In the name of 'progress' we've outlawed that kind of thing in most of the US, so now we have to drive pollution spewing vehicles to do even the most basic things.
I was hoping the article would discuss the issue of the visibly shifting foundations of many of the houses, which most of us find delightful as spectators but must be terrifying for property owners. It's impressive the houses are still here after 300 years, having been built on a bog. Even more impressive how many appear to be in otherwise excellent condition given their lean angle! I have to imagine many societies would have demolished and rebuilt them long ago (boo).
In the same vein, I've also read that the forward tilt many houses exhibit was intentional- to make it easier to hoist goods to the upper floors.
I mean, I like heritage as much as the next guy but as the owner of a rinky dink tiny thatched cottage that would cost 100k to really fix up or maybe 30k to replace with a much more comfortable, safer, cheaper to heat, modern dwelling with doors where I'm not whacking my forehead - you can hardly blame people. Oh, the lead paint isn't awesome either.
I mean, I'm just a crazy eccentric, but as actual structures to live in old houses, especially the ones the poor lived in, can be kind of horrible.
The cellars of my house date back to around 1000, and gradually, the higher you get, the newer the floors are. The roof is C19. The front facade was once removed and replaced, I guess around C18. We still have the sockets and the pipes for gas light, though, of course, they've been superceded by electric wire, three times at least. It's still a pretty good place to live :-)
The city of Amsterdam keeps track of the "sink rate" of fixed points on buildings.It's a good place to take a look if you ever plan on buying something in the city:
> Most classical gragtenpanden have modern insides
Yes, and many of these beautifully-renovated interiors are visible from the street! (Sorry, Amsterdamer, it's just impossible not to notice when walking by.)
The point is, though, that it appears common for these renovations to be carried out despite egregious settling of a house's foundation.
If you're building in a bog, you can maintain stability if you don't try to dig it out nearly as much as you would land. Also taking buoyancy into account.
> I've also read that the forward tilt many houses exhibit was intentional- to make it easier to hoist goods to the upper floors.
I always thought that was just Dutch people being Dutch and getting more floorspace without buying more land. Any of the skyhooks I've seen just extend out above the top floor. I suppose there's more risk of breaking windows if the load swings around as it goes straight up though.
There's typically one person on the street, one person at the window. There's one rope that goes up-down on the joist, and one rope which the person below can pull away from the home as well as use to stabilise.
The houses have been built on wooden piles, and with the recent drought in the Netherlands the ground water level fell. If the top of the wooden piles were exposed to air, they start rotting.
A few years from now we might see a lot of old homes needing new piles or new foundations.
When I did a walking tour there the guide said the very narrow and deep form factor of the houses was to do with the way property was taxed at the time. I imagine they're all protected now what with the look of the city being so important for it's tourism industry.
This is correct and also why you see the super-wide houses on Herengracht ("Gentlemen's canal") as that is where the wealthy traders lived. They could afford the insane tax.
The canals were access to transportation, so maximizing number of house fronts on the canal was probably a priority. That probably creates the tax situation too. But you see it elsewhere too. My neighborhood in Maryland has long narrow lots along the river.
Yes, the window tax did exist in the Netherlands. That is why you sometimes see a stone structure where a window had been. This was a way to avoid the tax.
New Orleans has shotgun houses "for the same reason", although no historians can find the tax code that caused this. My NOLA wife does not appreciate it when I point this out.
Well the article was a bit thin on the why TBH. But indeed one thing I noticed about Dutch houses is the attention to the living room, at the expense of all other spaces. Bedrooms barely as wide as a bed, ludicrously small bathrooms, entrances that are barely an afterthought (unless you count the space to “get the mud off your hoofs” as one.)
Oh, and the cheapness an often obvious design mistakes even in new buildings, mostly due to the boom/bust nature of the housing market: projects grind to a halt during bust, only exploding in a hurried frenzy when the market would happily buy anything as long as it has a roof (leaky.)
> Oh, and the cheapness an often obvious design mistakes even in new buildings, mostly due to the boom/bust nature of the housing market: projects grind to a halt during bust, only exploding in a hurried frenzy when the market would happily buy anything as long as it has a roof (leaky.)
I think you may not have been in the Netherlands when you observed this. It's quite easy to overshoot, after all ;)
The rest I will grant you. Even though in my experience (we have friends in 6 European countries) this isn't a Dutch exception. Wasting space on entrances is something only sparsely populated countries like the US can afford I think.
> Oh, and the cheapness an often obvious design mistakes even in new buildings, mostly due to the boom/bust nature of the housing market: projects grind to a halt during bust, only exploding in a hurried frenzy when the market would happily buy anything as long as it has a roof (leaky.)
I don't agree with this at all. The houses here in the Netherlands seem to be built a lot more solid, better insulated and come with more luxurious features than the houses I've seen in almost every other country in the world.
I think that climate plays a huge role in the quality of housing. I remember visiting a few homes in California and rented one in Florida and was shocked at how little there is to a house. Then I remembered they don't have to worry about things like a tonne of snow sitting on the roof.
With winter climates you have to dig into the ground for a while and put in a real solid foundation. Proper insulation and vapor barrier and such. For our cottage we actually had to explode away about 4 ft * 1100sqft of bedrock to pour a foundation into. I wonder if without winter we'd just sit it on the bedrock.
I doubt my experience is broad enough to consider it a representative sample but that's generally what my perception has been.
