City Levels

Although it is proposed for a suburban location in Holland, this apartment building by Alberto Nicolau + Montse Domínguez could provide a useful paradigm for housing in a variety of urban settings. In theis entry for the fifth Europan competition (for architects up to the age of 40), the architects focused on a site on the outskirts of the city of Almere. An area of flat, reclaimed Dutch land close to the sea, the site occupies a space, according to the architects, between two ‘watery planes: the soggy ground and the heavy, damp atmosphere’. In order better to aalow residents to appreciate these two zones, the architects, like so many others before them, lift the housing off the ground, placing apartaments in huge cantilevered blocks which hang several storeys above the ground at either end of th building.

But the real innovation in Nicolau and Domínguez’s project is the acknowledgement the cars have become a vital part of an individual’s sense of social identity. Rather tahn relegating car parking to the streetm or to piss-stained underground chambers, Nicolau and Domínguez propose that the apartment block is transformed into a commonly.owned private drive; a ramp to allow cars to be driven up to the level of the owner’s apartment.