540 : artis housing project

PREFACE

I had the pleasure to meet Gusatvo Ambrosini and Branimir Medic during the first year of my master degree. Since the beginning of my academic career, I have always been fascinated by dutch architecture and this is why I have decided to work in the Netherlands, through Medic's office, de Architekten Cie.

I took this final project as a truly occasion to improve myself. To live and work in a city like Amsterdam has been, definitely, a unique experience. I had the possibility to visit different places and to meet different people and cultures. Each of them gave me something precious and important.

From the academic and architectural point of view I decided to work inside a reality like Cie., because I wanted this final project to be a step further towards my professional future. I tried to interpret the design task in a mature and serious way.

This research revolves around the contemporary way of living and it is focused on polyvalent and adaptable buildings. The final output of the design work is a housing complex inside Amsterdam Centrum district.

Between the empty spots inside the city that Medic proposed to me I picked this site because it gave me the possibility to deal with many interesting features. First of all, the site is the heart of De Plantage neighbourhood, an illustrious and historical place. Then, it is part of Natura Artis Magistra, Amsterdam's Zoo and it face an ancient and beautiful warehouse, nowadays converted into housing: the Entrepotdok. Except for few public buildings and museums, the program of the district is residential. I approached the study of the urban layout, carefully, in order to respect the historical context. For my building I decide to reproduce the dimensions, the heights and the depths of the Entrepotdok. Both the urban layout and the architecture typology has been designed after a long research on Amsterdam architectural and urban history.

During my work I embraced de Architekten Cie. methods.

I tried to understand how dutch architects design their building without losing the approach that I learned along my years inside Politecnico di Torino. The output of this final project aims to give an image of a different way of living and it tries to frame new strategies to approach the complexity of contemporary architecture?