Given the increasing mobility, it cannot be long before the Netherlands has its own version of the American shopping mall. This proposal for such a hypermarket - PDV or Peripheral Wholesale Outlet - is sited at the Zeeburg traffic intersection in Amsterdam. The shopping centre claims a surface area of 100,000 m2, with 3300 parking places and its own metro station on the IJ-rail line.

The design seeks to forge a spatial relationship between motorway and mall and, inside the centre, a meaningful link between car and shop. As a shopping centre is essentially little more than a mass of goods passed by a flow of consumers, the mall is conceived of as a circulation machine accommodating a flow of people and cars. The design of the mall further elaborates the half cloverleaf below it. Its shape consists basically of a double helix with parking in one spiral and shopping in the other. With its one and a half kilometres, the gently raked shopping route is as long as the inner city trajectory over Nieuwendijk and Kalverstraat. The route regularly passes magnets in the shape of department stores, pumps that keep the circulation going. In the floating corners of the building are panoramic food courts directly accessible from the parking spiral and therefore doubling as restaurants serving the A10 orbital road.

Truss girders with a span of fifty metres ensure a maximum of flexibility. The shopping planes are column-free and therefore freely subdivisible, as is the parking plane though in accordance with its own traffic-based rationale.

As one approaches up the mall, the building expresses little of its contents. Only on driving through it on route for the S114 sliproad does it reveal its true nature. Then, an avalanche of advertising alternates with views probing deep into the mall.

Place of education: Amsterdam
Tutors: Niek van Vugt, Felix Claus & Harm Veenenbos
Specialization: architecture.