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 We still have the sockets and the pipes for gas light, though, of course, they've been superceded by electric wire, three times at least.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.
Don't apologize, it's perfectly acceptable and even expected that you gaze into people's houses while passing by. It's a Dutch thing; front windows are large and heavy curtains are rare.
I look in everyone's house when I walk by, and wave at everyone I see inside. I always get a wave in return. My kids count cats on sills. I spend considerable time in my in-laws' front room waving at passers-by, and we've even been known to go out and join someone on a walk.
I've heard it said that the open front window thing originated as a backlash against the heavy curtains that became common during German occupation in WWII. I don't know if there's any truth to that.
>I look in everyone's house when I walk by, and wave at everyone I see inside. I always get a wave in return. My kids count cats on sills. I spend considerable time in my in-laws' front room waving at passers-by, and we've even been known to go out and join someone on a walk.
Wait, that's acceptable? Heck yeah! I'm moving there in May (though I've been a number of times) and that's going to be super awesome and fun.
Of course, getting my wife to reciprocate and not put up a heavy front curtain will probably be impossible...
I do see a lot of shear curtains, the sort of light gauzy material that's easier to see out of than inward. Heavy, opaque curtains tend to draw a bit of gentle curiosity, as though the occupants might have a reason to hide their stuff. It's not a big deal either way, but living in a house without a clear front window would be terribly depressing for me.
I bet it'll be easier for your wife to accept once you get to know your neighbors. Most Dutch neighborhoods are intensely pedestrian, and waving through front windows buys you consistent contact with your neighbors for little effort.
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.
May not be the reason, but building codes and taxation can lead to strange outcomes like these. Then again, it may just be superficial, since the entrance hall is the first thing people see.
Some of them are nice, it's true, but I'm mostly thinking of the 19th-century Mietskasernen (rental barracks) where the original objective was to pack as many people into the space as possible.
I think part of the problem is that they were originally expected to have people sleeping in every room except maybe the kitchen, so you wouldn't want to have to walk through what is now the living/dining room to get to another room, so you have to reach every room from the hall. So the hall can be long, twisty, narrow and dark... as long as it lets everyone get from the staircase to their bedroom.
> 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.
That's interesting - I wonder where you are? Our ca. 1800 cottage has no foundation (it's literally just rocks sitting on dirt) and is in a pretty wet climate (Ireland). Though the room that had a screed put down is drier than the others.
East of Lake Huron in Canada. I think the difference is that the average winter temperature in Ireland is above freezing (correct me if I'm wrong). It's about 20C lower here. It's the freeze/thaw action that we are building deep to protect against.
I'm not an architect, but my understanding is that the foundation has to be far enough down that the ground does not freeze under it, which is why houses in the Northeast US and Canada have basements.
Go farther South and it gets down to eventually nothing. Go far enough North, to permafrost country, and you not only need to dig down to the permafrost but you need to have insulation so the permafrost doesn't melt.
It's actually calculated based on the frost line for the area. I don't think when building on solid rock it matters, since the point is to avoid expansion and contraction of freeze thaw cycle pushing the house up.
Yes, the foundation depth varies based on the frost line [1]. Also in warmer areas, termites can be a problem and foundations will be designed to prevent termites from getting in.
From reading about home construction I was surprised by how local the design considerations can be.
It makes complete sense when you think and read about it, of course.
One thing that surprised me (but makes complete sense) is that all the construction lumber I've grown up with is completely different species than the construction lumber used elsewhere. Dimensions vary, too.
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.
The low quality of buildings in New Zealand amazed me when I visited.
It was like my understanding of the poorest parts of the UK, or my impression of the UK before I was born (e.g. 1970s).
Many buildings only had single-glazed windows, and some only had electric heating. The latter might be reasonable for an earthquake-prone region, but that should make double- or even triple-glazing more important. Walls were thin, and everywhere was draughty. I went from a summer of 36°C to a winter of 12°C, so I was probably going to feel cold anyway, but many people at the conference were wearing coats indoors.
On the other hand, the people seem pretty tough. It was the end of the winter holiday, and students were returning to their university, so many were wandering around the town. Around half were wearing shorts and a t-shirt.
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.
Are you sure you are talking about the Netherlands? Heating pipes routed outside walls I have seen in the UK, but never in the Netherlands. No soundproofing would NEVER pass building regulations in the Netherlands.
