Anniek Gehlen
De binnengebieden van het historische centrum van Roermond. Academie van Bouwkunst, Maastricht (The Netherlands)
After the big cityfires Roermond was rebuilt according to the street pattern of the Middle Ages. The lots became larger which created spaces in the inner areas. The shopkeepers left the city in the nineteenth century. The houses above the shops, the upper houses, are mostly empty now. And the Second World War created also holes in the city.
My project provides a vision on the urban development of the historical centre of Roermond. The existing gates and lanes, but also the new underground passages are brought in to connect the inner areas with each other and with the historical city. As a sort of implantation, the new buildings are brought into the historical city. It gives impulses and completes the missing functions without affecting the historical city. This results in new building blocks with new fronts and historical inner areas.
I worked out three parts of Roermond:
- The upper house is a typology which can be brought back to the late Middle Ages. The dwellings are accessible by a sort of plinth which forms a square on a higher altitude at the backside. The Plinth dwellings are deduced from the houses in the city in the late Middle Ages. Detached houses are built partly on the square and partly on the plinth to make dwelling above the shops possible. The space between the houses provides an interaction between the square and the backsides of the historical houses.
- The multifunctional centre is deduced from the wall typology and large-scale structures. The structure is a transparant wall of a newly-formed building block. The historical building block gets projected in the new structure.
- The Fronthouse-Backhouse is a typology from the early Middle Ages. The Fronthouse consists of working spaces and is situated towards the inner square. The livingrooms of the Backhouse are reached by a passage along a patio. The backhouse is situated along the historical streetpattern.
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