Wissing's Pragmatism
Willem Wissing (1920-2008) was an architect and urban planner. From the mid-1950s, he designed numerous structural and expansion plans driven by the modernist principles of ‘light, air and space’. The neighbourhoods he designed consist not of closed blocks but of open bands of housing with large amounts of green space. These bands are made up of different housing types, including single-family houses, apartments and housing for the elderly, thus creating spatial variation.
Combatting the housing shortage was one of the government’s most important tasks in this period. As such, Wissing’s designs are characterised by simplicity, industrialised construction methods and standardised floor plans. The government issued catalogues with standard floor plans from which municipalities could choose; these included Wissing’s housing designs. This enabled rapid construction and high quality housing for all. Wissing’s houses were small by today’s standards, but were efficiently designed with built-in cupboards and serving hatches. Wissing designed the well-known ‘doorzonwoning’, a house with a living room arranged across the entire depth of the ground floor, with windows at the front and back, allowing sunlight to penetrate from both ends. This housing type can still be seen throughout the Netherlands. In the post-war years, houses of this kind in a green neighbourhood were an unprecedented luxury for many people.
Van den Broek & Bakema’s Utopia
In 1964, on its own initiative, the architecture practice Van den Broek & Bakema made a design for the eastward expansion of Amsterdam. Their proposal was a response to the rapid growth of the Dutch population and increased urbanisation between 1947 and 1960. Van den Broek & Bakema’s plan for Pampus envisioned a new neighbourhood for 350,000 people. The elongated city is spread across four artificial islands in the IJmeer. The individual areas are connected by a traffic artery comprising a partially subterranean, six-lane motorway and a monorail system. This thoroughfare is lined with tall, disc-like buildings containing shops, offices and housing.
The perspective drawing shows the dynamism of one of the traffic hubs: people are shopping on a broad promenade amid the zooming traffic. The buildings become lower and less dense towards the edges of the islands so that the residents can enjoy the landscape and water. The Van den Broek & Bakema archive is one of the most valuable collections in Het Nieuwe Instituut. The practice was a generator of new ideas about architecture, the city and the society of the future.
Text Andrea Prins