Hart van Zuid is an industrial area in city of Hengelo. The district is located south of the train station, right in the heart of the city. The area is defined by the typical emblem of 20th century production: the saw-tooth shed. Hart van Zuid is currently being redeveloped; it will be converted into a lively quarter where people will live and work comfortably. Hart van Zuid is a statement against monoculture: urban life will be celebrated here in a mixed use environment. Education and leisure will be a part the spectrum. High tech industrial activities remain a crucial component.
The B Tower is located in the centre of Rotterdam, immediately adjacent to the Bijenkorf department store designed by Marcel Breuer in the late 1950s. Because of its commercial context the site below the Bijenkorf’s roofline is to be fully occupied, while above it, just thirty per cent of the lot towards the sunken shopping mall Beurstraverse, has been released to build a high-rise tower. In order to avoid splitting the project into a basement and a tower, the design stacks three volumes of similar height. The ground-related volume contains a fashion store, The Sting, and a car park; the two upper volumes contain apartments.
Designed for a couple and sited in a hilly suburban area of Maastricht near the Netherlands-Belgium border, the H House was designed for a couple with a strong interest in the arts. The clients formerly occupied a home directly adjacent to the site before appointing Wiel Arets Architects to design what would become their new home, the H House. Individually an actor and a dancer, and dually landscape architects, the owners are able to keep their landscaping skills honed in the formal garden behind the house, which they occasionally open to the public.
Information Technology allows us to re-think the way we work. Working becomes potentially independent from time and place. The insurance company Interpolis has together with Veldhoen Company developed a revolutionary and radical office concept, called ‘Helder Werken’. The central idea is that employees no longer need a fixed workspace. Potentially any place becomes a place to work. They are allowed to choose from numerous high quality rooms and spaces that are optimized for the nature of their business at each point in time. You can take your laptop and cell phone and find a place under a tree, if you want, or go home, or work in the car, or use the ‘clubhouses’ that are especially designed for you. Flex.
A large-scale urban renewal project is in progress in the Reimerswaalbuurt in Osdorp, a neighborhood situated at the periphery of Amsterdam. The ambitious plan was made under the supervision of the Architecten Cie. Nine building complexes will be realized with broad streets and auto-free squares. Mecanoo designed the first complex which includes a school, sports hall, pre-school playrooms, a children’s day-care center, a community center, 51 apartments and 21 single family homes. The neighborhood will be enriched with good social housing situated in a network of pleasant and safe streets, squares and public green space with gathering places to socialize in. The result of the fruitful cooperation between the developer Ymere, the school board, design studio Makkink & Bey and artist Elspeth Pikaar is a richly detailed social housing and multi-functional education complex. Mecanoo’s design example will set the stage for the other eight residential complexes.
V- HOUSE is designed for a private client and is located in the urban planning area “Nieuw Leyden”, a high dense area in the city of Leiden (The Netherlands).
The UBU, comparable to a data recorder, is more than a place where people can consult books; it is a place where they can work in a concentrated fashion, but also one where they can meet other people without the need of any other stimulation except the atmosphere that the building radiates.
Location: University Campus ‘De Uithof’, Heidelberglaan 3, 3584 CS Utrecht, the Netherlands
Project team: Wiel Arets, Bettina Kraus, Harold Aspers, Dominic Papa, René Thijssen, Frederik Vaes, Henrik Vuust
Collaborators: Pauline Bremmer, Jacques van Eyck, Harold Hermans, Guido Neijnens, Michael Pedersen, Vincent Piroux, Jan Vanweert, Michiel Vrehen, Richard Welten
Photographs: Kim Zwarts (façade print), Jan Bitter, Henryk Gajewski, Bas Princen, Christian Richters, Héléne Binet
Having lost its original function in 2005, this former school, located in the centre of Utrecht, was divided into eight elements each to be sold separately and renovated into new residential properties.
HVE Architecten has designed a bright, sand-coloured housing project with a diverse program, that blends in and complements its surroundings with a certain ease and lightness. Filtered by the old trees next to the avenue Sandtlaan the light finds its way to the austere brick, glass and metal façades. Through façade composition and choice of materials the project has both a strong sense of solidity and lightness and playfulness.
The municipality of New West (a town district of Amsterdam) is already for years simultaneously on multiple locations working on a large scale renewal of the Westen Garden Cities of Amsterdam. In this framework De Bomentuin is a small scale project, that is fitted in the neighborhood with modesty and carefulness. The project is realized on the site of the Slotermeerhof, a complex of duplex apartments belonging to the residential home for the elderly, Slotermeeroord from 1963. The small dwellings were demolished in order to make place for more spacious and comfortable apartments and family houses.
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