Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Factory housing: Tuindorp Vooruit, phase 2



The long terraces of phase one were also planned for phase 2 of Tuindorp Vooruit in Ede. The architects Van der Burgh and Eschauzier held the conviction that closed facades were the proper expression of garden city ideals. These proposals fit well with the ideas of the forward thinking industrialists of the ENKA factory. They named the building society charged with the development of the factory housing 'Forwards' as an expression of this. The local council couldn't appreciate what was built in the first phase of the garden village and rejected similar proposals for the second phase. Despite the large gardens the residents also felt too hemmed in and couldn't appreciate the closeness of their neighbours. This resulted in drastic alterations to the plans.

The second phase of 150 dwellings was executed in the style of an open settlement, more akin to the majority of garden villages built in the Netherlands. The strong architectural expression so evident in the first phase was abandoned with the long rows of terraced houses. In its stead the plan comprised solely of semidetached houses that were scattered along streets and a large public garden. The plan has none of the typical Unwinesk treatment of the houses and building line. Basically the second phase consisted of two parallel streets with houses on either side and four blocks placed at a 45 degree angle in the middle and orthogonally placed dwellings around an amorphous public garden.

All the building were built in one building campaign in 1924 and '25. In 1934 a school was added across from the Poortplein. In the original designs this was always meant as the location for a special building. Until that time the school had been located on a side street of the Parkweg. The school was first built as a single block and later extended and expanded again with a back wing on each occasion.  

 In 1950 the Tuindorp Vooruit West comprised of the second phase of the garden village with the large school and the terraces built in 1949 (shown hatched). The very shapely layout isn't supported by the placement of the buildings. The old garden village consisted of two distinctive parts; a central portion and the southwestern part around a public garden. Later another block was added plus a row of terraces along the southern edge between the communal playground and the Parkweg.

Of the second phase of Tuindorp Vooruit only the school remains. All the other houses have been demolished and replaced with much larger dwellings (a mix of terraced housing and apartments) in short and long rows. The closed facades are punctuated by several gates and arched passages. The style of the new buildings is retrospective and picks up the characteristic architecture of 1920s garden villages. This style of architecture is has been used by developers in the Netherlands from about 1990 as buyers preferred the old houses built in the 1920s and 1930s to postmodern new-builds. The new buildings are well executed, but very urban in comparison to the scattered suburban housing that stood here before. In this location (as in too many other places) the architects couldn't resist using a totally different yellow stone for some parts of the new houses. Not that the buildings are badly done, and they get away with it as the retrospective  expressionist yellow brick buildings replace the 1958 residential neighbourhood that was added to the garden village on the northwest side.  

In the present situation only the terraces on the Parkweg and the old school still stand. The rest has been demolished and replaced by a more urban interpretation of the garden city model with two apartment complexes (A) and both semidetached and short terraces. Around the school the formal wing like closed faced emulate the first phase, thus returning to the interpretation of the original architects.

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