TIM  LAHAISE  ARCHITECT

As an international exchange student in Amsterdam, the design brief for the semester was to design a school and after-school facility to be built on Elandsstraat, near the city centre. As a foreigner, I greatly appreciated the sense of local identity in the city’s architecture, and was reluctant to upset this. While examining the buildings in the immediate vicinity, I also studied the modern canal houses along Scheepstimmermanstraat, looking for inspiration for a contemporary take on the city’s traditional style.

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I decided to emulate the tall, narrow forms of the local architecture by splitting the overall mass into 3 identical slender volumes, each resembling the very basic outline of Amsterdam’s row houses. However, the centre volume would be a large glass-fronted atrium, thereby allowing natural light into all corners of the design and incorporating passive ventilation techniques. The two flanking volumes would be built from traditional brickwork with sleek modern openings, with the possibility for use of reclaimed bricks to reduce the embodied energy of the design.