Description

In a post-war development on the outskirts of Amsterdam, two linear slab blocks form the east and west edges of an urban block ensemble framing a raised plaza above a parking garage in between, on which a mosque, a solitary residential building, and a school are located. This plaza opens to the north towards a public park and the sporting facility of a school via a generous stairway. The distinctively articulated plinth of the eastern block edge building mediates between the different levels of the street and the raised courtyard. It houses spacious entrance halls open to both sides, which lead to the half-sunken gymnasium and the apartments above. At the building ends, individual entrances to the duplex units (Types
a
and
c
) lead directly to the street, their transparent facades also enabling their usage as commercial spaces.

The floor plans of some of the flats (Type
d
) follow a simple but effective principle of division into three sections. The mid-section – a row of storage spaces, built-in furniture, inserted cores with bathrooms and WCs, and circulation areas – is offset to the sequences of rooms along both facades in such a way as to allow numerous crosslinks: from the living room to the dining space through the kitchen, from the entrance hall to the three rooms through a corridor or – in some apartments – from room to room through a shared closet. A certain degree of flexibility is maintained. For instance, the rooms can be combined by removing the non-structural dividing wall between the living room and bedroom facing the courtyard. And as the dining area has its own access point, it can be separated from the kitchen and used for other purposes. The principle of multiple links on both sides of an inserted core is also implemented in the 2-room apartment (Type
b
).

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Originally published in: Oliver Heckmann, Friederike Schneider with Eric Zapel (eds.), Floor Plan Manual Housing, fifth revised and expanded edition, Birkhäuser, 2018.