Bijlmermeer estate by NL Architects with XVW architectuur

To strip, not clad, a concrete facade; to reveal its inherent strength and beauty; to make the affordable at once desirable; to appreciate, not fetishise: this is a shopping list of approaches to postwar housing that seems unobtainably rare in Britain – but not elsewhere.

The Bijlmermeer estate lies in Amsterdam’s south-eastern quarter, a district severed from the city so that it forms a separate administrative enclave. The topography of the area is flat and watery – no surprises there – but as the metro trundles from the centre into its expansive hinterland, strange apparitions glide toward the passenger: great grids lying against the landscape like vast and fallen monuments to De Stijl. These are the blocks of Bijlmermeer, once the most notorious of the Netherlands’ postwar housing projects.

Every country has examples of this failed type, but every country fails in different ways: in Britain we have turned our public housing – when we haven’t knocked it down – into death-traps and private investment vehicles; in Germany’s east, the blocks of the former DDR are riddled with neo-Nazis; and in France and Belgium, the banlieues are neglected silos for immigrants from those nations’ collapsed empires. In the Netherlands they do things differently, and, it seems, better.

It did not always appear this way. The Bijlmermeer, commonly known as the Bijlmer, was a late addendum to an age of giants, serving as a prodigious full stop to dreams of a massive utopia. Begun in 1966 and completed in the early 1970s, the estate was intended to relieve an acute housing shortage in the capital, where the stock was ill-maintained and, it was then thought, hopelessly outdated. Instead, the city’s middle classes would be enticed into the outskirts; not by bucolic garden suburbs, but by Brutalist streets in the sky.

A conglomeration of 18 housing corporations built 36,000 homes in a series of snaking blocks; these were arranged on a honeycomb pattern derived from Sheffield’s Park Hill, and the circulation for motorised traffic was originally lifted above the surrounding parkland. The construction was largely of prefabricated concrete panels: this was intended as an industrialisation of housing, just as Western Europe was starting to de-industrialise.

But as production changed so too did consumption, and the inner city was beginning to regain its allure as the project neared completion. It turned out that the middle classes didn’t want to live like this, and certainly not at these prices, which were relatively high and not especially reflective of the amenities on offer. So, gradually, the housing was offered at a subsidised rate, attracting the urban poor, a large proportion of whom were immigrants from the former Dutch colony of Surinam. Although the Bijlmer (unlike Thamesmead in London, another watery concrete excrescence from a major capital) was equipped with a metro line and a Grimshaw-designed station, the area quickly gained a reputation for isolation, poverty and crime. It emptied like a burst dyke: in 1974, 30 per cent of the residents moved out.

Local organisers – some of whom joined the criticism of the press, while others, known as the ‘Bijlmer believers’, were more proudly defensive – had been agitating for improvement for some time, but it took a plane crashing into the estate in 1992 to finally galvanise an official response. Speculative proposals had already been made, among them Rem Koolhaas’s suggested enhancement of the project’s despised monumentality. This was 1986, and quite unusual for its time (in retrospect, Koolhaas’s praise for Bijlmer’s ‘monotonous beauty’ can be seen as an application of Venturi to High Modernism, and a precursor of his own banal turn). When action eventually came it took a more predictable form: demolitions and low-rise infill.

This being the Netherlands, the final encroachment of suburban typologies is not quite the design disaster that it was in the UK: no cul-de-sacs here, but rather more interesting terraced courtyard blocks. Still, the refrain of defensible space is detectible on the polder breeze. The remaining original blocks were treated with all the contempt customarily elicited by the type, the wishful thinking of ‘breaking up the mass’ particularly idiotic when applied to volumes hundreds of metres long. The predictable variety of these strategies can be enumerated from the train: colourful cladding, haphazard penetration and unidentified objects planted on roofs.

‘The horizontality of the original is allowed to predominate, retaining the monumentality of the whole’

However, every reaction has its own reaction, if not always an equal or opposite one. In 2010, as the city was about to demolish the Kleiburg, one of the Bijlmer’s biggest blocks, an alternative fate was suggested. Local protest spurred a consortium of maverick developers, DeFlat, to propose that the building be kept, and, for a fraction of the demolition price, reconfigured for the contemporary market. The city was won over, and agreed to sell the block for the nominal sum of €1 – a deal which, it seems, was brokered by a sensationalist newspaper headline.

