The site is situated right next to the Medina and in consequence interwoven with the indispensable social and economic structures of the Old City.
Both legal and illegal markets dominate the streetscape and are vital to the local economy. The downside of this density of commercial street business is the pollution and the decay of the public space. The design will have to serve as an example on how to improve the practical aspects of the market but leaving the existing social economic structures intact.
The SODAE-House is the house of the architect. The site is a private island at an intersection of waterways, south of Amsterdam. It is one of the precious pieces of unspoiled polder landscape, left open just outside the city. If the current trend of rapid urbanisation continues, it will soon be one of the last pieces of characteristic Dutch landscape in this part of the Netherlands. It is the choice of this particular spot, that is to say the perception of the landscape, which has dictated the character of the design.
This so called do-it-yourself dwelling in the centre of Rotterdam is part of a bold experiment initiated by the municipality to revitalize dilapidated urban areas. Run-down pre-war dwellings are renovated on the outside and brought back to their monumental appearance, while the interiors are stripped bare. The empty shell dwellings are primarily bought by enthusiastic young people who transform them according to their specific needs, desires and budgets. Real estate developers have picked up the initiative and a new demand driven market of urban housing has been generated in recent years. The result is a growing number of contemporary custom-made dream houses within the uniform old fabric of the traditional nineteenth and early twentieth century city.
What is a bridge in the collective imagination? How to obtain livable spaces from a passing-by architecture? How to push the design to its boundaries and at the same time satisfy the requests for traffic flows, wheelchair access, integration in the urban context, sustainability looking, clarity and comprehensibility of the program?
Mulders vandenBerk Architecten of Amsterdam have completed a playground building in a park in Utrecht, the Netherlands, with a Corian façade engraved with images of fairytales from around the world. The idea of the building is to excite and stimulate curiosity and creativity of the children.
Image Courtesy Wim Hanenberg, Roel Backaert, Wouter van der Sar
Article source: Thiago Augustus Prenholato Alves, Rodolfo Parolin Hardy, Rafael Santos Ferraz and Gilberto Baroni Junior.
The design comes from an analysis of the duality between complexity and simplicity, how a plain idea can develop onto a project that meets the needs of a pre-established program and interacts with the surrounding area. A challenge that is not to create the longest span or the most acrobatic structure but to connect both two points of the city and the inhabitant to the city. How to create a distinct and recognizable bridge design that’ll be integrated and interactive? An infrastructure optimized for public life. The design of the bridge brings the waves in the water surface to the level of the buildings around, integrating this unusual form to the city landscape. The contrast invites the pedestrian to discover new routes and challenges him along the path curves to see new perspectives, reopening his eyes to the beauty of Amsterdam.
Image Courtesy xLAB - Experimental Laboratory for Architecture
Architects: Thiago Augustus Prenholato Alves, Rodolfo Parolin Hardy, Rafael Santos Ferraz and Gilberto Baroni Junior.
email
Facebook
Twitter
RSS Feed
