Home of the Innocent

Amsterdam, NL

Type: Educational & Care

Commissoned by: MSc Graduation Studio Interiors, Buildings & Cities, Delft University of Technology

Year: 2021

Area: ~ 1150 m2

The project sets out to investigate what the architectural model could be like that offers shelter to parentless refugee children that now live in camps throughout Europe. To offer these children the prospect of a brighter future, the building sets out to create a safe and protective environment, one that allows them to withdraw and cope with trauma, but also presents means to build new relationships and interaction with the child's new setting.

Therefore the project combines a public nursery and after school care in the plinth and a private temporary domestic on the upper

floors. The public plinth acts as a mediator for interaction between children from the local community and the refugee children, stimulating a multicultural upbringing in the Metropol of Amsterdam from an early age and providing the children with a fair chance to a new life in the Netherlands. Situated in the Jordaan, the nursery and after school care respond to the growing shortage of daycare for youngsters in Amterdam’s residential neighbourhoods and so the public function surrogates as a financial model that funds the private upper floors, that provides temporary accommodation for the children until they find a loving foster family.

Designing for small, fragile and at times troubled children, the need for interaction and withdrawal both needed to be addressed adequately. The building learns from the Caravanserai, an ancient accommodation that sheltered travellers along the Silk Road, in its interpretation of these thresholds, cleverly creating a sequence of public, semi-private and private spaces. This resulted in architectural elements like connecting vestibules, topography elevations, niches in the building envelope and a degree of transparency between spaces, all aiding the paradoxical need for privacy and publicness. In the bedrooms this developed as a common

space with alcove beds to be closed with a curtain, that can be appropriated as the child desires with his/her choice of sheets, decoration and has an openable window.