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The 'Open Fort' to be designed in Amsterdam to commemmorate the founding of New York 400 years ago gives us an opportunity for cultural exchange between the two cities. This is a project that will be elaborated on both sides of the Atlantic. It will allow an occasion for New York to return the favor to Amsterdam, which built the first architecture in the city that is now world famous for its ground-breaking architecture.

To celebrate the bond between New York and Amsterdam, we don't want a carbon copy of the typical New Yorkesque. Skyscrapers, as wedding cakes or clad in glass in steel, are already being built in Amsterdam's Zuidas and on the banks of the IJ. They are in a way the mirror image of typical canal houses that have remained in downtown Manhattan. We wondered about something else that was typically New York that could find a place in Amsterdam without becoming a pastiche. Second only the the 1811 grid plan of Manhattan, the grandest project for New York must be the geodesic dome over the island conceived by Buckminster Fuller. Spanning the entire length of 42 street – about 2 mile – the dome would protect the city for polution. A kind of environmentalism avant la lettre blown up to absurd proportions. With Ducth modesty we could try to find some use for it in Amsterdam.





At the end of 42nd street lies the UN headquarters, housed in a modernist building with many fathers that sits comfortably on the banks of the East river. So, we wanted a counterpart for Amsterdam that would reflect the international ambitions of the city and specifically the cultural aspirations of the site on the banks of the IJ. A subsidiary of the UN, or one of its agencies would fit the bill perfectly. Unfortunatlity, our preferred candidate UNESCO headquarters was 'accidentally' built in Paris. Under the auspicious eyes of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, a team of international architects led by Marcel Breuer had already done an admirable job. But, what if we could imagine that the headquarters were located in Amsterdam? The city is surrounded by a unique UNESCO world heritage site: the Defence Line van Amsterdam, a fortification and inundation ring twenty miles across that intersects with the Beemster polder, also a world heritage site. The city itself has also nominated the histroric centre due to its creative genius. If all goes ahead, an invisible dome two miles wide will protect the city centre. Vis-a-vis these conservatory tendencies, Amsterdam is developing several dynamic urban areas, the largest of which are the Zuidas and the banks of the IJ. The latter sits directly opposite to the historic centre, deflating the urban pressure that would threaten the monumental character of the old city whilst creating possiblities for urban development, ensuring the vitality of the city as a whole. What better place is there to envisage our new UNESCO headquarters as a token of the entanglement of historic values and future development?



The banks of the IJ are under heavy development, gradually transforming from an industrial into a lively mixed-use area. Several pioneering cultural initiatives have already taken their place here. The new UNESCO headquarters will introduce a new international twist into the mix. To express the diversity of both the activities of the organisation and the cultures it deals with it is housed in five buildings of completely different architectures. Each building is situated on a 40 x 60 feet plot, and is a maximum of 90 feet high. The sixth plot is kept empty, acting as a public square. The six plots are covered by a glass ‘Bucky cube’, creating unity in the architecture, gathering together the public space of the project with its buildings. It is an open fort, clearly enclosing the architecture and yet in its transparancy communicating the openness of the complex. And, as far as we are concerned, the open fort should also be built according to the principles of open source. Because we won’t actually be designing the 5 buildings ourselves.

To be able to show the idea for the new UNESCO, we had to use five placeholder pieces of architecture. We chose five works that exemplify the historical development of the most typically New York building, the skyscraper. The Equitable Building in its greed for rentable floor space prompted the 1916 zoning laws that controlled the shape of tall buildings, leading to the typical wedding cake skyscrapers, of which the Empire State Building is undoubtably the epitomy. By introducing a public plaza Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in its turn led to the 1961 zoning law, which gave incentives to buildings that contributed to public space. Architecture veered of in another direction, as Philip Johnson’s postmodern AT & T bulding shows, becoming obsessed with image. However, recent developments such as SANAA’s New Museum show an increase in a fresh and playfull approach. We want to see what the next step will be. Instead of five existing buildings, we want five new designs for the future. Like the UNESCO in Paris, a team of architects will work on the plan. If this plan is selected for the next stage, we will us the € 10.000,- fee to commision five New York architects to each elaborate one part of the design. The architects will be seleced to represent the next generation, young, ambitious and conceptually strong. They will al be asked to envision the next step in architecture, within the limits set by the overall design. We ourselves will act as supervisors, guiding the design process and encouraging the architects to explore new possibilities.

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