100 years of architecture in Rotterdam
1955: Housing estates Kleinpolder
Kleinpolder is the first post war residential district built in Rotterdam. The modernist architect and urban planner Lotte Stam-Beese designs the area of housing blocks with a maximum of four stories in rectangular strips. Part of the appartments have been thoroughly renovated. Stam-Beese is a prime example of the neigbourhood philosophy propagated by most modernist urban planners in the post war period. In Rotterdam she got the opportunity to put her ideas into practice in Kleinpolder, but later on a bigger scale in Pendrecht. The neighbourhood philosophy was the corner stone to return a sense of community into cities. This was impossible at the city level. Most aspects of daily life (housing, shopping, school, work, culture) should be lived out inside the neighbourhood. Only for larger purchases or participation in cultural activities should require venturing outside the neigbourhood and a visit to the city centre.
In
its architecture the characteristics of modernism are easibly recognisable:
generous use of concrete, glass and steel. Easy access for daylight into the
appartment is important and determines the orientation of the buildings.
Stairwells are visible from the outside, storage is on ground level. The space
between buildings is reserved for lawns and trees as communal garden. Living and
traffic have been seperated. Kleinpolderplein has been large scale experiment
with prefab building units. Because of the emphasis on quantity the average
appartment was modest in its setup. Average size was 53 square metres.
Lotte Stam-Beese was the ex-wife of the Dutch modernist
architect Mart Stam and had joined the city council as an urban planner in 1947.
According to Stam-Beese the neighbourhood philosophy would easily take hold in
Rotterdam, because she saw the city as an open structure with more or less
autonomous parts that had been incorporated into the city during the course of
centuries. Expecially in a city with large scale shipping and port labour would
have a great need for intimacy that neighbourhoods and districts could offer.
The setup of Kleinpolder was geared towards this thought. Buildings formed a
neighbourhoud, neighbourhoods a district and districts a city. In the same Stam-Beese
tried organises streets and roads. From tracks near the buildings to
neighbourhood streets, to thoroughfares between districts and motorways. This
hierarchy of traffic would be applied widely throughout the 1960's, with
Lelystad and Amsterdam Bijlmer as prime examples.
Stam-Beese philosophy had high expectations of the sense of community that her designs would install. But she was not totally confident. Especially in Pendrecht a strict selection was made of people who were allowed to establish themselves in her model housing project. In the end modernist planning resulted in functional but dull housing estates and a sterile city centre. The vulnarabitlity of these neighbourhoods showed when the original inhabitants left these relatively simple and small appartments and the selection mechanisms were abolished for their patronising nature. New socially and economically weak inhabitant found their way into these low rent housing estates. Delapidation and social degradation was the fate of many of this type of estates. A lot of effort is being put into reversing this development by improvement of the appartments, replacing entire blocks by new ones and diversifying the range of appartments on offer.
Completed in 1955:
Cinema Thalia J. Hendriks, W. van der Sluys, L.A. van den Bosch
Central Bank Agency A. van Roode
Citrus auction H.A. Maaskant
