The Netherlands is coping with more than 7 million square meter of vacant office buildings. For my architectural graduation I wanted to show that these ’70-’90 offices are a potential breeding ground for a new type of bottom-up city development. Allowing users to lease vertical building lots to make loft like spaces starting at €500 a month. Users will be economically supporting the building owner and lift-up the surroundings by choosing a variety of building improvements and extensions during a strategic transformation.
User Oriented
Using a website potential users would see which vacant spaces are available. From there they can contact potential other users and form collective living/working groups or find people sharing the same dream to built an shared theatre/gym. This all would be possible within flexible building lots that provide the building-owner revenue while giving community the ownership and freedom to fill in these spaces to there own wishes and steer the building redevelopment in 4 phases to follow there needs.
Transformation
The transformation starts with a program to raise awareness of the potential of the vacant building. In my case-study this program consists of a Wood Workshop/Bar serving as a gathering point for young Amsterdam families which want to live and work on there own Loft. To prepare the building-lots a MEP module is installed on strategic locations in the building allowing new tenants to connect there needed appliances while voting for extra facilities in the public domain. When the building is 70% full, users will have the ability to contribute for a public/personal roof-terrace, windows or balcony to the exterior. Large spaces, flexibility and collective facilities will keep attracting users and this proces could repeat itself in one of the other 7,6 million m² vacant office space in the Netherlands.
Amstel III, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Mentor: Carolien Ligtenberg
Coaching MA+U: Jan Willem van Kuilenburg, Pieter Feenstra
Project Status: Study
Project Size: 5.600m²
publication blauwe kamer
changing building education
MA+U website
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