The popularity of Bijlmermeer ('the Bijlmer') southeast of Amsterdam diminished even as it was being built. There, CIAM's credo of the large scale, equality and separation of functions gave way to the urban renewal concept of differentiation, small scale and urban intimacy. 'Building for the neighbourhood' became the new slogan. In Bijlmermeer there was no neighbourhood or even the feeling of one, hence it was 'politically incorrect'. Urbanists proffered the Bijlmer as an example of how not to go about things: not anonymous, not abstract, not large-scale. And so parts of this overspill area are now being pulled down to make space for so many cosy and intimate neighbourhoods. The Bijlmer is indeed drab and unheimlich, because there is nothing to do there. Its long access galleries, large areas of parkland around the blocks, huge parking garages and broad interior streets are all unclaimed space that only the inhabitants make any use of. There is no urban life - hence the disagreeableness of the anonymity. Current attempts to turn Bijlmer-dwellers into neighbours of the hail-fellow-well-met variety by dint of cosy provincial layouts has something quite as unworldly as the utopian ideas behind the original Bijlmermeer concept. An unintentional spin-off of this inability to identify with the neighbourhood is that the population, a mixed bunch to say the least, is still able to lead a fairly easy-going existence. No neighbourhood, no ghetto, no discrimination. There goes the neighbourhood is an apartment building sited above Bijlmer railway station on the line dividing the social housing district from Amstel III, the up-and-coming money-spinning office site next door to the new Ajax football stadium (Arena). This mutated double-twisted housing block is 110 metres wide, 300 metres long and 100 metres tall. Inspired by the Bijlmer's anonymity and social freedom it is pointedly abstract, anonymous and large-scale. By combining the entrance zone for the houses with other functions such as the station, shopping mall, parking facilities, hotel lobby and Arena boulevard, the building is urban all the way up to the individual front doors. It refers to nothing, has no political, semantic or symbolic meaning, no scale, no projecting window and door frames, and there is nothing it resembles. It is as slippery and elusive as a bar of soap: just as you think you have it in your grasp it slips out of your hands and away. Institution: TU Delft Tutors: Bernard Leupen, Willem Hermans & Rogier Verbeek Specialization: architecture