17 May 2011

Kleiburg Bijlmer

Watch grab

As a guest lecturer at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture this spring, Jasper de Haan supervised a fun and interesting project with students.
One of the very last Bijlmer flats, Kleiburg, is about to be demolished. The assignment Jord den Hollander and Machiel Spaan came up with was to reuse the material from the flat. That way, the old apartment building would become a supermarket of building materials. A Kijkgrijp (after the first self-service grocery shop) full of walls, floors, frames, radiators, lift shafts, railings, balustrades, eaves, etc. etc.
The results were astonishing. From flattened flats, very inventive reuse of recycled radiators as balustrades to concrete eaves that took on a second life as beautiful brise soleil. But the most unlikely idea was to simply stack the flats' floors and walls on top of each other. Using the walls and floors of the apartment building as a kind of mega Kapla, student Sjors Onneweer managed to stack a beautiful monument for the Bijlmer, measuring up to 46 metres high.
Here are some images of his project.
Actually, it would be a good idea to carry it out like this, as a kind of 1% settlement of the demolition of the Bijlmer. A 46-metre-high "stairway to heaven" folly, as a monument to a failed public housing ideal, stacked from the floors and walls of a flat.