Main Architecture and Design Kleiburg: Last Hero in the War for Modernism

Kleiburg: Last Hero in the War for Modernism

DeFlat Kleiburg in Amsterdam by NL architects and XVW architectuur is winner of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies Van Der Rohe Award 2017. For the first time the main Award goes to a project of renovation of an existing building. DeFlat is an innovative renovation of one of the biggest apartment buildings in The Netherlands called Kleiburg, a bend slab with 500 apartments in Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer neighborhood. Consortium DeFlat rescued the building from the wrecking ball by turning it into a “Klusflat”, meaning that the inhabitants renovate their apartments by themselves.

Kleiburg is one of the biggest apartment buildings in the Netherlands: a bend slab with 500 apartments, 400 meter long, 10 + 1 stories high. Kleiburg is located in the Bijlmermeer, a CIAM inspired residential expansion of Amsterdam designed in the sixties by Siegfried Nassuth of the city planning department.

De Bijlmer was intended as a green, light and spacious alternative for the – at that time – disintegrating inner city. The Bijlmer was designed as a single project. A composition of slabs based on a hexagonal grid. An attempt to create a vertical garden city. Traffic modalities were radically separated; cars on elevated roads and bicycles and pedestrians on ground level. They would no longer share the same space.

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