Project: House Dijk
Architects: Jager Janssen architecten
Location: Blauwestad, The Netherlands
Area: 3,422 sq ft
Photographs by: Rob de Jong
House Dijk by Jager Janssen architecten
Jager Janssen architecten has designed the House Dijk in the Dutch village of Blauwestad.
It is immediately noticeable that the roof and the facade of this residence represent a single entity. They are both designed to let the environment in strategic places as well as making the exterior look rather solid and enclosed.
There are plenty of interesting features about this dwelling such as the fact that the entire home sits one meter above ground level, enabling the lower ground floor to offer quite a lot of space for activities.
The facades and the roof of this dwelling comprise one entity. The skin, consisting of anthracite-coloured corrugated sheets, is open in strategic places in order to let the environment in. Maximizing this effect, the entire dwelling is positioned one meter above ground level, resulting on a spacious lower ground floor.
The exterior of the dwelling looks rather solid and closed. The interior experience is one of beautiful spatial impressions.
A smart system based on just a few composition rules creates a seemingly irregular pattern of wooden boards.
–Jager Janssen architecten
A new city is being built in the north of the Netherlands: Blauwe Stad, a city as large as Amsterdam or Groningen (circumference about 23 km), but with only 1500 houses, which means a huge amount of living space, peace, nature and water. Virtually all, very spacious plots are directly connected to a new, extended lake of 8 km2.This lake is again connected to the Winschoterdiep, the Dollard, the Wadden Sea and the rest of the Netherlands.In short, space, space and more space Blue City is, without exaggeration, the most spectacular landscape project since the reclamation of the IJsselmeer polder.
The Dijk family has a lot in ‘Het Riet’: the archipelago east of the lake. On this lot we have designed a house that consists of a clear skin with the living volumes below. The house overlooks the water.
The building volume consists of a house with a clear and unambiguous skin as a blanket. The skin is made of anthracite-colored eternit corrugated sheets. The basic volume is determined by the skin of the house in which the outside wall and roof overlap. This skin is the leading element in the design. The house within the skin is soft, executed in a light wooden siding. From the house the feeling of space is maximally experienced by designed sight lines across the vast Groningen landscape. By lifting the living volume and placing it on a recessed basement it seems to float above the ground level.
–Jager Janssen architecten
