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Reinventing the Row: The Netherlands' Filmwijk Project
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21941 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1993 |
2,046 Words |
| Author
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Elizabeth van der Leelie
Elizabeth van der Leelie is an arts and architecture writer
currently based in the Netherlands. |
The compact row house is as common to the Dutch landscape as the sprawling rancher is to the American scene. In tiny, overcrowded Holland, side-by-side living is a fact of life; Europe's most densely populated country just doesn't have enough room for expansive, detached dwellings. Orderly, cost-efficient, and space-saving, the row house has been the trusty workhouse of domestic architecture in the Netherlands for centuries.
But can the workhouse keep pace with the changing needs and life-styles of homeowners in the nineties? Is it possible to create a row that is as flexible and unique as a rancher? What does it take to make a plural dwelling singularly beautiful? These questions are explored by the thirty architects who created housing projects for the Filmwijk, a new district in Almere.
Built on a polder of reclaimed land in the province of Flevoland, the city of Almere is located thirty kilometers east of Amsterdam, a twenty-minute train ride form Amsterdam's Central Station. It is a new area-flat, and as yet half-empty, a tribute to the miracle of Dutch engineering, which forces the sea back with dikes and drainage systems to make more land available for development. The pressure of housing shortages and an ever-increasing population in Amsterdam and the surrounding area have accelerated the rate of construction in Almere, which today is the fastest-growing community in Holland with 2,500 new housing units added annually. By the year 1995, Almere will house a population of over 200,000.
Despite the burgeoning nature of this "instant" community, growth has not been haphazard, nor has it produced a Levittown landscape of uniform mediocrity. In fact, the development of Almere has been carefully monitored since the initial settlement in 1976, with specific areas allocated for agricultural, recreational, residential, and industrial uses. And the opportunity presented by Almere's empty space--a very rare opportunity in Holland--has attracted some of the most innovative and well-designed architectural projects in the country.
Exceptional achievements often require unconventional processes, as is the case with Almere's Filmwijk, which originated as Bouw-Rai '92, an outdoor exposition of contemporary residential architecture organized by the Nationale Woningraad (NWR) in cooperation with the City of Almere. The NWR selected Dutch architects who had proven their ability to go beyond the limits of convention, though not necessarily those who had extensive prior experience in designing row housing. NWR project coordinator C. Van der
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