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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March 24, 2011
The University of Utrecht — a city notable, architecturally, in ancient and contemporary ways – is celebrating its 375th birthday this week. On Tuesday they kicked off the party with an art project that trained seven colored lasers (each a color found on the University flag) on the facade of the Utrecht Dom, from a distance of almost two miles.
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March 14, 2011
Situated on the Utrecht University Campus in the Netherlands, the Smarties student housing building is part of a pre-existing OMA master plan. The plan’s intention is to give the area greater coherence and character while simultaneously solving the chronic housing shortage for young people – and Architectenbureau Marlies Rohmer’s Smarties project is a direct descendent of that effort. Likewise, the development’s goal was to “achieve greater contrast between the built-up zones and open areas.” The building consists of 380 independent units, and the facade is covered with 1,500 multicolored modular aluminum panels to form a continuous surface, “which accentuates the monolithic character of the building.”
More details and images after the jump.
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