When you step into the weathered graffiti-covered hall, you don’t notice it right away; you only see it if you look longer at the sand on the concrete floor: hey, that looks like Zeeland, and on the other side: the Wadden Islands. Climb on the ‘lifeguard chair’ at the head of the hall and it is immediately clear: this is a gigantic scale model of the Netherlands, which you can walk right through.
In the Ferro Dome, a former gasholder in the Merwe-Vierhaven area in Rotterdam, the architectural firm Zus built with Mann an ‘XL test location’, at the invitation of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR). Goal: to test whether it is feasible to build one million new houses by 2030, as the cabinet wants.
The scale model contains wooden ‘display cases’: 101 models depicting residential islands, water cities and terplandschaps. It is the test results of the design teams who, each armed with a ‘test kit’ consisting of a base plate, a bag of ten thousand wooden blocks (houses), and blue, green and white foam (for water, trees and infrastructure) went into the country, looking for answers to the question: how?
Symbolic Distance
Architect Kristian Koreman van Zus points to the platform photo of the Rutte-IV cabinet that hangs at the entrance of the exhibition. In corona time, the ministers are one and a half meters apart. ‘That is symbolic of the spatial policy that is now being made. That minister is about nitrogen, that one about agriculture, and that one about housing, but they keep an ‘appropriate’ distance. While, of course, you can’t tackle these issues separately.’
This is the mission of the ‘Ministry of Maker’, a platform that uses the collective imagination to envision and create a future-proof Netherlands’. Koreman is concerned about ‘Hurricane Hugo’, as he calls Minister Hugo de Jonge of Housing and Spatial Planning, who ‘rages across the country to reach that number of 1 million’. He has to think of the mouth mask deal that was concluded during the corona pandemic (with the help of De Jonge), in which 100 million euros worth of unusable mouth masks were hurriedly ordered. Koreman: ‘Municipalities are under pressure to build many homes quickly. But what will that yield in the future?’
On the map of the Netherlands that De Jonge presented at the beginning of October, only numbers are listed per province; they now have to find out together with the municipalities where the houses should be. Almost half of the homes are planned in South and North Holland; the lowest part of the Netherlands. ‘That doesn’t make sense, if you assume houses that have to last at least a hundred years,’ says Koreman. ‘According to the (not even the most unfavorable) calculation by the International Climate Panel (IPCC), the sea level could have risen three meters by that time. Economists are already pointing out that houses on these lands will no longer be insurable in the long run, which puts a bomb under the mortgage system, the cork on which area development floats.’
Long term thinking
The plea of this exhibition: think about the long term, taking into account climate change, new forms of nature, agriculture and the need to build with renewable materials. ‘Instead of saying: 39,193 houses should be built in Flevoland, we asked designers to suggest suitable housing locations,’ explains Koreman. The hundred design teams come from all over the country. ‘These architects know the landscape and the people, some of them sat down with aldermen and farmers. In this way we try to unlock local knowledge, which is far removed from central government policy.’
Some teams have flooded a piece of land and are planning floating homes in it, such as the team that bent over Zoetermeer. Elsewhere, mounds or raised dikes are made to build on, building on the Frisian and Groningen tradition. You can flood the polder in the model that Team Gear made yourself with a watering can – and empty it again by pulling the plug out of the base plate. Some teams do not add new homes, but make existing neighborhoods and buildings more sustainable, while creating more homes at the same time.
Koreman acknowledges that some plans are ‘speculative’, such as the idea of combining the development of nature with housing at IJmuiden, in anticipation of the closing of the polluting blast furnaces at Tata Steel. But that wild ideas can become reality, Zus herself has previously proven with the design for Almere Duin, a neighborhood with three thousand homes built on an artificially constructed dune landscape. With the proceeds from housing construction, the sea dyke there has been raised by one and a half metres, which has been recognized by Rijkswaterstaat as a climate-adaptive measure.
On November 11, the Ministry of Make will present an analysis of the test results to developers, provinces and the Ministry of De Jonge. In any case, Zuid-Holland wants to continue with the project in order to come up with feasible plans. Koreman hopes that other provinces will follow.
Nonsense number
In response to the demand for solutions to the housing challenge, former government architect Floris Alkemade wrote an essay in which he calls the 1 million homes to be built ‘an absurd number’ that reflects ‘a fundamental inability to properly understand the complex housing market’. According to him, the solution to the housing shortage does not lie in building additional buildings – ‘with the risk of putting the cart before the horse’ – but tackling traffic flow, utilizing vacant buildings and reforming legislation and regulations.