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.

Kleinpolder, 1955In 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

 


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