In the Zuidas neighborhood of Amsterdam, international architectural practice MVRDV has renovated and transformed Tripolis Park, one of the last projects completed by celebrated Dutch modernist architect Aldo van Eyck (1918 – 1999). In this key redevelopment project, MVRDV has restored two of the three listed heritage buildings in keeping with Van Eyck’s original designs. The studio also added a new 12-story “landscraper” along the site’s edge that shelters the Tripolis complex from the adjacent A10 highway.
The Tripolis complex consists of three office buildings — Tripolis 100, 200, and 300 — that date from 1994. The development “was inextricably linked to Van Eyck’s masterpiece, the Amsterdam Orphanage,” says MVRDV. The orphanage was completed in 1960 and considered a key project of the Structuralist movement. Van Eyck was a vehement proponent of Structuralism: advancing the need to reject Functionalism, he attacked “the lack of originality in most post-war Modernism [and called] for a return to humanism within architectural design.”
Van Eyck’s orphanage:
Van Eyck’s orphanage was both a home for children and a small city, the design representing the architect’s fundamental belief that “a house must be like a small city if it’s to be a real house, a city like a large house if it’s to be a real city.” In the mid 1980s, the orphanage was threatened with demolition — saved by a successful international campaign, the municipality of Amsterdam offered the adjacent land to a developer on condition that Aldo van Eyck and his wife and architect Hannie van Eyck designed a new office complex: Tripolis, “the symbolic savior of the orphanage.”
“MVRDV’s design makes the next step in this history,” says the studio. “The original Tripolis did not prove commercially successful, standing empty for years. Meanwhile, an upcoming expansion of the adjacent A10 highway, which includes a new on-ramp right alongside the Tripolis site, threatened to bring increased noise and pollution.” The Tripolis buildings, like Van Eyck’s orphanage, required an urgent intervention that would ensure their future.
MVRDV redeveloped two of the three Tripolis buildings: 200 and 300. The studio utilized archival research and a close collaboration with Van Eyck’s heirs to restore the facades of the buildings to the architect’s original, unrealized designs: “The facades are now fully clad in wood, unlike the cheaper wood and granite combination requested by the Tripolis developer in the 1990s,” sats MVRDV. The multi-colored window frames have also been retained.
The interiors combine a mix of characteristic elements — maintaining staircases and the natural stone floors — with modern-day ways of working. For example, MVRDV removed dividing walls to improve communication and collaboration. The studio introduced a number of sustainability interventions, including intensive green roofs that encourage interactions between users and solar panels. Tripolis has achieved a BREEAM Outstanding certification.
A key element of the Tripolis Park project is the construction of “Het Venster” (The Window), a 150-meter-long (492 feet) 12-story landscraper (like a horizontal skyscraper). This building stands at the edge of the plot, close to the A10, creating a protective barrier between Van Eyck’s buildings and the highway. “A large rectangular window has been cut from the gridded south facade of the 34,000-square-meter (365,973-square-feet) office building — offering a view of the original Tripolis complex, it emphasizes the project’s heritage aspects,” says MVRDV. On the Het Venster building’s north-facing side, a creative cut-out traces the shapes of the Tripolis buildings. The studio explains: “The new building is careful in its relationship with the heritage buildings, keeping a respectful distance so that an exciting in-between space emerges where the two meet, with bridges crossing overhead to connect old and new.” The effect is pleasingly futuristic in nature, where 1994 meets 2024.
Work on Tripolis Park will continue over the next few years. Van Eyck’s Tripolis 100 will be redeveloped as a residential building. Landscaping by Utrecht-based Deltavormgroep will include walking and cycling routes that connect different parts of Zuidas and the nearby metro station, in effect creating a park-like urban campus that shelters and preserves Van Eyck’s Tripolis buildings and orphanage.
“Demolition of heritage is always the easy option, especially if it is located in a business district dominated by high-rise buildings,” says MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas. “Tripolis Park offers an approach to protecting heritage that at the same time meets people’s expectations for an office today. It combines this with new densification, a continuation of the development at Amsterdam Zuidas, that doesn’t copy Van Eyck’s intention, but creates a new one, like a new layer in time. And it celebrates the in-between which, as Aldo explained to me when I was a student, is one of the main sources of beauty in architecture.”
