Even the teenagers are interested in the intriguing Het Schip housing complex, finds the head of Scott Brownrigg's Design Research Unit
I am in Amsterdam, which entails tugging my teenage children behind me far beyond the concentric geometric pull of the parallel canals. Breaking free from this controlling urban grain, our destination is the extraordinary crafted masterpiece Het Schip (The ship) by Michel de Klerk.
We pass through a tunnel in a railway embankment, immediately compressed into a moment of darkness, and emerge into a different sequence of places and spaces beyond the town centre, where more light, air and sky are available.
We find ourselves walking past the brickwork prow towards the apex of the site, where this magical piece of Amsterdam School architecture anchored itself a century ago. It is the evident ‘making’ of this highly articulated red brick and tile-hung composition that is extraordinary, and there is – unusually – more than a flicker of interest from our boys. A definitive and intended abstraction is at work here, as well as a series of intended polarities between low and high, straight and curved, dark and light.
Moving around the periphery of the building, and eventually within the courtyard, provides a sequence of sculpted architectonic moments that are always well-detailed and wholly integrated into the overall composition – no mean feat considering the ambition and exuberance of the accumulated planes, curves, overhangs and complex geometries.
Thresholds, intersections, skyline profiles and an ebullient concentric hung lozenge of brickwork marking a corner captivate us, and it is the sheer joy and controlled variety of form, texture, rhythm and balance that distils and captures the notion and reality of a crafted place to live in.
We enter the post office waiting room on the ground floor, followed by an apartment, before exploring the communal spaces within the courtyard. Such is the tactility of this friendly – and to an extent eccentric – social housing proposition, that it is easy to understand why generations of families have lived here over the years, enjoying the intrinsic comfort and sense of home and hearth that this place still offers.
On the one hand humble and vernacular, on the other avant garde and extraordinary, Het Schip provides a real place to inhabit and grow, with an inherent sense of belonging which makes it difficult for us to leave and duck under the railway line and back into the centrifugal focus of the city centre.
Alistair Brierley is an architect and head of Design Research Unit at Scott Brownrigg
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