10 años EUROPAN 5 España

The Dutch landscape seems to be formed by two planes of water: the wet, flat land and a cloudy, heavy, nearby sky. It is in this landscape that Almere, a sprawling garden city north of Amsterdam, is located. The competition site is an elongated rectangle located between the railroad tracks and a park avenue that connects the city. It is located on the edge of the city, close to the sea and overlooks a nature reserve. A site for which the City Council wants a special building in which, while experimenting with new housing typologies, an iconic image is achieved at the entrance to the city.
In this suburban space, where the car is the usual means of transport, there seems to be a feeling of living too close to the ground. On this exceptional site, we would like to be able to live at a higher altitude, to be able to better enjoy this landscape carpeted with one- or two-storey houses, crops and meadows under a continuous sky, without giving up the advantages of driving to your front door. Pursuing that idea would be like taking a strip of city and twisting it in on itself.

Starting from this idea, the building acquires a size that makes it an element capable of relating to others in the landscape. While pursuing the sculptural qualities of the volume, we doubled it to produce a pocket between the building and the row of trees along the avenue and thus create a protected, south-facing space for outdoor activities.