2nd Price in competition about the future family farmhouse.

“How to defines the shape of a farm?” wins the 2nd prize in the competition “‘Een boerderijenfamilie voor de Overdiepse Polder: eenheid in verscheidenheid”

Ideas for a family of farms in the “Overdiepse Polder”
“Wat maakt een boerderij?” (what makes a farm?) is a proposal for the invited competition “Een boerderijenfamilie voor de Overdiepse Polder: eenheid in verscheidenheid” organized by the Province of Brabant in the contex of the project ruimte voor de rivier.

The project is a collaboration between ELstudio and Hekkenbergarchitects.

Once every 25 years, the Overdiepse Polder is expected to flood. This prediction is based on a state strategy that defines ‘controlled flooding areas’ to prevent unexpected flooding in other more densely populated areas.
To be able to use this land as agricultural land the Province of Brabant will create nine mounds risen above the water level. Here the Province plans to build fully operational farms: the “Overdiepse farms”. In a normal scenario, these farms will simply stand on hills, when the sporadic flooding occurs these platforms become isolated farm-islands.
The goal of this competition was to find a language that connects the nine farms taking into consideration the possible change of landscape.

Our proposals for an architecturally cohesive ‘family of farms’ focus on the residential section of the farms, the business area of the farm as well as the mount were given.
Like many historic farm typologies, the characteristics of the buildings are closely connected with the morphology of the land. Following this principle, we started by analyzing possible implementations of the farm-house on the mound typology (as a ‘hill’ and as an ‘island’), and also, the relation between the nine mounds.
From this analysis, we defined strategies that can be included as conditions in the Welstandsnota (a document used for the assessment of applications for building permits in Holland) and form the basis for the planning and design of the farms.
The overall idea of our strategies is that kinship is created not only by creating recognizable common attributes between the farms but also, by attributes that distinguish the group of farms from the surroundings.

Set of attributes for the farmhouse.