Silodam
Why is it significant?
Walk out along the old pier until the long block on stilts stands in front of you, its facade a patchwork of colours and materials, like a ship stacked high with mismatched containers. Water laps under your feet, because this building stands not on land but on piles in the IJ.
Key Facts
| Place | Silodam |
|---|---|
| Address | Silodam, 1013 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.39100, 4.89090 |
| Part of Walk | Red Brick Dreams: Amsterdam School, Het Schip & the Western Islands |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk out along the old pier until the long block on stilts stands in front of you, its facade a patchwork of colours and materials, like a ship stacked high with mismatched containers. Water laps under your feet, because this building stands not on land but on piles in the IJ.
This is Silodam, completed in the early 2000s by the Rotterdam architects MVRDV. The idea was cheeky and brilliant: instead of one type of flat repeated a hundred times, they mixed many different apartment types, large and small, high and low, and let each group show itself on the outside with its own colour and material. The building literally tells you who lives where. It is ten storeys of neighbours, stacked rather than lined up along a street.
Now turn to the solid old brick giant at the landward end. That is the grain silo that gave the pier its name, built at the end of the nineteenth century, when grain from abroad was unloaded here and stored before it went to the mills and bakeries. Next to Silodam it looks like a grandfather standing beside a grandchild in a striped jumper. After the grain trade left, it stood empty for years and was eventually converted into apartments too.
This pair is the third answer of the walk to the same housing question. In the 1910s, the state funded brick palaces for workers. Around 2000, Amsterdam was building on its abandoned harbours, and architects were experimenting with density, variety and water. Same city, same problem of too many people and too little land, completely different moods.
If the sun is out, stand still and look west down the IJ towards the harbour cranes. This view of open water and big ships is the reason Amsterdam exists at all. Now walk back along the pier and head south-west to the first of the Western Islands and its old waterfront called the Zandhoek.