City on Pampus
- Megastructure -In 1948, the architectural firm Van den Broek and Bakema designed various urban development projects to counteract the inevitable increase of urbanisation in the Netherlands. The exceptionally large scale of the projects was prompted by the optimistic belief that society could be formed to suit our wishes. The planned megastructures were Broek and Bakema’s answer to problems resulting from increasing welfare, a growing population and an increasing need for mobility and diversion.
The 1964 ‘City on Pampus Island’ project consisted of a city that would house 350,000 inhabitants on a group of artificial islands in the IJmeer lake east of Amsterdam. The IJburg project that was begun in 2000, by comparison, is designed for 18,000 inhabitants. Van den Broek and Bakema designed the centre of the city as linear rows of buildings with shops, flats and offices. The buildings are up to forty storeys high. The centre is accessible by a main artery that includes a monorail among other things. The buildings on the outskirts are lower and further apart to allow the inhabitants and visitors to enjoy the recreational use of the water and the land.
In the mid-sixties, belief in the unlimited possibilities of the welfare state was fading. Moreover, the architectural firm was being heavily criticised by its peers and members of the public for the, as it was perceived, inhumanly vast scale of its projects. As a result, only a few of the megastructures were ever built, and only after downsizing them to the scale of a very large building.
Request number BROX 1411t5
Literature
-J. Joedicke, Architektur und Städtebau. Das Werk van den Broek and Bakema, Stuttgart 1963
-H. Ibelings (ed.), Van den Broek en Bakema 1948-1988. Architectuur en stedenbouw. De functie van de vorm (Van den Broek and Bakema 1948-1988. Architecture and Urban Planning: the function of form), Rotterdam 2000