Kiefhoek lakótelep Rotterdam története és jellemzői
Rotterdam is home to quite a few hidden pearls of modernism, most famous one is of course Van Nelle Factory. Many of these can be found just slightly outside the city centre and are thus not always easy to find and explore. The Kiefhoek is the undisputed highlight of modernism within the context of Rotterdam’s vast collection of social housing projects. It was with this residential area from 1927 that J. J. P. Oud made a name for himself as a modern architect. The houses were small, but very practically furnished with all kinds of built-in elements, such as cupboards, a small fireplace and a useful coat rack that was, at the same time, serving the purpose of a hat shelf. A tour of the Kiefhoek starts at the unique house museum, which gives you a good insight into the history of the architecture and its clever features. The house is set on the edge of the Hendrik Ido square and is only open to groups guided by an Urban- or MuseumGuide. After visiting the house museum, you’ll be exploring the rest of the remarkable project. Tip! There are also other special social housing and garden villages around the Kiefhoek. You can discover these individually via this walking route that UrbanGuides created on behalf of Open Monument Day. Hungry for more Modernism in Rotterdam?
€ 125,- ex. J.J.P. Oud was without a doubt, along with Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld and the historically displaced Truus Schröder, one of the greatest exponents of the Dutch architectural avant-garde. Until a few decades ago, the city of Rotterdam had always been defined as containing a high number of working people, one of the most exploited seats of the Dutch citizenry. It is in 1918 when J.J.P. Oud assumes the position of director of the city's Housing Department, thanks to which new cutting-edge variables applied to large-scale social housing projects would begin to be incorporated. The proposal, of rather isotropic characteristics in its general perception, was limited by a fairly consolidated urban enclave in its perimeter, which forced Oud to find an introverted solution and promoted the typology of paired houses in a row set back on their interior faces. The set is resolved only in two levels, in opposition to many of the buildings that had been made in the years prior to the war. Oud, on the contrary, opted for semi-detached and repetitive houses to give geometric unity to the blocks that are read as complete linear volumes delimited by small entrance gardens, but that internally free up almost half of their surface for the courtyards of the heart of the block. “All the security that there is in the building approach is hesitation in the urban approach. Outwardly, Oud left a clear nod to his past in De Stijl, with facades stuccoed completely in white, but with some flashes of red, blue and yellow colours in the carpentry, in a composition resolved with the most rigorous Berlaguian tradition. Functionally, the houses are made up of two levels of less than four meters wide (3.88 m), with a living room, a small kitchen, a bathroom and up to three bedrooms, also considering that many of the families who moved to the neighbourhood were numerous, with up to five or six children per couple. For the residential area, Oud chose to design a minimal dwelling, a relatively new concept for the time, but widely disseminated by his contemporaries of the Modern Movement. If today we think that each house was resolved only in 61 m2, we might be surprised, even more so if we consider how this idea has been exploited to exhaustion today and we can easily find resolved homes (projected or forced) in less than 20 m2. But as we mentioned before, many of these residences were intended to accommodate families of eight or more. “Oud is the most conscientious of modern architects. Both in technical matters and in matters of design he accomplishes results less by startling strokes of imagination than by a cumulative process of refinement. This resolution of the Kiefhoek neighbourhood allows us to recognize a type of housing that Oud would later use (since 1926) to respond to the order of the Deutscher Werkbund with the project of the five houses in a row in the Weissenhof. Finally, as a cause of the low maintenance placed on the complex and a structure that could not respond adequately to the passage of time, the working-class neighbourhood of Kiefhoek was demolished in 1978, to later be rebuilt, with some modifications, between 1989 and 1995. The process was left in the hands of the architect Wytze Patijn, who chose to combine some of the houses to provide larger spaces and in line with the requirements of the time. Beyond this, the exteriors maintained their original characteristics, only changing the uses of the stores for spaces for community activity, and a house-museum that was the only one of them that preserved the interiors as designed by J.J.P.
- BENEVOLO, Leonardo (1971) History of modern architecture. Fifth part: The modern movement. chap. XIII. The formation of the Modern Movement. 4. The Dutch heritage: J. J. P. Oud and W. M. Dudok. P. 2- Ibidem.
- GARCIA GARCIA, Rafael (1995) Del bloque residencial al bloque lineal. Las propuestas de vivienda de Oud. Cuaderno de notas. N°3. Madrid.España: E.T.S.
- GOLDHAGEN, Sarah & GÓMEZ, Juan (2008) Algo de qué hablar: Modernismo, Discurso, Estilo. Bitacora Urbano Territorial. Vol 12. N° 1. Pp. 11-42. Bogotá.
- GONZÁLEZ CAPITEL, Antón (1996) La arquitectura en Holanda al margen y después de las Vanguardias. En Arquitectura europea y americana después de las Vanguardias. Pp. 391-412. Madrid.
- WIŚNICKA, Anna (2011) New Architecture for a New Man. De Stijl and the Process of Redesigning Architecture in the Age of Modernism. Neerlandica Wratislaviensia. Vol. 20. Pp. 175-184. Wroclaw.
NOTE: The house can't be visited at the moment.
The last large project of social housing built by Oud was the one developed in the Kiefhoek neighborhood at the south of Rotterdam. Many times, historians have noted the affinities between Kiefhoek and Hoek Van Holland as examples of a new trajectory for the modern renovation of the minimum and rational housing. Benevolo shows them as paradigms of an initial state of the open construction of the modern movement, and it is undeniably their valuable contribution to the problem of modern worker housing, with significant recognitions among their contemporaries. If we look at carefully, we can see that Oud chose, as in Oud Mathenesse, two-height dwellings with a flat roof; a typology that for continuous streets, was not usually used. Regarding to the general plan, we can observe that Kiefhoek occupies the inner part of a large estate with its perimeter had plots that were already built or were going to be soon. Based on this situation, it was not posible to influence on the context and, Oud decided to adopt an introverted strategy, similar as Oud Mathenesse; It seemed there was not possible to develop another solution since the visual limits of the project were the back façade of the existing constructions. Inside the available land, he collected the already predetermined system of access streets, linked it with the road network he designed, and arranged the houses in long rows predominantly parallel to each other. However, a hasty examination of the project should not confuse us and make us think that we are already in the presence of an arrangement of open blocks, on the contrary, these rows were conceived, and in a rather traditional way, with alternate orientations, so that the backyards remained contiguous, and the street frontages faced each other. One of the main concerns from Oud was to impede the views to the back courtyards and facades. The main reason, as Oud stated, was to hide the clothes racks. However, this attempt that is followed in all the areas of the project conditioned the position of the rows and has its formal consequences. En español: La arquitectura de Oud se centra en patios hacia el interior y en ocultar la ropa tendida para mantener la privacidad y la limpieza visual de las fachadas.
Garcia Garcia részletes elemzése szerint a Kiefhoek a minimális méretű, de intim, elvonulásra alkalmas helyek lehetőségét megteremtő lakótér kiforrott változata. A sűrű beépítés kígyózó sávjai kitöltik a rendelkezésre álló területet, közöttük udvarok, terek, térbővületek és utak húzódnak. A teljesen lecsupaszított, ablaksávokkal jó arányban tagolt homlokzatok ráerősítenek az alaprajzban is tetten érhető célszerűségre. A Kiefhoek a minimális méretű, de intim környezetet teremtő lakótér megoldása, amely a Modern Movement korai példájaként értelmezhető.
tags: #kiefhoek #lakotelep #rotterdam