This project description is an excerpt from the longer article “Infrastructural Engagements”. For a comparative analysis and further data on this and all other categories including accompanying graphs, please see the article “A Turning Point”.
The docklands of Amsterdam also offered an opportunity for the city to reclaim the prime waterfront site, for the importance of the local shipping industry had been declining for years. Besides the Borneo Sporenburg project, which was briefly discussed as part of the Eastern Harbor District redevelopment in the previous chapter, an earlier example that later became influential was the IJ-Plein by OMA, designed between 1980 and 1982, and completed in 1988. Located across the Het IJ from Amsterdam’s historic center and the Eastern Harbor District (Oostelijk Havengebied), the site was a former shipyard right at the tip of the industrial district known as Amsterdam-Noord. Prior to the 1900s, Amsterdam-Noord was not considered an official part of Amsterdam city; its administrative recognition and emergence at the turn of the twentieth century was associated with the concentration of industries, particularly those related to shipping, resulting in its growth as a working-class, industrial area. The area’s fortunes changed, however, after the Second World War and during the latter half of the twentieth century with the beginnings of de-industrialization and the city’s diminishing role as a major shipping port.
With the closure of the west harbor division of the Amsterdam Dry Dock Company that had occupied the site right at the tip of Amsterdam-Noord bordering the IJ, a window of opportunity presented itself for the construction of the IJ-Plein, the first housing project in the district to recover the waterfront, a significant change of orientation for a city that had essentially turned its back to the harbor for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, as early as 1974, the city had revealed its plans to convert the shipyard and the IJ-Plein and its environs into a new residential sub-centre for the city, under the direction of the Stuurgroep Aanvullende Woningbouw or Steering Group for Supplementary Housing which played a central role in urban renewal. [1] The land itself was acquired by the city government, which thus maintained the powers to strategically determine the use, quality, and amount of land available for development. Thereafter, the city’s Department of Town and Country Planning (DRO) designed a plan in 1980 for the redevelopment of the IJ-Plein, composed primarily of five-storey closed perimeter residential blocks arrayed across the site. Unfortunately, the scheme was not well received by the Amsterdam-Noord inhabitants who demanded unobstructed views of the IJ and the historic city. It was at this juncture that Rem Koolhaas and OMA were appointed by the Public Housing Department to serve as a ‘conditioning architect’, mediating between the DRO and the various architects who would be involved in different sections of the plan, but more significantly, to devise an improved plan. [2] Koolhaas and OMA first assumed a brainstorming session where 25 different housing typologies, ranging from Le Corbusier’s Ville contemporaine and Unité d’habitation to Cerdà’s Plan for the Extension of Barcelona, were tested out on the site, on the assumption that there were no limiting constraints, so as to figure out how the same number of dwelling units could be accommodated within the various models. [3] Initial design sketches that followed revealed the team’s preoccupation to extend the visual axis from the Meeuwenlaan road meandering along the edge to the water, effectively dividing the site into two. In addition, the team proposed for land reclamation to be undertaken in filling the shape of the dock to increase the available land area for development. In this preliminary plan, the eastern, triangular-shaped section was to be composed of low-rise buildings in open blocks, whereas the western section was intended to be a dense cluster of high-rises, separated from the eastern half by a park that served as a visual corridor. The park was to be situated above the newly-reclaimed land, thereby preserving part of the original form of the site. Spanning across the three sections was an east-west axis to link them together.
The neighboring residents, however, vetoed the high-rise element of OMA’s initial proposal, prompting the team to revise the western section based on the model by the Luckhardt brothers in Berlin during the 1920s for a ‘Stadt ohne Höfe’ or ‘City without Courtyards’; such a model consists of low- to mid-rise bars flanked by urban villas. Further, with the IJ-tunnel running under the western section, the team had to ensure that construction above grade along this infrastructural right-of-way was minimized. [4] The final master plan was composed in the form of a montage, setting out parallel bars of housing in the eastern section, with a triangular open space in the center, while the western section was a mixture of urban villas arranged in bands alongside the two longer bars. Diverging from these vertical striations were horizontal slabs raised on pilotis straddling across at the southern edge of the triangular park on the eastern half, oriented towards central Amsterdam. To attain a certain degree of formal coherence for the district, OMA established a set of urban design guidelines that intervened using a zoning envelope, stipulating the circulatory access to the residents, down to details like establishing the color of the façades and the materials. [5] In total, 1,375 units of social housing were accommodated on the 17-hectare site, equivalent to a relatively low density of 81 units per hectare, supported by shops, a school, community center, and a variety of public green spaces. Apart from the two slender bars defining the eastern edge of the site and the public school along the waterfront that were designed by OMA, the rest of the buildings were commissioned to a cast of different architects, including Bureau Hein van Meer which designed three of the urban villas, Architectengroep 69 which designed the horizontal slab, and Bureau Budding en Wilken that designed the Youth Center adjacent to Meeuwenlaan and the bright-orange pavilion by the water’s edge.
Of the pair of parallel blocks by OMA, the longer slab with a built area of 11,860 square meters is raised on pilotis, underneath which is tucked an assortment of programs, including a market and a community center, each of which is housed in a triangular structure, shops which are accommodated in two glazed oval structures, bicycle parking, and lobby entrances to the apartments above. Moreover, by opening up the ground level of the slab, the street is allowed to pass underneath the building, creating more open space at this level, rather than acting like a wall-like barrier enclosing the perimeter. Vehicular parking is provided for by the space in front of the slab, running alongside the marina where boats are docked. Although the building bears a formal vocabulary similar to the rest of the blocks with its flat roof, strip windows, and stuccoed treatment, the interior circulation showcases an ingenious way of producing unit variation through the deployment of different stair systems. Besides the apparent use of metal-clad switch-back stairs that grace the structure where the ground level is free, providing access to units with balconies supported by perforated steel columns rising four-storeys above the ground, OMA also incorporated two other systems. One is the conventional galleries accessed by two stairway cores, used for the single-loaded narrow ‘HAT units’, as they were dubbed, along the northernmost third of the bar. The other is a transverse system of cascading stairs used for accessing the one- and two-bedroom units at the southernmost third of the bar, where the unusual section cuts generated a layout that shifts at every level. On the top floor where the stairs merge, the gallery is encased within a translucent glass enclosure to ensure a degree of privacy for the apartment terraces sandwiched between them.
Separated by a pedestrian court is the shorter of the two blocks, with a built area of 4,560 square meters. Here, unlike the switch-back stairs that are spaced regularly along the longer block, the façade of this shorter block is lined with a multitude of glass-covered stoops providing direct access to three- or four-bedroom apartments on the first three floors, creating a rhythmic interplay and contrast between the two bars. Inside the seemingly straightforward block, OMA introduced a system of lateral cascading stairs running through the spine of the block, resulting in an ingenious stacking of apartment units, and communal living arrangements on the top floor. In total, 202 units ranging from dormitories to five-room configurations are accommodated in this pair of buildings. Within the dwelling units, which are no more than 15 meters deep in the longer block and 11 meters deep in the shorter one, glass walls are copiously deployed, such as between the living and dining areas, lending a sense of spaciousness as well as transparency. In addition to the lengths of these buildings that reify the original dimensions of the shipyard site, the intentional choice of materials, in particular the metal-clad staircases and elevator shaft, and the perforated steel columns, pay homage to the industrial heritage of the place, albeit in modern, subtle gestures.
Bernard Leupen, IJ-Plein, Amsterdam: Een Speurtocht Naar Nieuwe Compositorische Middelen: Rem Koolhaas, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 1989), 109.