The design consists of four elements: four separate but closely grouped towers. The unit has twenty-one floors of which each contains five apartments. The tower block, standing on the island formerly occupied by the Royal Netherlands Steamboat Company, has a view of Amsterdam in one direction and of the waters of Ijsselmeer in the other.
The four elements comprising the tower block come into confrontation with the ground plane at different heights. Fluctuating in height with regard to the ground floor level, the elements are designed so as to create a skyline, as it were, at ground floor level. Views are afforded through the indoor car park from this level as well. The facade is made of a skin of concrete elements poured into a rubber mould to create a ‘continuous’ skin line appearance.
The colossal volumes of the tower complex become particularly striking through the solution of the towers’ stylobate: the massive towers are suspended before touching the ground, in what Jos Bosman has perceptively termed as an ‘inverted skyline’, so as to allow for a horizontal slice, a framed panoramic view of the Y of the river. The ground floor thus becomes an equivalent of the terrace. Such interplay between different architectural components is also echoed in the pavement-like treatment of the vertical cladding.
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