he Abbot of Bijlmer pads around his sunlit home
in a slogan T-shirt and full beard. Most of the disciples
who occupy this nine-lat ‘cloister’ in the Kleiburg
building have gone for the day, so he can move freely
through the communal kitchen to the slender chapel
with the cross-shaped window, past full-height glass
to the sweeping balcony. Beyond it, children frolic
in a quiet common dotted with mature oaks. They’re
lucky: this residential complex is one of the loveliest
within the controversial social housing project called
Bijlmermeer in south-east Amsterdam.
At a long wooden dining table, the abbot (real
name: Johannes van den Akker) cracks open a bottle
of Kleiburg Sicilian white beer, a citrusy blend he
brews, like a good Dutch Trappist, in a nearby hangar
surrounded by gardens. The microbrewery, which
serves enlightened dishes such as sustainable smoked-
mackerel salad with grapefruit, helps him underwrite
the cloister’s expenses and shelter homeless families.
A decade ago, the Kleiburg building’s 500 lats
were crumbling to their foundations. Developers
bought the lot for a single, symbolic euro and hired
XVW Architectuur and NL Architects to rescue it.
NL’s Kamiel Klaasse says Bijlmermeer had earned
a ‘street cred that hadn’t yet iltered to policymakers.
Many famous rappers came out of the area, using the
buildings and elevated roads in their videos.’
The architects employed great restraint that netted
huge gains at Kleiburg. They repositioned lifts that
had been slapped onto the exterior and tore of cheappointing to expose the warm concrete underneath. (^) »
An illustration of Siegfried Nassuth’s 1966 plan for the
estate, which comprised a series of ten-storey, 300m-long
blocks laid out in a hexagonal grid to allow each of the
13,000 apartments to get sunlight every day, and to leave
space for gardens, cycle paths and pedestrian avenues
Illustrator: Caroline Sillesen
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