KNSM-eiland and Piraeus: Steamships and Giant Blocks
Why is it significant?
In front of you rises a massive dark block, much bigger than anything on Java-eiland, its walls bending and stepping as if somebody had folded a giant brick slab around a garden. This is Piraeus, and on this island big is the point.
Key Facts
| Place | KNSM-eiland and Piraeus: Steamships and Giant Blocks |
|---|---|
| Address | KNSM-laan, 1019 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.37690, 4.93950 |
| Part of Walk | Ships, Silos and a Red Python: Modern Architecture of Amsterdam's Eastern Docklands |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you rises a massive dark block, much bigger than anything on Java-eiland, its walls bending and stepping as if somebody had folded a giant brick slab around a garden. This is Piraeus, and on this island big is the point.
The island is named after the KNSM, the Koninklijke Nederlandsche Stoomboot-Maatschappij, the Royal Dutch Steamship Company, founded in 1856. From 1903 the company worked from this quay, with routes reaching ports around the Mediterranean and far beyond, so the names of buildings here, Piraeus and Barcelona, are a fitting salute. But by the time the company celebrated its hundredth birthday in 1956, decline had begun, and in 1979 the KNSM left the eastern harbour for good.
What came next was a fight. In the 1980s artists and squatters moved into the empty sheds, and many wanted the island to stay a free zone. In 1988 Jo Coenen, the architect of the library at the start of this walk, drew up a master plan of a completely different kind from Java's: not small canal houses, but a few very large, strong buildings standing like ships along a central avenue.
The Berlin architect Hans Kollhoff delivered Piraeus in 1994. From outside it looks almost forbidding, but walk around it and you find a sheltered inner courtyard, and inside there are apartments of all kinds of shapes and sizes. Next came the Barcelona complex by the Belgian architect Bruno Albert in 1993, and in 1996 the round tower of the Emerald Empire. Today about 2,300 people live on the island, in more than thirteen hundred homes, nearly half of them social housing.
Some of the old squatters' spirit survives in the studios and the odd harbour shed that escaped demolition. Now go back towards the Azartplein and cross the Verbindingsdam, the connecting dam, south to the old quay, and look for a stately brick building with a tower.