Bulletin KNOB

De Grote Kerk van Alkmaar

2021-03-10T09:26:32+01:00

Boekbespreking van een boek van Carly Misset (red.)

Huizen van fortuin

2021-03-10T09:41:32+01:00

Boekbespreking van een boek van Coert Peter Krabbe

Schiphol

2021-03-10T14:53:54+01:00

Boekbespreking van een boek van Paul Meurs en Isabel van Lent

Stad op de schop / Graaf- en modderwerk

2021-03-10T14:58:38+01:00

Boekbespreking van een boek van Ronald van Genabeek, Eddie Nijhof & Frederike Schipper (red.) en van Ranjith Jayasena

Stadsvernieuwing in Rotterdam

2021-03-10T15:22:33+01:00

Boekbespreking van een boek van Ben Maandag

Waarom die vorm en oriëntatie van Borssele?

2021-03-09T12:48:35+01:00

The village of Borssele was founded in 1616 in a polder of the same name on the island of Zuid-Beveland in the province of Zeeland. The driving force behind both the diking of the polder and the construction of the village during the Twelve Year Truce (1609-1621) in the young Dutch Republic was the mayor of the city of Goes, Cornelis Soetwater. This article argues that the unusual form and orientation of the Borssele village plan reflects a conscious decision by Soetwater to combine and improve on the best of the Zeeland’s impoldering and village planning tradition, and on the most striking old Zuid-Beveland villages.

Soetwater’s decision to give Borssele’s main square a resolutely northern orientation and an unconventional, rotated positioning within the polder grid, and to model its plan on that of the most distinctive medieval villages on the islands of Zuid-Beveland, Nisse and Kloetinge, served to anchor the new village emphatically in its immediate surroundings.

Moreover, Borssele represents the culmination of an honourable tradition initiated during the fifteenth century by the Zeeland nobleman Adriaan van Borssele with the construction of ringstraatdorpen[1] such as Dirksland, Sommelsdijk and Middelharnis, in the large Flakkee polders. The marquises of Bergen op Zoom and the family of Orange continued this tradition during the sixteenth century in the construction of Willemstad and Colijnsplaat, among others.

Soetwater exploited the symbolic significance of these new villages, which was as important to Adriaan van Borssele and his followers as their economic and administrative function, for his own purposes. By continuing a trend towards orthogonality and symmetry in the layout of sixteenth-century ringstraatdorpen in the double symmetry of the Borssele street plan, Soetwater was able to emphasize the victory of rationality over chaos. Not just in the sense that the wild water had been turned into orderly cultural landscape, but also in the sense that after many years of war, the Twelve Year Truce had ushered in a period of peace, order and the prospect of a bright future.

^[1] The ringstraatdorp was a combination of two older types of Zeeland village plans, the kerkringdorp and the voorstraatdorp. Its main street (voorstraat) was perpendicular to the polder dike and its landward end terminated in a kerkring (church encircled by a street).

‘Hier woont men in de wereld’

2021-03-10T09:04:45+01:00

In Dutch history the years between 1945 and 1965 are regarded as the period of post-war recovery and reconstruction (wederopbouw). One of the main issues of this period was the urgent need to house the rapidly rising Dutch population. High-rise dwellings were seen as one of the answers and, according to many, desirable. However, after the war, and even into the early 1960s, the construction of high-rise apartment towers was considered suitable for only a small, relatively well-to-do, part of the Dutch population. It was thought that most people would not be interested in living in tall buildings unless there was an element of luxury in both the buildings and the apartments themselves. Most architects and city planners labelled high-rise as unfit for the working class and for families with children. Consequently, most high-rise construction in the 1950s and early 1960s was aimed at a small group of ‘modern’ people, well-educated and perhaps slightly bohemian. Seven of these buildings are studied in this article. They vary in size, height and architectural appearance, but still form a distinct architectural type. As the article points out, these buildings were, and are to this day, very successful. Their success is analysed through a close reading of the buildings themselves and of their location in the urban context. The success of the luxury apartment building is attributed to the following conditions. The buildings were built for a small group of independently-minded people, keen to live a modern and comfortable life. They were even prepared to pay far more for their apartment than most terraced houses would have cost. Secondly, the developers invested in a wide variety of luxury features such as central heating, elevators, roof terraces, a housekeeper, ‘American’ kitchens, lock-up garages and the like. Thirdly, renowned architects were hired to design these luxury buildings. Since it did not concern social housing, the building budgets were rather generous. The architects could therefore design rather stylish buildings with well thought-out floor plans and airy and spacious rooms. Costly and decorative materials were used lavishly. As these buildings were unique, architects could meet the requirements of the building plot as well as of the intended inhabitants. Furthermore, the buildings were invariably built on highly desirable sites. They either overlook a city park, a large pond or a canal, or are in an already established residential area, but always within easy reach of urban amenities.

Unlike a considerable part of the social high-rise buildings in Dutch cities built from the early 1960s onwards, many of the luxury apartment buildings are still considered highly desirable places to live, even sixty years after their construction.