Do you like modern urbanism and quirky architecture? Then grab your camera quickly and come to Flevoland. The contemporary polder towns are partly architecture museums. Experimental and world-famous designers like Rem Koolhaas, Gerrit Rietveld, Ben van Berkel and Liesbeth van der Pol show their work here.
Flevoland's towns and villages were all designed on the drawing board. You can see that in Noordoostpolder, for example. All the villages are about the same distance apart and you can see a pattern, so to speak. The idea behind this is that all farms had to have access to facilities like school, shop and church at a certain distance. Not only was there very practical thinking about things, famous architects were also given the opportunity to create beautiful designs. You can see some of this in almost every town or village in Flevoland.
From the motorway, Almere's cosmopolitan skyline screams for photos. And if you come by train, it's like driving straight through an architectural museum. The variety of architectural styles is spectacular in Almere. Besides Rem Koolhaas, René van Zuuk and Herman Hertzberger, international architecture firms have also left their signature in Almere. Not surprisingly, Almere ranks third among architectural cities in the Netherlands and even first among European New Towns.
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Nagele is nicknamed “the flat-roofed village” and is indeed the only village in the Netherlands where all buildings have flat roofs. The houses have a maximum of two floors and the architecture is sober and practical, but playful. Actually, Nagele is a textbook example of the belief in a socially engineered society. Beforehand, a group of specialists gave the village a lot of thought. This makes Nagele a place that very clearly tells the typical story of Flevoland - a place with room for new ideas.
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Nagele's houses, by the way, were incredibly modern for their time. The designers wanted to provide the new polder pioneers with large and spacious houses with all modern amenities for the time. such as running water, toilet and lavet. The houses were new and without defects, quite a relief for many of their inhabitants, who in “the old country” had often lived in small and old houses or farms, where water still came from the pump and people still did their needs on the outside toilet. Museum-house Polman shows you how practical and comfortable for its time the houses in Nagele were, as it is completely original and furnished in 1950s style.
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