Zeemanshuis the third layer
Lightweight co-living informed by Amsterdam’s historic timber joinery principles
B. Hooijer (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
G. Koskamp – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
S. Brancart – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Contemporary timber architecture is increasingly driven by standardised products and prefabricated systems. Timber is widely adopted as a material, but its architectural role often remains limited: it is present without being locally grounded. The current situation of Amsterdam amplifies this condition. The city has to densify within its protected historic fabric, for which rooftop extensions are an established municipal strategy. Even though Amsterdam has a well-documented historic timber culture, it often remains largely outside the working vocabulary of contemporary lightweight construction. This project proposes that historic timber joinery logic, extracted as transferable principles at the scale of the joint, can reintroduce legibility into contemporary timber architecture, grounding a new lightweight layer in the specific material memory of its city.
This project asks whether Amsterdam's historic timber joinery logic can inform an architectural language for new lightweight timber layers. It develops a tectonic framework through a three-step research-by-design procedure. Historic Amsterdam joints are analysed through literature and analytical redrawing, yielding three operative principles: curvature, tolerance, and node articulation. The principles are then repositioned within a contemporary frame of material sourcing, fabrication and regulation, organised through a tiered material system that combines European graded softwood, slope-grown spruce and urban hardwood. They are finally operationalised in the design of a lightweight transitional co-living top-up for the Zeemanshuis at Kadijksplein, Amsterdam. The framework is tested against a readability criterion: whether the principles remain traceable from the historic joint through the contemporary joint to the building.
The project contributes the first terms of a locally grounded contemporary timber language for Amsterdam, and a replicable method for extending it. The procedure is transferable to other principles, other cities, and other timber cultures.