Architect Ashok Bhalotra (1943-2022) became internationally known with his urban design for Kattenbroek, the Vinex district that arose between 1988 and 1994 north of Amersfoort. The district, subdivided into neighborhoods such as the Forbidden Zone and Hof der Memory, with striking projects such as the ‘ruin houses’, caused quite a stir in the Dutch architecture world, which at the time was still strongly dependent on strict modernism. Residents, however, turned out to appreciate his poetic design, and the neighborhood is seen as a success.
Bhalotra was born in 1943 in the Indian city of Gujrat, where he studied architecture and urban planning. He started his career there, worked in Kuwait and Paris, after which he started working in the Netherlands in 1971 at KuiperCompagnons in Rotterdam, an office for Spatial Planning, Urban Planning, Architecture and Landscape. In addition to his work, he loved to travel. Along the way, he liked to talk to ‘the farmer on the mountain and the citizen of a city’, he said in an interview in 1993. Fidelity† ‘Wisdom is just in the street, more so than in the university.’
At the end of the eighties, just as it is now, the Netherlands was faced with an enormous housing construction task, for which the central government had designated the so-called Vinex locations near cities. Bhalotra wanted to prevent rows of houses from simply being rolled out in the meadows. With Kattenbroek he wanted to create a city with a soul, focused on the use and experience of the residents. He took the existing landscape with its ditches and rows of trees as the starting point for the urban design, which consists of an enormous circle intersected by axes. The shopping center was given the name Emiclaer, after an old farm that once stood there. Several architects worked out the streets and squares, and Bhalotra designed the street signs and the street furniture himself.
‘Thanks to Kattenbroek and the collaboration with Bhalotra, I have become more relaxed, less dogmatic’, said architect Leo Heijdenrijk at the time about the ruined houses he designed. In this way Bhalotra has enriched Heijndenrijk’s work and Dutch architecture.
“One of the best things about living in a city is that you can keep flirting,” Bhalotra said in a 2006 interview about his passion for cities. Paris was his favorite city, Swiss cities he hated: too clean, too orderly. ‘If there is too much social control or repression, as there is now in the Netherlands, you no longer live in a city, but in a prison. When a city is a prison, it’s time for anarchy.’
In collaboration with Harm Zeedijk, Bhalotra realized the new housing estate Skoatterwald near Heerenveen, and in 2009 the emission-free residential area Stad van de Zon in Heerhugowaard, where a bridge and bicycle path are named after him.
Abroad, Bhalotra designed the Dubai National Airport, the King Saud University in Saudi Arabia and the City Hall in New Delhi, among others.