Amsterdam’s canal houses have endured for 300 years
citylab.com
citylab.com
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.
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.
Yes, and many of these beautifully-renovated interiors are visible from the street! (Sorry, Amsterdamer, it's just impossible not to notice when walking by.)
The point is, though, that it appears common for these renovations to be carried out despite egregious settling of a house's foundation.
I look in everyone's house when I walk by, and wave at everyone I see inside. I always get a wave in return. My kids count cats on sills. I spend considerable time in my in-laws' front room waving at passers-by, and we've even been known to go out and join someone on a walk.
I've heard it said that the open front window thing originated as a backlash against the heavy curtains that became common during German occupation in WWII. I don't know if there's any truth to that.
Wait, that's acceptable? Heck yeah! I'm moving there in May (though I've been a number of times) and that's going to be super awesome and fun.
Of course, getting my wife to reciprocate and not put up a heavy front curtain will probably be impossible...
I bet it'll be easier for your wife to accept once you get to know your neighbors. Most Dutch neighborhoods are intensely pedestrian, and waving through front windows buys you consistent contact with your neighbors for little effort.
Grachtenpanden
https://data.amsterdam.nl/data/?modus=kaart¢er=52.366622...
note, in Dutch, but the color coding should make it clear.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
He was right of course.
Bedrooms, studies, bathrooms as small and cramped as feasible
That blackish blob in Europe is the Netherlands.
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/land-cover-atlas-uk-1.74...
It's a political choice, a matter of spatial planning, to live this densly.
I actually just landed at Schiphol on a clear day and you can see the country just has so much sparsely populated areas peaking out the window on approach
Also Amsterdam is the peak of tiny spaces here. Single bedroom 25 m2, with shared toilet/kitchen for sale can cost you €100.000,- easily.
Without kids, though, it would be plenty (tbf I have a big shed outside for projects and bikes which helps a lot)
Unless you have a specific need for more space (maybe a workshop, etc) I would avoid the bigger sized houses.
For apartments, the average size is 941 sqft, which is down about 5% over the last 10 years.
That's actually large by many standards across the world but also for older urban dwellings in US cities. I suspect those 2600+ ft^2 numbers are average sizes for new construction?
For whatever reason, new construction of single family homes consists almost entirely of structural wood framing and plywood, then tyvek and non-structural brick facade. That kind of construction makes building larger volumes feasible. I don't know when the change-over in the USA from structural brick to wood occured, but I suspect it was in the 50-60's. In old urban neighborhoods in the North East, 2500+ ft^2 is definitely considered "big".
Unfortunately, I doubt that modern wood frame homes will last 100+ years without serious interventions. Brick also deteriorates, but more slowly and it's possible to work on it piecemeal.
It was like my understanding of the poorest parts of the UK, or my impression of the UK before I was born (e.g. 1970s).
Many buildings only had single-glazed windows, and some only had electric heating. The latter might be reasonable for an earthquake-prone region, but that should make double- or even triple-glazing more important. Walls were thin, and everywhere was draughty. I went from a summer of 36°C to a winter of 12°C, so I was probably going to feel cold anyway, but many people at the conference were wearing coats indoors.
On the other hand, the people seem pretty tough. It was the end of the winter holiday, and students were returning to their university, so many were wandering around the town. Around half were wearing shorts and a t-shirt.
You all must think Europeans are soft :-)
With winter climates you have to dig into the ground for a while and put in a real solid foundation. Proper insulation and vapor barrier and such. For our cottage we actually had to explode away about 4 ft * 1100sqft of bedrock to pour a foundation into. I wonder if without winter we'd just sit it on the bedrock.
I doubt my experience is broad enough to consider it a representative sample but that's generally what my perception has been.
Go farther South and it gets down to eventually nothing. Go far enough North, to permafrost country, and you not only need to dig down to the permafrost but you need to have insulation so the permafrost doesn't melt.
I don't see why you would need to do this? You can build right on top of bedrock; it's not going to give you frost heave.
From reading about home construction I was surprised by how local the design considerations can be.
[1] https://www.engineeringexpress.com/wiki/frost-protection-con... [2]
One thing that surprised me (but makes complete sense) is that all the construction lumber I've grown up with is completely different species than the construction lumber used elsewhere. Dimensions vary, too.
The list goes on...
Waste water pipes outside are fairly common in some places with lots of older buildings but I don't think I've ever seen outside heating pipes!
Walls here are made from brick. The newer buildings are either normal or aerated concrete, and sometimes split up using drywall. This totally depends what the requirements are, and the past years, construction has been more and more drywall instead of brick etc. I've never seen a single layer of drywall, and I've lived in all type of housing in Amsterdam.
Another thing to remember is that a brick house is only as good as its foundations.
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.
I think part of the problem is that they were originally expected to have people sleeping in every room except maybe the kitchen, so you wouldn't want to have to walk through what is now the living/dining room to get to another room, so you have to reach every room from the hall. So the hall can be long, twisty, narrow and dark... as long as it lets everyone get from the staircase to their bedroom.
Herengracht index https://hotelivory.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/a-very-long-view...
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.
However I live in a neigbourhood with houses from 1930 in Amsterdam. All of them have a hallway of 1m.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herengracht_index [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=598
Compare with Rotterdam (which was destroyed by the Nazis).
All other destroyed cities (e.g. Arnhem, Nijmegen) were bombed by allied forces in their attempts to drive out the occupying Germans.
I initially learned this from Band of Brothers. It doesn't seem to be as common knowledge in the Netherlands compared to the bombing of Rotterdam.
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.
Fortunately, they're greatly outnumbered by the bicycles. ;)
It's mostly due to the very attractive tax benefits the government gives on EVs.
That's not what your link says. It says 6.87%.
These are mostly cars bought under a lease contract since thet are way too expensive in the Netherlands. (65k euro).
The government stopped a big benefit end last year. So there was a run on these Teslas.
If you have an electric car the goverment will out a charging pole in your street for free.
Also they are going to van cars altogether in the city center.
Streets are being repurposed for broad bike lanes. And the goverment is planning bike higjways between cities due to the rise of electric bikes thay go 50kmph.
Also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/10/08/nether...
I can’t find data, but I’ve heard the argument that is because the Netherlands is big in manufacturers of electric charging stations.
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.
Unless you're a woman who dies before menopause...
Sure, if a building falls into disuse it may die, but is that not true of people too?
In our case, however, we're lucky not to be sitting on top of a swamp!
But also, houses built before the end of WW II were often built significantly better than now (e.g. with more "European" standards) to last for a century or more. Since then the commoditization and rapid suburban building (and now multi-story mixed use "urban" condos as well) are meant for maximum profit and 30-50 year lifetimes, just long enough for the mortgage to be paid.
http://shadowsofaforgottenworld.blogspot.com/2016/06/hoistin...