Its connotations as a last resort – a jolly one – acquire another resonance when it is learned that the curved nautical-bridge shape at the top of the building is for the coffins of the recently dead, where family and friends pay last respects. This is perhaps a fitting image – it is certainly proving a popular one – for a place in which older people can cluster together and enjoy community in their final years. Closer to, in the entry or garden courts, the building strongly recalls an Art Deco resort hotel. From a distance it looks like a liner or an aircraft-carrier steaming through the Neo-Vernacular terraces, its off-white concrete block walls and flat roofs contrasting with the ‘natural’ finishes and pitched roofs of the houses. De Overloop is situated near the dam wall and overlooks the lake from which chill winds blow. But once children have departed, the parents may be left isolated and lonely. Its population fled the dirt, decadence and distractions of the city to raise children in cosy new houses in spacious suburbia. Wide sills are filled with plants along the single-banked corridor on the north side that overlooks the entry courtĪlmere-Haven is a new town overlooking a lake on a new polder east of Amsterdam. Source: Martin Charles / RIBA collections It is elegant in its facades and massing but reveals its eclecticism quite unabashedly – among other things paying homage to heroes of the early Modern Movement with some direct, yet quite unforced, quotations. The building also provides further evidence of the architect’s new-found maturity (discussed in AR January 1985). Factors he considers important in designing any of them are: the role of the building in the larger community of the city that where possible and appropriate it should invite in, and involve, the local community that it should forge a community from its inhabitants and that the design should invite the inhabitants to interact with, actively ‘make’ a home of, and even commune with, the building. All these concerns are abundantly evident in Hertzberger’s De Overloop old-age home in Almere-Haven, another milestone in his evolving approach. You can read Buchanan’s new introduction here.Ĭommunity has been a central concern in all of Herman Hertzberger’s buildings.

Originally published in April 1985, this piece was republished in print in November 2018, with a new introduction by Peter Buchanan, as part of an issue on the AR Emerging Architecture awards and the Netherlands. Realising various strategies to draw out a community, De Overloop provides a milestone in Hertzberger’s evolving approach

Traphekje overloop