Dutch architecture office i29 has completed a floating home on a canal in Amsterdam that features angled openings and cutaway corners providing views across the watery neighbourhood.
The owners asked i29 to create a house as part of the Schoonschip floating village which is located on the Johan van Hasselt Canal in a former industrial neighbourhood in north Amsterdam.
Schoonschip Amsterdam was envisioned by a group of residents who engaged spatial design studio Space&Matter to develop an urban plan comprising 46 individual water dwellings, housing more than 100 residents.
The house forms part of the Schoonschip floating village in Amsterdam
The "floating village" has been in development since 2010 and is intended as a model of sustainable planning. Water pumps that extract warmth from the canal water provide heat to the homes, while solar panels supply electricity that is stored and traded with the national energy grid. Like all the other houses that comprise the Schoonschip development, the building designed by i29 is unique in its form and limited in design only by the dimensions of the water plot.
Angled openings and cutaway corners frame views of the site
"Our client challenged us to design a home which would maximise the space within the volume boundaries of the plot and still have a typical yet surprising house shape," the architects explained.
"The floating volume has a pitched roof, but the coping of the roof is turned diagonal in the fl...