De Nieuwe Doelen

Abstract

The project rethinks the City Hotel and its accommodation of tourists within Amsterdam. Additionally, the building answers the question of urban densification and building within the historic centre of Amsterdam and revises the social precepts of privilege inherent to the elite architecture of the ‘Binnengasthuis’ area.

‘De Nieuwe Doelen’ constitutes in a social framework functioning as a collective house for diversity, effectively acting as a charitable institution, where twenty four rooms offer a place to students disadvantaged by their ethnicity and the white, secular tradition that exists within University of Amsterdam. The underprivileged citizens are welcomed to build on a grounded community where they are empowered by the architecture and grandeur of the context and recognised as an integral part of the campus, solidifying their position within the university.

The building enacts as a public platform, resonating notions of discourse inherent to the direct historic context. The project uses the fundamental models of the ‘Intimate City’ as a dogmatic approach; the ‘Venetian Campo’, the ‘Urban Loggia’ and the ‘Vienese Café’ inform the collectivity, informality and public permeability of the project. The notions of hospitality and charity, inherent to the morphology of the context, clarify in the social and spatial characteristics of the contextual model of ‘het Gasthuishof’, the Dutch analogical model to the ‘Venetian Campo’, which are inscribed into the tenet of the building.

‘De Nieuwe Doelen’ opens up a sequence of courtyard spaces that exist within the morphology of the ‘Binnengasthuis’ area. The building naturally extends the colonial architecture of the context, yet it reimagines the characteristics of privilege by creating an open and continuous public interior, existing of the continuous topology of the ground floor and basement and a highly permeable plinth to the context. The community floors rise above the gravitas of the construct; a formal public room of discourse where a telescopic seating system constitutes a sense of fluidity, aiding its multiplicity. By agency of intricately organised thresholds, an open and continuous interior is organised, existing of a collective gallery, as a place of residing, and contiguous rooms of privacy, resembling the highly informing model of the Gentlemen’s Club. Throughout the construct, integrated furniture in both collective and private spaces, establish instruments of appropriation. The formality of the social construct, enacting as a blank canvas, awaits appropriation of its inhabitants, awakening the significance of ‘De Nieuwe Doelen’.