In my experience, water pipes (not sure about heating) routed outside the walls are pretty common in houses in Amsterdam build pre ~2000 (and not renovated since)
Depends on who did some renovation. Heating is usually routed trough the floor. Water sometimes in or against the wall, sometimes in the floor, and sometimes in sight, but never outside... In the past gas was routed out of sight as well, but that's not allowed anymore, so you see gas pipes usually in the corner of a ceiling. You can hide this with a facade.
Walls here are made from brick. The newer buildings are either normal or aerated concrete, and sometimes split up using drywall. This totally depends what the requirements are, and the past years, construction has been more and more drywall instead of brick etc. I've never seen a single layer of drywall, and I've lived in all type of housing in Amsterdam.
My wife and I were hunting for a new apartment a few years ago, and after looking a few houses in a village around 30km from Amsterdam we stopped at the local pub for a drink. Got to talking with an old local and explained that we were torn whether to live closer to the city, or get a place here that has a lot more space. He said to us, "More space? What's the point of that? All you'll do is put useless things in it. Move to the city."
Well, as far as I have seen space in the Dutch sense is not about functionally rather for show. Living room. A lot of living room, something you could play soccer in (or have many friends for dinner.)
Bedrooms, studies, bathrooms as small and cramped as feasible
It's not for show. It's design 101. You spend the most time in the livingroom, diningroom or kitchen, so it makes sense to use the most space for that.
There's only so much space you can divide up.
A lot of people have come to the conclusion that lots of space in the house is not really luxurious but just space that you have to keep clean and pay the bills for. I know a few middle aged couples who begun to regard 800ft² of living space as maximum (not including basement etc.), some even with 2 kids, and plenty of older people who like to have less. And that's certainly not the tiny house guys. It's similar to the stuff Marie Kondo talks about. Plenty of space in the garden is different, obviously.
If you're living in a small house it can be a little hard not to be envious. Our house is 517 square feet (48 square meters) interior space and it's challenging when the baby's crying wakes the toddler.
Without kids, though, it would be plenty (tbf I have a big shed outside for projects and bikes which helps a lot)
The house I grew up in in the US was considered on the small side at 2600 sqft (240 sqm). Partly the size of your family matters, but mostly I think it’s just cultural expectations.
That's actually large by many standards across the world but also for older urban dwellings in US cities. I suspect those 2600+ ft^2 numbers are average sizes for new construction?
For whatever reason, new construction of single family homes consists almost entirely of structural wood framing and plywood, then tyvek and non-structural brick facade. That kind of construction makes building larger volumes feasible. I don't know when the change-over in the USA from structural brick to wood occured, but I suspect it was in the 50-60's. In old urban neighborhoods in the North East, 2500+ ft^2 is definitely considered "big".
Unfortunately, I doubt that modern wood frame homes will last 100+ years without serious interventions. Brick also deteriorates, but more slowly and it's possible to work on it piecemeal.
Big houses get less dirty. If you’re not religious about cleaning up a small place it gets hard to manage. (It’s like swapping to HD. You have to move stuff so you can move other stuff to get stuff into place.)
This is true. Once you have the minimal set of things you need for your lifestyle, having more space for those things makes it easier to keep everything clean. This breaks down if you acquire new things to fill unused space though.
That's showing the average across the entire country - sounds a bit like the UK where average population density figures for the entire country are a bit misleading as there are substantial chunks of the country that are pretty empty:
Averages are misleading when applied countrywide. Just drive through Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe etc. (all provinces) and you will get a totally different picture.
I actually just landed at Schiphol on a clear day and you can see the country just has so much sparsely populated areas peaking out the window on approach
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.
I question logic in the article about stairs being narrow because there was a crane. There is a good case it is the opposite way around - that a crane. There was a tax on the width of the house, so having wide stairways was certain to increase the cost or reduce the useful space. My guess is that this led to narrow stairs, which required the crane in order to bring in things like lumber, beds and other furniture. And then windows that would accommodate those items.
A big part of this is that the Dutch capitulated to the Nazis in WWII before they got to Amsterdam. Pretty much every other major city in the area was reshaped by the war, but Amsterdam avoided the major conflict.
Compare with Rotterdam (which was destroyed by the Nazis).
A bit off-topic but aren't there two Tesla cars in front of that house? If you look closely, they are plugged into an electric charging station on the sidewalk.
When I lived in the Netherlands a couple years ago, I was fascinated by the large number of electric charging stations everywhere. The highest density in the world, as I recall reading somewhere.
