Distilled Dutch Domesticity - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2001

A house in Amsterdam's docklands is an elegant expression of ingenuity and the Dutch art of getting more from less

The latest expression of architectural Calvinism, prevalent in Holland at the moment, is to be found at its most exquisite in Koen van Velsen's house for an alpinist in the eastern docklands of Amsterdam. Occupying a long narrow site between street and canal, the building demonstrates the Dutch art, here at its most refined, of extracting more out of less.

The building, four storeys high and designed to a taut geometry, is an abstract composition of concrete, stainless steel and glass. It is enclosed front and back by a screen -- a black concrete frame incorporating a regular pattern of rectangular openings and rising sheer from the street on one side, water on the other, to turn into a skylit roof. The screen, maintaining a distance between living accommodation and the external world, defines open space on each side -- a courtyard or patio, a terrace or balcony. At street level, a garage door rises smoothly to admit the car into a courtyard floored with a stainless-steel grid. The house bridges a drop in level from street to canal and beneath the grid is a shallow basement which is used for storage. Seduction in today's Dutch architecture so often succeeds in the tension drawn between strict geometry and romantic organic (AR March 1999). Here, the void literally accommodates the organic, the roots of a tree which rises through courtyard and terrace grids to the top of the building.

Plan and section are consonant, for the building is dissected in each dimension into three parts. Vertically, division is by means of glass walls, and, horizontally, by stainless-steel grilles or stainless-steel panelled floors. Paradoxically, considering the elaborate strategies for secluding the house, privacy disappears at night. The occupant has yet to get screening devices and when illuminated the house becomes a transparent box open to scrutiny from both side.

Accommodation, attached to a nucleate service core, reverses the usual convention, so that private quarters are underneath dining and living rooms. Glass walls soften the transition between interior and exterior and are combined with the stainless-steel grilles to blur vertical distinction. In places, movable walls enlarge or diminish space. The extent of the semi-basement study can be varied by rolling the wall of the bathroom backwards and forwardds, and similarly, the size of the kitchen can be changed by moving the wall between it and the dining room.

The polished sophistication of this eassy on how to use compressed space is underlined by the architect's ingenious use of materials.