Tactical urbanism generates so much buzz now—what with cheeky-smart interventions like scaffolding seating, recliner benches, and recreational parklets—that it’s easy to forget how pedestrians usually get shortchanged in the urban scheme of things. After World War II, Rotterdam remade its city center with larger-than-life modernist principles in mind, installing big works of infrastructure fringed with big buildings and, in the process, cutting central Rotterdam off from its northern districts. To improve their lot, residents are turning back the clock to 1854, when the city architect proposed a plan based on public walkways. “He planned canal promenades as a way of structuring the city,” says Kristian Koreman, principal of ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles). Now, of course, any pedestrian amenities must preserve traffic patterns, so ZUS designed a sky bridge that will knit the city center back together. Read more!

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In his first foray into urban camouflage, Otten transformed this electrical substation in Rotterdam with hi-res photos on aluminum panels.

Here’s a neighborhood-beautification strategy that doesn’t require any code changes, construction crews, or red-tape hassles. Using only tile, mirrors, hi-res photo prints, and paint, the Dutch designer Roeland Otten camouflages urban eyesores—usually aged bits of infrastructure—by dressing them up as the much-cuter shops, trees, and sidewalks that the offending structures obscure. Unlike the loud statement of yarn bombing or this weird gnome project, Otten’s urban interventions improve the streetscape by diffusing, rather than attracting, attention. Check out the pictures!

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Being an architect is handy for, you know, designing cloud towers and giant garden peninsulas. It’s also a convenient way to cure one’s hometown of dysfunctional spaces that have been allowed to fester for decades. MVRDV‘s Winy Maas, who grew up in the Dutch farming village Schijndel, has wanted to do something about the town’s oversized, empty-looking village square since 1980, when he first wrote to the mayor at the age of 20. The square had been damaged in a World War II and sorely needed a new building to return it to human scale. Three decades later, Maas got his wish, and he and partners Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries gave the town… a thematically appropriate but actually kind of triptastic photocollaged glass farmhouse! Read more.

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No stranger to creating unusual imagery and patterns out of every day images, designer Sven Lamme has developed a public-art series of inspired seating arrangements for the Balij forest near Zoetermeer in the Netherlands. Don in collaboration with landscaper Terra Incognita, Lamme’s monumental chairs serve not only as seating objects but also landmarks, giving the natural environment an unexpected, surrealist jolt. Read more!

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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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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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Vincent Callebaut’s Coral Reef Island, a proposal for Haiti. Photo courtesy of Vincent Callebaut

What is it about water that captures our imaginations? Yes, we certainly have been warned about rising sea levels and the 100-year flood’s awkward rechristening as the 3-to-20-year flood. But if stats really got through to us, obesity wouldn’t be a crisis and we would all have retirement savings. When it comes to visionary designs for the future of the built environment, flood scenarios dominate the design briefs—standard-issue earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanoes just can’t catch a break.

In our collective architectural imagination, the next century looks like a fanciful sci-fi resort in which we jet from floating airports to floating Scottish villages, soak in pools that float (wink-wink) in rivers, and furnish our floating apartment complexes with flat packs we bought in floating IKEAs.

And now that Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy has filled New York’s subway tunnels with water, it doesn’t seem so farfetched to imagine a fleet of gondolas sending commuters down a river underneath Broadway (which would certainly be an interesting entry in our Architecture + Weather category in the A+ Awards!). So, in preparation for only the most picturesque of disaster scenarios, we bring you some of our favorite futuristic designs for the all-waterfront property of tomorrow. Dive in!

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Photo: courtesy of Ken Lee

This September, the international students of Amsterdam University College started the academic year in a brand new building designed by Mecanoo Architecten, led by Francine Houben. Located in Science Park Amsterdam in the eastern part of the city, close to the historic center, the new school is an inviting place that can host up to 900 students. Read more.

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Building: Anansi Playground

Architect: Mulders vandenBerk Architecten

Location: Utrecht, Netherlands

Why We Like This:

This building in a park was designed to stimulate the creativity of visiting children within a calm, playground oasis. Each interior room has its own identity, with colorful wallpaper adorning the walls, helping to contextualize the space. The building’s façade, a stark white Corian that offers a sharp contrast to the vibrant interior, initially appears to be covered in miscellaneous, jagged lines. It is not until closer inspection that the lines begin to connect, creating decorative fairytale characters, beloved around the world. Read the complete project description here.

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The Netherlands has a storied past of adapting their building tradition to the waterways. The Dutch were less concerned with cultivating a proprietary architectural style than with forging landscapes conducive to their seafaring trade, draining rivers and reclaiming land and building dykes and canals which would facilitate the shipping of goods from their tiny land. The Moses Bridge is a continuation of that infrastructural heritage: a long sunken passageway that parts a water channel whose surface rests just below the eye level of most crossing visitors. More after the jump!

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