Actually you mostly see Teslas in cities like Amsterdam. This year I saw a huge growth in the numbers of Model 3s on Amstrrdam streets. i would say 1 in every 15 cars is a Tesla.
These are mostly cars bought under a lease contract since thet are way too expensive in the Netherlands. (65k euro).
The government stopped a big benefit end last year. So there was a run on these Teslas.
If you have an electric car the goverment will out a charging pole in your street for free.
Also they are going to van cars altogether in the city center.
Streets are being repurposed for broad bike lanes. And the goverment is planning bike higjways between cities due to the rise of electric bikes thay go 50kmph.
You could avoid parking charges when charging an electric car. That certainly did help EV adoption, cause parking costs a lot in Amsterdam. However, this policy is expired or will expire soon.
https://openchargemap.org/site/country doesn’t have full numbers, but it gives Norway 9,850 stations vs 10,934 for the Netherlands. So, density by population is a lot higher in Norway, but density per square km a lot lower (Norway has about a third the population, 9 times the area)
One of the reasons I think no human will ever be immortal is that we can't even make houses live for more than a couple of hundred years in the general case, and houses are objects rather than dynamic systems.
I think it is the other way around, a dynamic system is better at lasting long than a static one.
Human bodies are able to regenerate and repair themselves to a certain extend (no single cell in your body will live as long as you). In fact, one of the factors that diminishes our life is a malfunction of our regeneration processes: cancer.
Human body machinery mostly outperforms man-made machinery i.e. there is nor reason to believe that a human heart can beat for ever if we find a way to allow it to regenerate for ever without faults.
Human brains are able to perform medicine which is also a positive feedback loop for how long human bodies can last.
In a nutshell, a dynamic system has a least the chance to reverse or repair damage done to it due to entropy, a static one has not.
I'd make the argument that houses, and by extension structures and towns, form dynamic systems. Parts of a structure may decay over time, but any structure in active use is going to undergo a continuous process of repair and improvement, based on the needs of it's inhabitants.
Sure, if a building falls into disuse it may die, but is that not true of people too?
I dont think this is sound logic. If humans were immortal design considerations would change. Houses dont live for hundreds of years because the constraint dictates it.
Human lifespan is also dictated by constraints - if we lived much longer the young would not have meaningful access to resources and evolution would slow down. People live long enough to see their children grown up and help with their grandchildren.
That's just proper craftsmanship. As opposed to that, the term "house" means any shitty cardboard box in the US. Which is as intended because the cardboard box vendor makes money with resales each time the weather gets bad.
It is very likely to be victim of survivorship bias here. It's not that there were no bad houses back in the day, they are just not here anymore. So it is easy to believe people built better houses in the past.
I generally agree with the point you're making, but to be fair, there are plenty of 200-year-old houses in my neighborhood in the U.S., and few younger than 100. And unlike the canal houses in Amsterdam, all were originally built as residential structures rather than commercial, which I think speaks even more highly to their ratio of craftsmanship per cost.
In our case, however, we're lucky not to be sitting on top of a swamp!
I think you make the real point. These "houses" were highly overbuilt warehouses for stacked storage of relatively heavy trade goods on multiple floors... with an intentional overhang for winch loading.
But also, houses built before the end of WW II were often built significantly better than now (e.g. with more "European" standards) to last for a century or more. Since then the commoditization and rapid suburban building (and now multi-story mixed use "urban" condos as well) are meant for maximum profit and 30-50 year lifetimes, just long enough for the mortgage to be paid.
Most (older) residential buildings also have hoist beams, mostly to get furniture in and out when moving. Because older Amsterdam houses have narrow stairs and no elevators.
That sounds more like "get off my lawn" than objective truth. I grew up in a house built in 1914, and almost 10 years ago I bought a brand new house. The new one is built better in nearly all regards.
Beyond that, most people are comparing old houses built by well off people vs modern middle class houses. If you look at "middle class" houses built 300 years ago they were basically shacks.
At least those shacks didn’t ‘cost’ a $million so the developer’s REIT could show 12% returns on quickly degrading crap. At least they have to meet some modern codes, but that doesn’t mean they won’t fall apart, leak and mold, or burn quickly.
You should compare your modern house to a commercial building with steel beams or concrete slabs, if you want a real comparison. Those ‘houses’ were not built for people to live in, but for commercial storage and transport. Of course they were expensive and well built... the owners were wealthy and the warehouses profitable.
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.