Project Description
In the United States, half of all home buyers are looking for a new house, and of them, 27 percent would prefer a custom one. But that’s not necessarily the case everywhere. “The Dutch don’t have a rich tradition of building their own houses,” says Wouter van Alebeek, a partner at Amsterdam-based WE Architecten. “The Belgians build their own houses, and the Germans, but in Holland we have big companies building loads of houses at once and filling them all.”
So from the get-go, WE Architecten’s Amstelloft, a multifamily housing project that overlooks the Amstel River in central Amsterdam, stood apart from its neighbors by allowing clients to design their own space. In 2012, the city offered four prime riverbank sites for multifamily projects that emulated the German baugruppen model: co-funded, co-designed co-housing, without the backing of a developer, which is successful in Berlin, but radical in Amsterdam. To bid for one of the sites, WE Architecten first had to find clients. “We put an advertisement in the local newspaper saying: ‘We want you to build your own house. Who is enthusiastic?’ ” van Alebeek says. More than 30 people came to their first meeting, at a local café. Of the final group of clients, half attended that meeting and the other half knew someone who did.
After what van Alebeek calls “training [our] clients to be clients,” the architects developed a scheme with them that won one of the city’s four sites. The parti is organized as a series of blank-box units behind an arched brick façade. (Brick is “one of the few materials that still looks good after about 10 years in the Dutch climate,” he says.) Six units—20 feet wide and 55 feet deep, with a ceiling height of nearly 18 feet—are stacked side-by-side on the first three levels, and the single-height penthouse extends the full width of the building. The units are designed to be flexible: A young couple’s loft can be subdivided on two levels as the family grows. Rather than move to the suburbs for more space, “our idea was that here you can order timber and make an extra room,” van Alebeek says.
WE Architecten offered space planning for all of the clients—and did construction documents for two units—but each client builds out their own space on their own schedule. One owner moved in a week after Amstelloft was completed; other units are still under construction months later.
The city remains enthusiastic about baugruppen, but other prime sites are slow to come on market, now that the real estate market is hot again. When one does, WE Architecten would be happy to join in—not just for the design, but also for the larger impact. “It’s a big step to have people build their own homes in the city,” van Alebeek says.
Project Credits
Project: Amstelloft, Amsterdam
Client: Bouwgroep Amstelloft
Architecture: WE Architecten, Amsterdam . Wouter van Alebeek, Erik de Vries (principal architects)
Construction: CAE Nederland
Acoustic/Physics Consultant: Earth Energie Advies
Cost Consultant: Kolom Bouw Advies
Building Surveyor: SSW Groep
Size: 1,135 square meters (12,217 square feet), base building
Cost: Withheld