Le Medi
Le Medi Housing Estate
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Client: Com Wonen Rotterdam, Era Bouw
Architects: Geurst & Schulze, Korteknie Stuhlmacher
Landscape Architects: DS&V, Geurst & Schulze
Completed in late 2008, this urban residential block in Rotterdam sits on a block in the 19th century district of Bospolder. It is much larger than the surrounding ones, and has two interior streets that are closed off during the night by gates.
This represents the first contradictory move: the grain of the block is simultaneously larger and smaller than is usual in the surroundings. The facades are even more puzzling. There are very few contextual nods. The windows are square. They do not resemble the surrounding sash windows at all, and their spacing is at odds with the typical transparency of the Dutch bourgeois house. The houses are clad with grey bricks, forming all sorts of decorative patterns. The roof line is irregular. There are ornaments around windows and doors — mostly in stone, but occasionally brickwork — which in places shift vertically or horizontally, causing graphic complications in the grid of the facade. Railings and doors are decorated. An arched gate provides access to the interior streets which are even richer in their appearance, lined with houses that are each painted in a different colour.
Central in the block is a rectangular square, distinguished from the rest of the scheme by its purity — all facades are white and there is a continuous concrete colonnade with a fountain in the middle. Its drain runs in the pavement back to the arched entrance gate. Some of the houses in the scheme are designed by a second office, Korteknie Stuhlmacher, which further compounds the project’s sense of complexity.
The layout at Le Medi consists of six parallel rows of housing, the two outer pairs carefully masking residents’ parking garages. The main arched gate at the eastern perimeter is supported by a recessed pair of houses, and addresses a street connecting directly to an important local shopping avenue and to public transport. One of the southern gates is set at an angle which supports a diagonal pedestrian route likely to be intensively used.
The project is an initiative of Hassani Idrissi, a successful immigrant entrepreneur. He is known in Rotterdam for having built a fountain (“Shrab oe shoe!”, Drink and admire!) and for establishing a successful Moroccan restaurant. His brief for Le Medi had something of the quality of a dream - an architectural wish list that was way too long.
There had to be a gate, a square, a fountain, ornaments and decorations, small streets, large streets, and the estate had to reconcile a commitment to Moroccan culture with the context of Rotterdam. Idrissi convinced a social housing trust and a developer to look into his ideas, but it proved difficult to translate his desires into architecture. Various designs failed.
However, architect Jeroen Geurst — probably informed by his travels to northern Africa — did not fall into the trap of going completely mediterranean. The layout of the block is rational and economic, and is located with great precision both in the local urban grid and within the capabilities of the Dutch building industry. This was key in achieving a level of finish and craftsmanship that has become unusual in the Netherlands.
Today, the value of architecture cannot be easily measured in terms of its authors’ ethical inclinations. Idrissi’s emancipatory dream does not automatically validate Geurst’s architecture. But there is more to this project than offering a mere symbol for the emancipation of immigrants in Dutch city life.
What Geurst applied to the rational foundation of the project is not at all about mystification. Its iconography is referential rather than symbolic. Images refer to things that are exotic but tangible. This makes it very different from other urban housing developments which offer no more than plastic ornamentation.
By contrast, Geurst & Schulze’s housing has a constant base tone which is much too self-conscious and too urban in quality to really become “ugly”. The rear facades and the pergolas in the back yards are firmly attached to the overall spatial and aesthetic ideas.
Le Medi exhibits exaggeration, contradiction and conflicts in every aspect, but also demonstrates great compositional control. Moreover, there is an element of differentiation within the differentiation – differences between the outer facades (grey brick all over), the interior streets (each house painted in a different colour) and the square (painted white, gridded by the colonnade, and uniform again).
With the careful detailing of façades that feature articulated frames around the windows, stepped ornamentation in the expanses of brickwork and strategic use of colour, columns and embellishments, the neighbourhood refers to classic stylistic elements that still appeal strongly to a large and diverse group of house buyers in the Netherlands.
Le Medi is the provisional culmination of an oeuvre that is celebrating the architectonic culture of today’s city. In that oeuvre, the absorption of exotic architectures happens as a matter of course.