I agree with you entirely. The majority of Dutch houses are very well designed and built, and extremely comfortable. It's a world away from my native New Zealand.
Completely agree with you. I am a Dutch citizen and have been living in the UK for over a decade; I would say the build quality of housing in the Netherlands is far better (if I had to guess probably because of stricter regulations). This is especially evident in apartment blocks.
It depends on the period of construction. Houses built in the 60's and 70's of the previous century were quite shoddy, quite a few of them (especially apartment buildings) have been demolished already. But older stuff, especially from the thirties and later built houses are of very good quality.
Another thing to remember is that a brick house is only as good as its foundations.
Uh let’s start: heating pipes routed outside walls. Walls made of single layer drywall, wide apart studs, no soundproofing, cheapest plugs possible (even in premium apartments), window frames installed without the necessary PU foam, just screwed on the brickwork.
In the discussion of the previous article of this series, I posted some stuff about the beautiful public housing in the Spaarndammerbuurt district of Amsterdam, which Michel de Klerk built in the Amsterdam School of architecture.
There is the Herengracht house index which tracks house prices along the Herengracht canal during a long period of time. Its an interesting read, one notices that house prices flucates over time.
Thanks for sharing! Very interesting I wonder where the index would be now since we have experienced another surge in house prices over the last 5 years in the Netherlands and in particular in Amsterdam.
A slight (meta-)architectural comment: in the floor plan there is a hall that leads to living/dining room, kitchen, etc. This is lacking in many modern-built houses.
What I find it a strange architectural design choice, especially in areas that experience something even close to the season of winter, where the main door opens out into the main area of the house. It seems to be this is letting out a lot of warm air and blasting the living area with chilled air.
It would better that after you open the main door, there would be something (2-3 steps' worth of distance) that limited airflow:
I think the main reason is that they were well-built centuries ago, and, by the time something really better could be built, the Netherlands was rich enough and fond enough of their looks to not demolish them.
Readit News
This is covered well in the Strong Towns book that came out recently: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Strong_Towns/w0WyDwAAQB... (available on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2FRT6bA or your local library on request).
In the name of 'progress' we've outlawed that kind of thing in most of the US, so now we have to drive pollution spewing vehicles to do even the most basic things.
In the same vein, I've also read that the forward tilt many houses exhibit was intentional- to make it easier to hoist goods to the upper floors.
I mean, I like heritage as much as the next guy but as the owner of a rinky dink tiny thatched cottage that would cost 100k to really fix up or maybe 30k to replace with a much more comfortable, safer, cheaper to heat, modern dwelling with doors where I'm not whacking my forehead - you can hardly blame people. Oh, the lead paint isn't awesome either.
I mean, I'm just a crazy eccentric, but as actual structures to live in old houses, especially the ones the poor lived in, can be kind of horrible.
https://data.amsterdam.nl/data/?modus=kaart¢er=52.366622...
note, in Dutch, but the color coding should make it clear.
Yes, and many of these beautifully-renovated interiors are visible from the street! (Sorry, Amsterdamer, it's just impossible not to notice when walking by.)
The point is, though, that it appears common for these renovations to be carried out despite egregious settling of a house's foundation.
Grachtenpanden
> I've also read that the forward tilt many houses exhibit was intentional- to make it easier to hoist goods to the upper floors.
I always thought that was just Dutch people being Dutch and getting more floorspace without buying more land. Any of the skyhooks I've seen just extend out above the top floor. I suppose there's more risk of breaking windows if the load swings around as it goes straight up though.
The houses have been built on wooden piles, and with the recent drought in the Netherlands the ground water level fell. If the top of the wooden piles were exposed to air, they start rotting.
A few years from now we might see a lot of old homes needing new piles or new foundations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
> The window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house.
I don't know if this tax was levied in the Netherlands, but I've heard of other towns that developed narrow house fronts to minimise this outflow.
Oh, and the cheapness an often obvious design mistakes even in new buildings, mostly due to the boom/bust nature of the housing market: projects grind to a halt during bust, only exploding in a hurried frenzy when the market would happily buy anything as long as it has a roof (leaky.)
I think you may not have been in the Netherlands when you observed this. It's quite easy to overshoot, after all ;)
The rest I will grant you. Even though in my experience (we have friends in 6 European countries) this isn't a Dutch exception. Wasting space on entrances is something only sparsely populated countries like the US can afford I think.
I don't agree with this at all. The houses here in the Netherlands seem to be built a lot more solid, better insulated and come with more luxurious features than the houses I've seen in almost every other country in the world.
With winter climates you have to dig into the ground for a while and put in a real solid foundation. Proper insulation and vapor barrier and such. For our cottage we actually had to explode away about 4 ft * 1100sqft of bedrock to pour a foundation into. I wonder if without winter we'd just sit it on the bedrock.
I doubt my experience is broad enough to consider it a representative sample but that's generally what my perception has been.
Another thing to remember is that a brick house is only as good as its foundations.
The list goes on...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043056
Herengracht index https://hotelivory.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/a-very-long-view...
What I find it a strange architectural design choice, especially in areas that experience something even close to the season of winter, where the main door opens out into the main area of the house. It seems to be this is letting out a lot of warm air and blasting the living area with chilled air.
It would better that after you open the main door, there would be something (2-3 steps' worth of distance) that limited airflow:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibule_(architecture)
AFAICT, this is "130 Entrance Rooms" in A Pattern Language.
However I live in a neigbourhood with houses from 1930 in Amsterdam. All of them have a hallway of 1m.