September 1, 2015

a deck is not a roof!

Commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations and the Federation of Building Regulations, Jasper de Haan | ARCHITECTEN has written a guide for municipalities and drafters of building regulations.
 

This was in response to a ruling by the Council of State on 16 April 2014 which meant that all houseboats and other floating objects, intended to be "used on the spot and connected to the ground in any way," were suddenly a structure. This also made the Housing Act applicable to floating structures and therefore the building code, the zoning plan and much more. Thus, in order to put a houseboat anywhere, an environmental permit must now be applied for. It will also be possible to require floating structures to comply with reasonable standards of appearance. However, in order to test floating structures against reasonable standards of appearance, it is necessary, just as on land, to formulate standards of appearance criteria in a standards memorandum, with which such floating structures must comply. This guide, which was commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, is intended to help drafters of building standards memoranda dealing with floating structures formulate standards criteria. In this way, to monitor and where possible improve the spatial quality on and around the water. And that is important. Because these floating construction weeks are often located in water that is surrounded by non-floating structures for which building regulations have applied for ages. It would therefore be strange and result in legal inequality if all kinds of standards were imposed on a house on the quay, but not for the structure floating three metres away in the canal. Often these floating structures are in the middle of public space and have a huge impact on spatial quality. They are all-sided floating objects on which you can usually look. If you set spatial quality requirements on land, it is sensible to do so on water as well, which, incidentally, can be done in the same standards memorandum under a separate chapter, for example. Hence this guide.
 

A pdf of the guide is available for free download here:
Click here to download A deck is not a roof,. (4.02 MB)