Duneroof Groenmarkt Amsterdam

On the roof of this nature-inclusive apartment block ‘Groenmarkt’, in the heart of Amsterdam, you can swim in between the dunes. Here, bees buzz, seagulls cry and the background noise of the city is like the rustling of the sea. Feels like a holiday, every day.

The environmental challenges we face nowadays are numerous. They all need space and in the meantime the world population grows – so you might wish we had an extra world. Well: we’ve got one! Look up! There’s a world to win on our roofs. But the Dutch don’t really have the tradition nor the climate for rooftop gardens (yet), and because the roofs of Amsterdam’s City Centre almost all have the same height of a15 m, coastal winds blow even harder here.

So we asked ourselves: which landscape is fun, even with or maybe especially when the wind almost blows you away? The coast! With wind-blown pine trees and a variety of indigenous (and sometimes rare) plants growing in the dunes that are máde for these harsh and windy circumstances we created a dune-landscape that in a couple of months was covered with a blossoming dune-vegetation. All kinds of bees, butterflies and other insects found this new habitat right away.

The complete roof is covered by a water-collecting base (polder-roof) under meters of sea-sand, together capturing rainwater and saving it for dry periods. A meandering shell-path takes you around. A typical wooden dune-fence protects from falling down. The construction of those fences, and all the ventilation-pipes and installations that normally dominate the roof landscape are carefully integrated and made invisible in the technical design for this easy looking landscape.

In the middle of the dune landscape lies a 1,40 m deep swimming pool. A cool splash on hot summer days but also wonderful when it rains or in winter times. A bamboo terrace is ‘cut out’ in the higher dunes. The beach pavilion is the place where inhabitants can enjoy this surrealistic roof landscape under all conditions, a small wooden house in the dunes is meant to relax in the sauna that is about to be installed inside.

With this project we prove that by building we don’t make the world smaller - but bigger. The roof is a lifted landscape, what we lose on the ground, we win in the air. The facades which are overgrown by plants and are inhabited by birds, insects and humans, are extra surfaces. We multiply landscapes.