june 2011

contractors are known, we are going to build finally!

september 2010
design starts after development phase. Christian Muller Architects join in designing and elaborating the project.

september 2009

Minister of neigborhood and integration, Van der Laan visited a project Krill is working on with Observatorium CVD and Woonbron. The project involves creating a living and working environment for the youth in Delfshaven. Harmen van de Wal handed a signed sketch of the project to the minister.

• Project: urban planning, housing
• client: competition NAi-Ymere
• design: Harmen van de Wal, with Smahan Amrach, Sonia Sousa and Cady Chintis
• program: 139 familyhouses, 11 tower apartments
• date: May 2007
• location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In the Bijlmer, a post-war neighborhood in Amsterdam, history is being written. All historic elements previous to the building of this neighborhood has been removed thoroughly to be replaced for a modernist dream of apartment slabs in the green. The result is both impressive and meager. Being problem solvers of the first hour, the engineers treated the Bijlmer as a solution for mass housing and succeeded in that, but they failed in making it a proper environment for dwelling.
Dwellandscape Heesterveld aims for the same ambitions as the original Bijlmer master plan, creating dwellings in the green, only this time the housing will not be disconnected UFO’s in the park, but they will form a symbiotic relationship with it. A new landscape will be created with hills as artificial horizons, a new water structure of small ponds and canals will be made, trees will be planted. The housing, small in scale and footprint, will be equally distributed in this landscape. Instead of creating a public park, the land will be given in custody of the inhabitants. They will take care of the trees ponds and canals releaving the authorities from the maintenance costs, and in turn they can treat it as their own garden. A win win situation for both parties.

• Project: sustainable urban renewal
• Client: self commissioned researched
• designteam: Harmen van de Wal, Paul de Graaf, Ines Balsa da Silva, Arnold de Bruin, Barbara Constantino, Javier Iñigo, Carmen Largacha, Gianpiero Venturini
• research: Krill Architectuur, Paul de Graaf, Ruimtelab2, BVR, Machiel van Dorst (TU Delft)
• date: june 2010
• Program: sustainable urban renewal of 70′s neighborhoods
• Location: Rotterdam, Zevenkamp

Within atelier 7up, Reinventing Zevenkamp, four teams (Krill, BVR, Ruimtelab2, Paul de Graaf) collaborated with Machiel van Dorst (Technical University of Delft) in order to find tools for sustainable urban restructuring, using Zevenkamp, a suburban neighborhood build in the late 70′s, as a case study. Three major perspectives were explored and combined in one method: ecology, flows and people.
Krill and Paul de Graaf collaborated to use ecology as perspective and metophore. City as ecosystem is not just interpreted as green and natural city, but rather as a city that behaves like an ecosystem, a resilient robust, dynamic and divers urban area.

• Project: architecture
• Program: elementary school cluster
• Client: competition
• Design: Harmen van de Wal, Javier Peno, Patricia Venero, Beverley Walker
• Location: Rotterdam
• Start design: july 2008

What do kids in a run-down, totally paved neighborhood need? We could only answer that question with ‘nothing’. No playground instruments, no fixed sportsfields, no new rules. They need a piece of urban nothingness, a wilderness to play in.
When confronted with the question to design a school with sports and playground facilities to be shared with two other schools, we decided to create this playfull wilderniss.

The facilities, among which a hamam, a sports center, a kindergarten an a small theater will all be hidden under a roof. The roof provides a landscape devoid of design, but full of small water streams, rocks, stones. A place without function, guidelines, a place where kids can make a mess, build huts, play with mud. In an area where obesity among kids is growing rapidly, where everything has been functionally claimed, this seems to be one of the few methods to stimulate kids to leave their computer games and to move.

• commision: competition Europan 8
• date: august 2005
• design : Krill: Harmen van de Wal with Smahan Amrach, Julia Sulzer
• program: 19.600 m2 of housing, retail, leisure and landscaping
• photography architecture model: Jacqueline Schellingerhout
• photography urban model: Bart Goedbloed

This project explores a fascination of us, the colonized architecture. For a competition for a coastal development of a small city in Finland, we decided to focus upon a prototypical building designed for living, shops, leisure and many more without fixing the programs architecturally. It had to be a building like those one find in abandoned harbour areas; strong, sturdy and capable of being completely renovated while keeping its fascinating appearance.

Asked for a housing design, we decided to break away from the function-specific, target group oriented approach of most architecture and instead to make a building that is spatially specific, offering closed, rough and cosey spaces just as open, light and refi ned spaces. This prototypical building could live many lifes, housing a broad variety of people and functions over time. We gave Kemi the harbour buildings it never had, reinventing it’s history.

• Project: architecture, housing
• Commision: self organized research
• Designteam: Bart Goedbloed, Harmen van de Wal
• Location: Amsterdam

De Cascade is an apartment building in a location pestered by pollution and noise. The soil is heavily polluted with toxics, and one of Netherlands major railwaylines runs at less than 100m from the site. Two environmental issues that are most common in the Netherlands, but dealt with in the least creative way. Noise and pollution are being done with in expensive actions to ensure the possibillity of tabula rasa planning, not incorporated in the design itself.
The Cascade investigates alternative ways to deal with these issues in an ecologically and spatially much more interesting way. The result is a building sanitating it’s own soil pollution and creating it’s own low-noise spots.

Three floor in the tower are designed as elevated courtyards. Every courtyard gives entrance to five apartments up, and five apartments below and every courtyard has it’s own character. The top courtyard has been designe as a collection of private gardens, while onde of the others has been designed as a collective garden.

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A year after completion the extension of De Kleine Duizendpoot is fully in use. We've taken some snapshots of the Kleine Duizendpoot, while waiting for the real photo's Ralph Kaemena is going to make for us.

team:
Harmen van de Wal with Arnold de Bruin, Ines Balsa, Carmen Largacha, Ruta Velucita
Constructor: Karel van Moorsel
Contractor: Chris Liet
Client: M. Chin a Sen

De kleine Duizendpoot, even the roof is being used allready.