NowAmsterdam

Architecture

Architecture in Amsterdam

Amsterdam protects its old centre so tightly that new architecture is pushed out to the docklands and the southern business district. The experimental Dutch work most people picture is largely in Rotterdam; what Amsterdam has instead is a long argument about housing.

• Sluishuis

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  Completed 2022

  BIG

  A housing block on the IJ waterfront at IJburg, built around a courtyard. Bjarke Ingels lifted one corner of the block clear of the water and dropped the opposite corner as a terraced stair climbing to the roof. Boats moor beneath the raised corner, so the courtyard works as a small harbour rather than a garden. It is a perimeter block bent until it stops being one.

• Valley

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  Completed 2022

  MVRDV

  Three mixed-use towers in the Zuidas business district. MVRDV cut the glass volume back in irregular terraces faced in natural stone, so the towers read as a cliff broken open rather than as a curtain wall. A planted valley runs between them across the fourth and fifth floors, reached by open stairs from the street. It puts a public route through the middle of a private office block.

• Silodam

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  Completed 2003

  MVRDV

  A housing block on a pier in the western docks, set on the line of two grain silos. MVRDV stacked around a hundred and fifty apartment types into one slab and gave each cluster its own cladding, so the elevation reads as a container stack. Circulation runs as internal streets rather than corridors, and each type is reached from a different level. One building holds the variety a whole street would.

• NEMO Science Museum

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  Completed 1997

  Renzo Piano

  A science museum sitting over the entrance to the IJ tunnel. Renzo Piano shaped it as a green copper hull rising out of the water at the same angle as the tunnel descending beneath it. The roof is a public square stepped up to a viewing deck rather than a closed surface. The building is doing the tunnel's structural work and taking its form from it.

• Het Schip

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  Completed 1921

  Michel de Klerk

  A social housing block in the Spaarndammerbuurt, built for a workers' cooperative. Michel de Klerk worked the brick into curved parapets, sculpted window heads and a spire that carries nothing, treating cheap housing as a subject worth ornamenting. The wedge-shaped block ends in a prow, which is what gave it its name. It is the clearest surviving statement of the Amsterdam School, which held that workers' housing deserved architecture.