The eventual cost was somewhat higher, since the land had also to be bought from the municipality; however, the most appealing element of the proposal – formulated with local architect Xander Vermeulen Windsant – remained unchanged: the flats would be stripped out, their services modernised, and offered for sale at bargain prices. (In the end, mortgages for the units were equivalent to a standard subsidised rent of €350 per month, but without the waiting list of eight years usual for social housing in Amsterdam.) Any further work would be undertaken by their new owners. This could include the conjunction of adjacent units as well as more superficial finishing touches.

The remaining alterations conducted by Windsant and another local firm, NL Architects, were intended to reintegrate the building with its surroundings. The raised circulatory system was demolished and animation given to the ground level via the conversion of what was formerly almost an entire storey of storage units. These would henceforth be businesses, bike stores and flats, bringing the total number of units in the block to 500. Extra lifts were added and the passages through the ground floor were enlarged, and the first-floor ‘internal street’ enclosed.

In contrast to previous refurbishment schemes in the area, the exteriors were to remain unchanged, except for the removal of opaque panels from the rooms facing the access decks, increasing natural light within the already generously lit double-aspect flats. Indeed, on scraping back the paint that had been applied to the building, it was discovered that the concrete was in surprisingly good condition, and it was decided that this would be left exposed. The result is a handsome and finely finished grey.

‘The adoption of this strategy marks a degree of bravery from city, developer and architect’

The impulse to refurbish rather than demolish is not a new one: Crimson Architectural Historians pioneered the strategy for the Netherlands in Rotterdam, as the result of an intensive consultation process, while Lacaton & Vassal have cornered the market for this kind of thing in France. The original impetus for this increasingly popular approach came from architects who emerged from the crisis of Modernism, such as Lucien Kroll, whose (only partly realised) work in Alençon prioritised upgrading not just the fabric of the grands ensembles, but especially their facilities, economic opportunities and management structures.

In the Kleiburg, although the reconfigurability of the units is one of the major design decisions, and while this extends to a limited extent to the facade (residents have a choice of glazing units facing the balconies, from concertina doors to fixed panels), the ultimate result is far less of a patchwork than Kroll’s ‘democratic facades’. Instead, the horizontality of the original is allowed to predominate, retaining the monumentality of the whole. This rejects the rather specious idea that residents shaping the appearance of the building has some kind of radically transformative effect – after all it is just as much a straitjacket for future residents as anything designed by an architect – and instead lets them get on with the interiors themselves, without direction (but with some caveats: for instance, permission has to be sought before knocking units together, for structural reasons).

In a moment of renewed housing pressure, the adoption of this strategy for a 400-metre block marks a degree of bravery from city, developer and architect. It also corresponds to the increasing attraction of Brutalism to a certain type of resident, and indeed, it has become something of a standing joke that the Kleiburg is now full of hipsters. It is certainly full: the owners found that the first stretch of the block sold out in three months, the last in a couple of weeks. Compare this with Park Hill, the refurbishment of which has succeeded neither aesthetically nor in attracting tenants, since the apartments are marketed at a class of wealthy young professionals not prevalent in Sheffield. There, stripped concrete has been fetishised as a commodity; here it is a means of making housing affordable.

Indeed, the cheap unfinished flats of the Kleiburg have attracted those who are willing and able to DIY, a population not entirely determined by class. One third of the building’s new residents came from the Bijlmer, another third from Amsterdam, and the rest from across the Netherlands. Among them was a group of five young families who have joined their units together as a Christian commune, the ‘Kleiklooster’, complete with a chapel and guest room. They also brew their own beer.

The success of the Kleiburg, however sensitive the recent intervention, must also be attributed in part to its original architects, led by Fop Ottenhof. Windsant is not hesitant in his praise: this was always a carefully considered, detailed and constructed building, and his respect for the architecture is apparent in his treatment of it. Beyond the block, the surrounding landscape of ponds and channels, from which the massive concrete piers of the elevated railway rise, succeeds in giving Bijlmer the extraordinary, urban-rural hybrid quality originally intended by its planners. On the early summer day on which I visit the estate, the sun casts sharp and gently waving shadows from the mature trees standing against the Kleiburg, while beneath its benevolent hulk vegetables sprout in the communal garden and joggers slowly trot around the track. This feels like a place that works, and its reception of the 2017 Mies van der Rohe Prize is both fitting and heartening.