(NL) Thinking about the architecture of the urban landscape in the Netherlands owes a great deal to the work of Adriaan Geuze, who founded West 8 in 1987 in Rotterdam. West 8 challenges the boundaries between architecture, design and city planning, situating their intervention where all these disciplines meet, on extreme scales, from the object to urban development. They are interested in the urban landscape both in its complexity and in its ordinariness, coming up with often unexpected solutions where there is a mixture of the natural and the artificial. The answers, in terms of development, proposed by Adriaan Geuze for the Borneo and Sporenburg basins in Amsterdam are good examples of the way the agency goes about things. Faced with the paradox--something that has become almost commonplace in the Netherlands--of responding to a problem involving population density and individualized housing and habitat, they come up with solutions which combine rules and regulations and individual appropriation. The individual habitat is arranged in bands set all along the docks; three blocks of collective housing units are the other part of this arrangement. The density is made up for, for all and sundry, by a sweeping view over the water, which is visible not only from the quays, the terraced roofs and the residential blocks, but also from the pedestrian foot bridges which connect the basins. Starting from the principle that natural areas in cities have a symbolic meaning rather than any real utility, they scale the public place down to the street, incorporating it into the living space, and thus providing patios and terrace gardens for each individual home. The diversity is retained by getting different architects to deal with small areas scattered throughout the plan. Infringements of the alignment are possible, thus introducing events which break the continuity.

West 8
Geuze (Adriaan) (1960)
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• Borneo/Sporenburg réalisé