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 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
[+] [-] davidw|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] minikites|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alamortsubite|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CalRobert|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rrmoelker|6 years ago|reply
https://data.amsterdam.nl/data/?modus=kaart¢er=52.366622...
note, in Dutch, but the color coding should make it clear.
[+] [-] kalium_xyz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flingo|6 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] neor|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Neil44|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comprev|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vijayr02|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stevehawk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbverschoor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eecc|6 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] brnt|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Avalaxy|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DonHopkins|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043056
[+] [-] acd|6 years ago|reply
Herengracht index https://hotelivory.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/a-very-long-view...
[+] [-] gpuhacker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TeeWEE|6 years ago|reply
However I live in a neigbourhood with houses from 1930 in Amsterdam. All of them have a hallway of 1m.
[+] [-] Someone|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] talkingtab|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uijl|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herengracht_index [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=598
[+] [-] wayoutthere|6 years ago|reply
Compare with Rotterdam (which was destroyed by the Nazis).
[+] [-] misja|6 years ago|reply
All other destroyed cities (e.g. Arnhem, Nijmegen) were bombed by allied forces in their attempts to drive out the occupying Germans.
[+] [-] Avalaxy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joss82|6 years ago|reply
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.
I love the Netherlands.
[+] [-] alamortsubite|6 years ago|reply
Fortunately, they're greatly outnumbered by the bicycles. ;)
[+] [-] Andrew_nenakhov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unixhero|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earthboundkid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ravingraven|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] QuinnWilton|6 years ago|reply
Sure, if a building falls into disuse it may die, but is that not true of people too?
[+] [-] cgsmith|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] classified|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devbas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alamortsubite|6 years ago|reply
In our case, however, we're lucky not to be sitting on top of a swamp!