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.
Lamu Residence
Lamu Residence
Lamu, Kenya
Client: Suno Kay Osterweis
Architect and Interiors: Claudio Modola
Suno Kay Osterweis first visited Lamu, off the northern coast of Kenya, in 1996 after a brief safari. She was immediately seduced by the island’s heady mix of stylish, easy living and the eclectic crowd of regular visitors. She returned often eventually becoming acquainted with Claudio Modola, an architectural designer who practices in Lamu and lives on the neighboring island of Manda. In 1998, she acquired a narrow, steep plot of land facing the Indian Ocean, and quickly enlisted him to help her fulfill her dream of building a house of her own there.
Modola worked for weeks on sketches and eventually presented his client with a scheme that would fit the site’s topography and unusual dimensions. A fountain, to mark the transition from the outside to the inside, was to be at the entrance; the living spaces and master bedroom were to be placed on the upper levels to take advantage of the views and the ocean breezes. The ceilings were to be 23 feet high, and a swimming pool would be perched nearly 20 feet above the ground. The style would be inspired by the island’s Islamic architecture
Osterweis’ and Modola’s vision proved a difficult proposition. Building on Lamu is never easy. This centuries old island, with an old town that is a UNESCO protected Cultural Heritage Site, is accessible only by boat or air, and cars are not allowed. Thousands of blocks (composed in part of coral topsoil and cement) had to be fabricated on Manda and transported in small boats across the channel’s often rough seas. The site presented its own challenge: Hundreds of tons of sand had to be removed before the foundations could be dug.
Photographs by Tim Beddow
Despite the obstacles, the house was finished almost two years after construction began, and Osterweis focused her attention on the finishes and interiors. For the former, she replicated the traditional plasterwork of the local Swahili culture found on many of the island’s buildings – a process which, using local artisans took two and a half years, producing surfaces of superb sensuality and subtle color.
Most of the furnishings were sourced locally on the island, using salvaged driftwood, and local craftsmen.
Tropical Transplant
Veronica Web Residence
Key West, Florida
Architecuture: Bender & Associates
Interior Design: T W Black, Inc
Landscape Architecture: Craig Reynolds
If it were not overlooking a coconut-palm-fringed canal, the lavish if modestly scaled pleasure palace that New York designer Todd Black created as Veronica Webb’s family retreat in Key West would surely be taken at first glance for a royal pavilion in Marrakech or Taroudannt in Morocco. The docile manatees grazing in the canal, however, place it firmly in South Florida, where it is tucked away in a tropical paradise of a garden that includes mangoes, papayas, pineapples, yellow frangipanis, a diverse collection of palms and 45 varieties of orchids colorfully perched on the 100-year-old trees that populate their recently transfigured surroundings.
The former Vogue cover girl, face of Revlon and star model for Chanel, Azzedine Alaïa and Isaac Mizrahi says, “I got my love of all things Moorish while working with Alaïa on his Alhambra Palace collection.”
Webb’s appetite for the Moorish aesthetic was further whetted during a modeling stint in Morocco, where she met her husband, George Robb, who is dedicated to RPM Nautical, the foundation he established for the preservation of maritime history.
“We were in Tangier, where he had been commissioned by Mohammed V to recover ancient Roman shipwrecks,” she says. “The time my husband and I spent there sealed our love of the amazing art and architecture.”
Black recalls the introduction of the Moroccan theme as the Key West project began. “I had worked with Veronica Webb for years in more traditional styles, and then all of a sudden the vision of Morocco just seemed to come out of the blue of the Florida sky. I can do Moroccan, I said to myself, and I liked the idea of a paradise in isolation from everything.”
The home they created reflects the spirit found in the intricacies of French Orientalist paintings of the later 19th century, with their diverse styles of Arab North Africa, Egypt and the Middle East—here mixed with touches of Muslim India.
Black says of Webb that “her fashion-oriented design vocabulary gave the project a couture feeling—that passion for the handmade and hand-finished, along with fashion’s type of stylistic individuality.”
Robb’s interest in maritime history added its own vocabulary, as his work took the couple to excavations as far off as Turkey. “Everything is so joyful in Turkish design,” Webb muses.
Neither Webb nor Black went to Morocco during the process, preferring to work through Darwish Studio, a New York company specializing in Andalusian architectural ornamentation. As the design took shape, there was much of “the charm of the unexpected,” Black remembers. Woodwork, tile and stone arrived from Morocco to be fitted or carved or laid or otherwise woven into the fabric of the evolving island pavilion by a team of Moroccan craftsmen and apprentices, who spent a year in the Key West compound fashioning the house’s endlessly fascinating and endlessly complex details.
“We had a little Morocco going on around us,” Webb remembers. “Our 11 guys brought their prayer rugs and their spices with them, so there were the sounds and smells of Morocco. The FBI came every few weeks to check on us and what was happening in our little oasis.”
As the intricacies of the Islamic-star grids in colorful wood ceilings, domes and doors were adjusted to their sites, the wood mashrabiyyas fitted to windows, arabesques carved into the stone and brightly colored tiles wrapped around columns, there were many pleasant surprises. “Moroccan craftsmen follow their own intuitions, adding this here and that there. There’s something nice about giving up control and letting them take their own path,” says Black, who chose a riot of colorful textiles for the interiors.
“It’s like looking into a kaleidoscope,” Webb observes of the rooms. “You have enough pattern and color to keep you entertained: I feel that it all weaves together—my husband George’s shipwreck culture with my fashion and crafts culture. We enjoy its ‘crossroads of civilization’ spirit.”
Black adds, “Exoticism in general has always been on my radar, so it was great to flex that muscle on this project. There is such a sensuality to the textures and colors that is so appealing—so very romantic.”
Text and Photographs courtesy of Architecture Digest, March 2009
