In Oosterhout, we designed an apartment block with 52 apartments on a semi-submerged underground parking garage. This block is part of four large residential buildings along the Wilhelmina Canal in the Slotjes Midden reconstruction district.

The various buildings along the canal each have their own plastic expression, but they share a common thread like a family resemblance. The volume structure tapers off towards the existing buildings, consisting of ground-level homes and apartment buildings.   

To keep the structural design and building physics of the volume as simple as possible, we pushed the balconies outward. A staccato rhythm of brick pilasters, projecting a meter, encloses and supports the balconies, providing shelter and a strongly vertically profiled facade facing the larger scale of the canal. Horizontally, the first layers are given brick balconies, and the pilasters slope upwards as buttresses, based on a structural logic that serves as a support for the basement wall. 

Everything is finished in brick that closely matches the original colors of the neighborhood. The windows are framed with borders, the balconies have a border of cognac-colored glazed bricks, and the spouts are incorporated into the concrete.