January 20, 2009
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| Architect Pieter Weijnen’s tall, skinny blue house stands on Steigereiland, one of seven artificial islands dredged from Amsterdam’s IJ Lake in IJburg, the city’s most recent urban expansion plan. The house is not much older than the ground it’s built upon and is surrounded by deep-blue waters and a dizzying range of forms, finishes, and hues—just minutes away from the historic city center. |
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| The “fairytale boat,” so visible from the outside, is also the first thing you see upon entering the house. Suspended above the ground floor, the enigmatic, scaly, blue-green mass hovers, just as likely the belly of a sea dragon as the hull of some fantasy ship. From below, the color and texture of the copper plates, with their beautiful verdigris, form a sculptural centerpiece for the house, articulating and enhancing the vertical thrust of the space rather than interrupting it. |
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| “We always intended to have the kitchen at street level and the living room above it,” says Weijnen, explaining how “the ship” evolved. “So I decided to suspend the living room on a platform 13 feet from the floor. As it’s so visible, the platform needed to have an interesting shape. A friend of mine who builds yachts designed a hull-like structure for it, and we finished it off with recycled copper from a church roof, cut into plates.” |
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| “The beams weigh a ton each,” says Weijnen. “They’re so hard that cutting them destroyed several chainsaw blades.” The giant weathered braces are mounted on concrete blocks set with shells, the idea of the project builder, Jasper Kerkhofs. “He was a great person to work with,” says Weijnen. “He interpreted my drawings brilliantly and was constantly thinking along with us.” The team used recycled materials throughout the house, which the architect intended as “an experiment in sustainability.”
“As an architect, you can have a big influence,” Weijnen says. “In the Netherlands, builders, architects, and developers are all waiting for each other, happy to stick to the legal minimum requirements for new buildings. So I think we just have to get on and do it.” Accordingly, Faro Architecten, the firm Weijnen cofounded and which currently employs a staff of 38 on a range of large-scale projects, “now tends to build in sustainability,” he explains. “But with developers, I don’t talk about things like climate change. I talk about added value and better sales instead.” |
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| The Blue House, which Weijnen describes as “a learning process” in sustainable building, uses half of the energy normally used by a new house of the same size. On the roof terrace, where several apple trees (a gift from a local farmer) are growing, a double-pipe solar water heater uses hot wastewater to help heat clean water. Under the recycled-wood garden terrace, a large tank collects rainwater that is used to operate toilets. An air-cooling system inspired by traditional Arabian wind towers conveys the air outside in underground pipes, which cool it before pumping it back in. |
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Source : dwell
Tags: architect, blue house, sustainable building, the house, urban
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[...] The Blue House by Pieter Weijnen Pieter Weijnen’s brand of maritime modernism brings a touch of magic to Amsterdam’s Steigereiland, where the architect built his family’s home. Inhabiting one of the development’s narrow plots, the house harkens back to the area’s nautical roots with a suspended shiplike story, visible from the street. Via…Interior Design Ideas [...]
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