ABSTRACT
After the Second World War the Netherlands were faced with an enormous housing shortage. This was the reason why, in the 1960s, the city of Amsterdam embarked upon what, at that point in time, was considered a unique urban planning experiment—the construction of a ‘functional town’, in which living, working, traffic and recreation were separated. The planning theory which underlies the Bijlmer’s construction stems from the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Following his concept, the apartments were build mainly in the form of high-rise (10 storeys) deck access apartment blocks in a honeycomb pattern. Thirty modern high-rise buildings, containing 13,000 of the 18,000 units that were built, were constructed this way, with large ‘green spaces’ between the blocks, where bicycle and pedestrian routes were also created. On a higher level motor vehicles were led to multi-storey car parks while metro lines crossed the roadways.
