Campus

Studio Amsterdam : Live on het IJ

Master’s students in the Faculty of Architecture can now use Amsterdam’s Overhoeks area as teaching laboratory.
Design Studio Amsterdam, a 12 credit studio class for architecture master’s students, launched this September.

This year, Jacob van Rijs, one of the founders for the architecture firm MVRDV and a TU Delft alumnus, is the professor-in-residence.


The current site of Studio Amsterdam’s design project is the Overhoeks area on the IJ, the body of water just north of Central Station. Before the financial crisis hit, developers were ready with plans to create a neighborhood with residential, shopping and leisure facilities. Most of those projects were scrapped, but some projects, like the Amsterdam Eye Film Institute, were eventually finished.


The first client is the Spatial Planning Department of the City of Amsterdam to whom this semester’s students will present their designs for the Overhoeks area. “It should be quite normal for a student to work on actual assignments with partners outside of the university,” Rijs said in a statement.


If this were an industrial project, major investors and wealthy corporations might try to get the developers to cater to their interests, distorting the overall product to entirely meet the client’s needs. But since Studio Amsterdam is taking on the Overhoeks area as an academic project, those barriers fall back. “Therefore, for us it’s an actual assignment, for a client who wants quick answers,” said Rijs.


The designs will largely follow research that the Faculty of Architecture publishes in its publication series, Delft Architectural Studies on Housing. For the Overhoeks area, specifically, the buildings need strong profiles to fit the urban landscape, accommodate high population and building density and provide public spaces.


Ultimately, students will present their best ideas to build a functioning neighborhood, subject to a new design process that emphasizes either flexibility or incremental change. A major goal of the studio is to put these design processes to a stress test with the Amsterdam municipality as the client.


Only 25 percent of the applicants to this semester’s course were from the Netherlands. All the rest were international. In the end, a mix of 30 students was accepted. The coordinators are currently in the planning phase for next semester’s Studio Amsterdam. 

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