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.
Butabu
For centuries, complex and intricate adobe structures, have been built in the Sahal region of western Africa, including the countries of Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso. Made of earth mixed with water, these ephemeral buildings display a remarkable diversity of form, human ingenuity, and originality.
In a fascinating book, published in 2003, titled ‘Butabu: Adobe Architecture of West Africa’, and co-authored by British photographer James Morris and Harvard professor Suzanne Preston Blier, a stunning visual array of these structures is displayed.
In his Preface to the book, Morris writes:
“Too often, when people in the West think of African architecture, they perceive nothing more than a mud hut—a primitive vernacular remembered from an old Tarzan movie. Why this ignorance to the richness of West African buildings? Possibly it is because the great dynastic civilizations of the region were already in decline when the European colonizers first exposed these cultures to the West. Being built of mud, many older buildings had already been lost, unlike the stone or brick buildings of other ancient cultures. Or possibly this lack of awareness is because the buildings are just too strange, too foreign to have been easily appreciated by outsiders. Often they more closely resemble huge monolithic sculptures or ceramic pots than “architecture” as we think of it. But in fact these buildings are neither “historic monuments” in the classic sense, nor as culturally remote as they may initially appear. They share many qualities—such as sustainability, sculptural beauty, and community participation in their conception—now valued in Western architectural thinking. Though part of long traditions and ancient cultures, they are at the same time contemporary structures serving a current purpose.
The mud from which these buildings are made is itself a controversial substance that tests our conventional views of architecture. It is one of the most commonly used building materials in the world, and yet in our urban-dominated society it is seen, effectively, as dirt. Buildings subtly alter in appearance each time they are re-rendered, which can be as often as once a year. Yet the maintaining and resurfacing of buildings is part of the rhythm of life; there is an ongoing and active participation in their continuing existence. If they lost their relevance and were neglected, they would collapse. This is not a museum culture…”
In this review of the book from The Guardian Newspaper, journalist Jonathan Glancey writes:
“What these magnificent mosques prove is that mud buildings can be far more sophisticated than many people living in a world of concrete and steel might want to believe. Mud is not just a material for shaping pots, but for temples, palaces and even, as so many west African towns demonstrate, the framing of entire communities. The very fluidity, or viscosity, of the material allows the architects who use it to create dynamic and sensual forms.
Morris’s photographic trips through the region in 1999 and 2000 record a world of architecture that, sadly, is increasingly under threat. Perhaps it is mostly poverty rather than culture and memory that keeps this rich and inventive tradition of building alive…”
This book is a treasure trove of imagery and information to any architecture enthusiast. Critical elements like space, light, and texture are explored in intimate detail, revealing a strong argument for this kind of architecture to be studied, documented, and profiled more wildly. As Morris sums up his preface: “I am still curious why West Africa’s adobe buildings receive so little serious consideration. If architecture is a cultural expression, perhaps it is the culture from which these buildings have evolved, so alien to the European mind, that keeps it in the academic wilderness, hard for the commentators to place.
Sadly, the English version of the book is now out of print. There are, however, used and new copies avaibale from independent oulets via Amazon.com
Photographs and Preface published courtesy of James Morris.
