New Housing Renews Dutch Docklands

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From the air, it looks like two meteorites have plunged into Amsterdam’s new Borneo Sporenburg district, interrupting the bar-code pattern of its distended city blocks. The large buildings are not cosmic fragments but apartment buildings, one of the willful gestures (a wide diagonal street, mowed through the blocks, is another) in this latest permutation in an 80-year-old tradition of Dutch urban-planning innovation. While the low-slung blocks of rowhouses don’t obviously resemble the stepped-gabled quaintness of Amsterdam’s historic canal-house districts, these made-over docklands have much in common with the picture-postcard Amsterdam everyone knows. This new housing also speaks more closely to American housing dilemmas than does the typical large-scale European housing-production norm.

Borneo Sporenburg represents only about one-third of an enormous redevelopment of the city’s Eastern Docklands area–a once-abandoned landscape of warehouses, railroad sidings, and cargo cranes. Of the 17,000 new units of housing that are finishing up, those in Borneo Sporenburg are the most innovative, offering a vision of urban living tuned to the nation’s shrinking household sizes, its greater wealth, and an unabated aspiration by many to live in the city’s historic core or someplace much like it.

The fundamental unit of Borneo Sporenburg is the single-family rowhouse. In Holland, individual dwellings account for a minority of the housing stock, not the predominant unit as it is in America. The urban design firm of West 8, of Rotterdam, laid out the two fingers of the island with 2,500 townhouses and floor-through apartments. The public spaces in the new development include a small, simply designed park and three graceful pedestrian bridges that arch over the waterways to the other Eastern Harbor islands. The diagonals West 8 Principal Adrian Geuze has cut through this pattern draw the eye to urban landmarks, such as the spired central train station and a monumental pumping station, as well as the gap where these inlets open to the larger Ij harbor. Within the development, the skewed “meteorite” buildings were given the same picturesque visual function as the imposing cathedrals or palaces of historic towns. (Unable to avail himself of the programmatic diversity available to old towns–city planners allowed almost nothing but housing–Geuze ordered up larger courtyard-style apartment buildings.) The development includes a school and special housing for the elderly and the mentally disabled. Reflecting the nation’s greater wealth, only 30 percent of the units are subsidized “social” housing (not long ago the typical percentage would have been 70 percent); the rest are market rate.

West 8 charged the nine architects awarded commissions here with reinterpreting the traditional canal house for contemporary needs. The government mandated a density of about 40 units per acre (100 units per hectare–unusually high by Dutch standards), and a three-story height limitation. Instead of traditional stoops and microscopic back gardens or light courts, West 8 placed most of the tiny 16.5 foot by 49.5-foot lots (5m by 15m) back to back. No rear courts were required; instead West 8’s guidelines asked architects to carve out from 30 to 50 percent of the volume in section to form a variety of light courts and outdoor spaces. The idea was to drive daylight deep into the volumes of the houses, making smallish spaces appear larger and taking advantage of the water views, while maintaining privacy. Inventively designed scrims, doors, and gates make palatable the one-car garage or carport (a relative novelty in Holland) that usually shares the street frontage with the entrance. Double-height spaces were mandated within canal-side units to draw light and shimmering reflections inside. Some areas, especially those facing internal canals where private waterfront access was possible, were designated for individual houses each designed by the buyers’ own architect. Here architects have lavished a profusion of forms; each jostles for attention, making a dizzying esthetic din.

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