Professor Richard Rosa
Individual Work
Fall 2023
Individual Work
Fall 2023
This study of housing and housing types explores how people can live privately, share communally, and inhabit contextually by imagining Amsterdamian housing as a collage of three typologies, separated by form but connected through a common sequence of forecourt, living room, and garden. The three typologies of housing are rowhouses, co-housing, and villas. Each type has ample light, air, and green space; the only difference is in the scale of space and the scale of sharing.
The rowhouse continues contextual patterns along the street, maintaining the same rhythm and surface. It is a double-story unit with a double-height space that delaminates from a surface to a frame, that opens up to a balcony on the park side. The bar on the park side villas are a tripartite organization of bedroom, living room, bedroom, with each room opening up to a garden in the back. There is a mat of cohousing between the rowhouses and villas, which serves to mediate between the two typologies. In the cohousing, only the bedrooms and bathrooms are fixed, and the living space and gardens on either side are flexible and shared. Through the use of planes and the blending of materials between inside and outside, the units’ experience of green space is further enhanced.
The overall form of the project completes the closed-block pattern typical of Amderdamian blocks. The site is situated west of the Singelgracht canal and the busy Stadhouderskade street, south of the quiet and intimate Tesselschadestraat street, and north of Amsterdam’s largest and most notable park, Vondelpark. The three typologies of housing form three bars, which terminate against a tower that faces the canal and houses public programs.
The circulation supplies the connecting tapestry that brings the contexts together, in both the east-west and north-south directions. The public approaches on three parallel east-west lengths of circulation, which change in scale depending on the program. The residents approach perpendicularly, in the north-south lengths. The residential circulation lengths operate both vertically and laterally, to bring residents across and up to their unit.
