There is nothing as ravishing as the polder. It is like a green Mondrian when seen from the air. Besides being beautiful, it is a wonderfully intelligent system of drainage ditches, pumping stations, channels, farms, fences and shelterbelts of trees. The polder is an extreme landscape of a sleek artificial splendour. This landscape is indelibly linked to farms and farmers, whom you might describe as being the guardians of this open country. Things are not looking good for the polder. Subsidies, environmental legislation, scaling up and globalization are reducing the farmers' prospects of survival. They are slowly but surely disappearing and look likely to drag their cultural-historical landscape, the polder, down with them. Our final year project seeks to answer the following questions: Can housing contribute to revivifying the farming economy if the profits made in that sector go to the farmers and the landscape? What else besides dwelling is needed to make the countryside more attractive socially and culturally?

The polder has a rich culture and a history to match. It is an area with its share of ownerships, narratives and perspectives. All these small-scale elements prompted us to develop a 'farmer's urbanism' that literally builds upon the constant changes and small-scale developments undergone by the landscape. A company (Farmers Inc.) was founded to harmonize what new residents want and what farmer enterprises supply. The farmers indicate which swampy, unmowable or residual areas are better suited for habitation. A new structure is to be created that slips into the present pattern of roads, paths, dykes and watercourses. Other provisions include ecological development, the availability of roundabout routes and additional new activities. This smooth urbanism will leave the countryside more varied and more vibrant.

Our design for the houses in the polder is inspired by such descriptions of country life and farmer's ingenuity as useful, convenient, versatile, enduring, simple, cheap, build-it-quick and build-it-yourself. Taking barn construction techniques as the stepping-off points for this new form of dwelling, the farmyard barn can be transformed into a residential barn. Based on the structure of steel joists for the frame, sandwich panels for the roof and walls and black corrugated sheet to ward off wind and rain, it is an architecture that fits well in this landscape.

The simplicity of rural living has clear architectural principles to go with it: large openings, no superfluous detail, light apertures of translucent corrugated sheet, insulation only where necessary and an internal subdivision distinct from the main structure. All this is supplemented by atypical elements, such special features as large panorama windows, sliding and swinging doors and large roof hatches.

'Farmers' ingenuity' attracts people who live the no-frills life of the polder. People who can warm to a polder wind whistling through the house, muddy boots and cowpats out front, the chug of tractors and the vicissitudes of the weather, and take pleasure from the low Dutch sky and cattle out the back.

Place of education: Amsterdam Academy of Architecture
Specialization: architecture
Tutors: Wim Kloosterboer, Berdie Olthof, Arjan Klok, Rik Herngreen