November 29, 2012
Hans van Heeswijk Architects’ concept for the Meandering Tower House.
It’s not often that a European architect approaches American-style tract housing with anything resembling desire. But on a tour of the modernist developer Joseph Eichler’s homes in and around San Francisco, the Dutch architect Hans van Heeswijk was taken with the region’s hilly expanses of single-family homes. Imposing that style of development onto the already saturated Dutch Randstad—the urban super-region comprising Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht—is obviously out of the question, but California’s spaciousness got Heeswijk thinking about how to build a Dutch residence with the same sense of air and possibility. Read more!
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November 21, 2012
Why have one venue when you can have three? Neutelings Riedijk Architects‘ plan for the new Spuiforum at The Hague will house performance venues for the Royal Conservatory, the Nederlands Dance Theatre, and the Residential Orchestra. The ambitious yet compact design functions as a giant set of stairs—making the stacked performance halls possibly the largest landings ever—that carries the public to a domed roof with sweeping views of the city.
Neutelings Riedijk originally won an international competition to design the building back in 2010. The firm’s proposal for a central volume of performance spaces wrapped in a filigreed exoskeleton beat out 53 other submissions, including one of Zaha Hadid’s undulating metallic apparatuses. After an uncertain two years of budgetary hurdles and design changes, the project has won approval from The Hague’s city council and is on track for a 2018 opening. Check out the renderings!
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