have to be able to see that it has been made.” Frans de Wit

Pencil sketches indicate the position of the sun at twelve o’clock which determines the position of the bowl, which is positioned upwards, at a slant on the square island of 52x52 meters. Water and sunlight are unified in the most primary forms of human order: the circle and square. The square water hole on the bottom of the bowl depicts the lowest point of the Netherlands. The highest point of the bowl extends seven meters above the water level of the lake and is therefore equal to the NAP water level. In the final version this is modified to 7.15 meters. De Wit says to landscape architect Ad Koolen, “We can still stand here together with dry feet, if the dike breaks.”

Merciless scraper - A concrete bowl with a diameter of 28.5 meters, is first of its kind. De Wit wanted to apply ridges on the interior and exterior of the bowl to imply a rotating movement. To achieve this, he and his son Justus designed a ‘merciless, savage scraper machine’ consisting of an eight meter high steel column with an adjustable iron boom of 15 meters in length. When the scraper is attached, it can be dragged over the concrete in a circular motion. Six men were needed to push the boom to scrape the ridges in the surface of the concrete skin. “I don’t work with thin lines,’ says De Wit, ‘my work emerges from resistance.’

On an everyday walk you can ascend ‘Square Island in the Lake’, spiraling against the current over ramps and tunnel-like steps up to the top of the bowl, and then, with some difficulty descend to the core, to the square water hole. There, at the historically lowest point in the country, the water not only reflects the sunlight, but also mirrors the past of Prinsenland and The Netherlands.’