AEREA . Weekly series
20 drawings that reimagine some of the most significant public housing projects around the world.
Both an archive and a critique. Imagining these buildings as satellites. No longer belonging to the ground we inhabit, but to a distant orbit of ideas.
Still visible, still influential yet no longer fully accessible.
This week:
4/20
Bijlmermeer
Design by Siegfried Nassuth
Built in Amsterdam, Netherlands . 1968-1975
Conceived as one of the Netherlands’ most ambitious postwar urban expansions, Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam reimagined modernist housing at a metropolitan scale. Organized through a strict grid of elevated hexagonal blocks, the district was designed as a rational, egalitarian environment where high-rise living coexisted with vast green spaces and separated traffic systems. Its repetitive concrete slabs and elevated walkways embodied a vision of functional utopia, yet over time revealed the social and spatial challenges of abstraction, anonymity, and urban fragmentation.
There’s two great episodes of @99percentinvisible that tell the story of this project and its demise. By @katiemingle. Go listen!
36 x 36 cm – 14 x 14 in
Ink on 200g/m2 paper
Available at the website (link in bio)
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Each week, one more drawing!
Full list of references & all the drawings here:
mistermourao.com/aerea