A few minutes ago, The Netherlands national soccer team defeated Brazil, one of the favorite teams to win the South Africa World Cup and advanced to semi-finals. We want to congratulate all of our Netherlands fans in this big step to win their first World Cup! And to celebrate, we decided to put together a small selection of five great projects from The Netherlands. Check them all after the break.
Villa Berkel / Paul de Ruiter Villa Berkel in Veenendaal (Netherlands) is built on a site formerly occupied by a bungalow dating from the nineteen seventies. The owners wanted to remodel the bungalow, but decided on the advice of Paul de Ruiter to demolish the bungalow and make room for a completely new design (read more…)
Villa 1 / Powerhouse Company Villa 1 was the first villa commissioned to Powerhouse Company since its founding in May 2005. In order to mark the site a golden “1″ was nailed to a pine tree at the end of a dirt road. The forest, like most of the Dutch landscape, is manmade. Mostly Douglas Pines were planted there in the 1950s for the production of straight stems that could then be used as beams. The trees became mature enough to be harvested in the 1970s, paradoxically just when it became immoral to cut trees (read more…)
Block 16 / René van Zuuk Architekten Block 16 is part of the master plan designed by OMA for a new prestigious city centre in Almere. The autonomous expressive block reacts on two conditions: the billowing end marks as a kind of gatekeeper the harbour entrance. At the other end the movement is smoothened and the building fits in with the right-angled grid of the adjacent glass high-rise housing blocks. The block is sited on a basement car park (design OMA) serving as a pedestal (read more…)
Market Hall in Rotterdam / MVRDV Dutch architects MVRDV strike another one with a new mixed use project in the new inner city heart for the Laurens Quarter, the pre-war centre of Rotterdam. The project, comissioned by Provast, includes an open air market, that due to new hygienic constraints of dutch laws has to be covered. It also includes 246 residences, that form an arc that covers the open market area (read more…)
Petting Farm / 70F Architecture Most city parts of Almere, a city with almost 190.000 inhabitants, have a petting farm. In the ‘den Uyl’ park there used to be one, but it burned down in the early 80’s, leaving only its concrete foundation. Early 2005 we were commissioned by the municipality of Almere to design a new petting farm on the exact location and the remaining foundation. The building was finally built using almost only sponsored money, and finished late 2008 (read more…)
