Addressing the tiny windows and opaque balconies,
they hauled in miles of double-glazing. ‘The Dutch
are known for their large windows and fearless
emphasis on transparency,’ says Klaasse. The gutted
interiors were sold as DIY shells (keeping prices low) to
enterprising residents, who today form a cross section
of Bijlmermeer’s 140 nationalities. For now, Kleiburg
is the only building on the estate where residents have
purchased their lats on the open market.
If van den Akker represents the salvation
of Kleiburg, you could say Kleiburg represents the
salvation of the wider Bijlmermeer area, a district
conceived in the 1960s as a progressive paradise
that quickly became, instead, the most notorious estate
in Holland. The Bijlmer, to use its colloquial name,
went further than the urban blueprints of Le Corbusier
and Ernö Goldinger. Endowed with around 100
hectares of reclaimed farmland on a former polder
in Amsterdam-Zuidoost, the architect Siegfried
Nassuth designed an egalitarian public-housing nirvana
for the emerging middle class. His identikit high-rises
in honeycomb formations towered above automobile
traic, which in turn travelled on futuristic lyovers
above gardens and playgrounds. Quadrants were
zoned for residential, commercial or social functions.But once the (all too cheap) housing went up, the
public money evaporated. The supposed shopping
district? All vacant lots. Nobody with means would
choose to live in a brutalist monolith with no street life,
no metro, no heart. The housing association shoved
Surinamese migrants into rent-controlled lats while
more spaces sat vacant, becoming prime territory
for heroin addicts. With the Bijlmer name an emblem
for squalor and sin, Nassuth retired from architecture.
And that was before 1992, when an El Al cargo plane
lost control and plunged into two towers, killing dozens
of tenants. Strike up a conversation with anyone
here over 35 and they’ll likely have experienced the
‘Bijlmerramp’ catastrophe somehow: the resounding
crash, the screams, the night-long vigil.
Ultimately, though, this tragedy was the catalyst
the Bijlmer needed to survive. The city resolved to
raze a quarter of the towers and the roadways loating
between, replacing them with low-rises faced in
vernacular brick and slatted timber, still ofered
at subsidised rents. It dammed a lake, built transport
links and put up dedicated housing for addicts.
Eventually the contemporary art museum OSCAM
moved into a shiny space across from the produce
market. A Surinamese entrepreneur called Sarriel Taus »CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE,
A VIEW FROM THE
KLEIBURG BUILDING OF
LONTARPALMSTRAAT’S
TERRACED HOUSES,
A LOW-RISE DEVELOPMENT
THAT HAS REPLACED ONE
OF NASSUTH’S ORIGINAL
BLOCKS; NL ARCHITECTS’
2012 KAMELEON BUILDING,
A MIXED-USE PROJECT
THAT INCLUDES RESIDENTIAL
UNITS, A NEW SHOPPING
CENTRE AND A CAR PARK; XVW
ARCHITECTUUR‘S XANDER
VERMEULEN WINDSANT AND
NL ARCHITECTS’ KAMIEL
KLAASSE IN FRONT OF THE
REFURBISHED KLEIBURG
BUILDING, A PROJECT FOR
WHICH THEY WON THE
MIES VAN DER ROHE AWARD122 ∑