Terraced houses in Hook of Holland

Housing in Scheepvaartstraat, Rotterdam Holland, 1924

Oud designed the residential quarter in 1924, it was built shortly after in 1926-1927. This was Oud's first project in a series of white housing projects and earned him immediate international recognition. The elongated wall of the housing is divided into two equal parts, the rounded ends of which contain shops on the ground floor with all-glass facades. Above the gateway in the center of the block is a bookstore. The block instead consists of residential units, three-room units on the ground floor and an alternation of two- and four-room units on the upper floor.
This division into lower and upper dwellings can also be seen in the treatment of the external facade. At street level the facade, joined as it is to the glass shop fronts, has an opening in this regard. The white area of ​​the upper facade, however, is more introverted. This division into an open and closed strip, and even more so the continuous white balcony on the upper floor, serves to reinforce the horizontal character of the street facade.
In his residential projects, Oud treats the facades not as an accumulation of individual dwellings but as an architectural whole in which the street elevations function as part of the urban fabric.
In this, the Hook of Holland building certainly succeeds, with only its brick garden walls providing the individual units with an identifying element. The rear facade, unlike its taut counterpart, has a lively, rhythmic quality. It steps back and forth in alternating narrow and wide recesses, clearly emphasizing the individual dwellings. This contrast between the taut street facade and the more articulated rear facade has a certain affinity with the villas of Adolf Loos. It is known that there is a neoplastic design for the ends of the blocks. The round version as built was scornfully rejected by Van Doesburg as an exaggerated imitation of Van de Velde. This finalized Oud's break with De Stijl, after which he followed a strongly functionalist path. The use of color alone recalls his past associations with that movement: white facades, yellow bricks, blue doors and railings and red street lamps.
Source: Translation from the original published on http://www.architectureguide.nl/