Europan 18 The Netherlands
Location: Amersfoort, NL
Year: 2025
Type: Europan International Competition, 1st prize
Status: Completed
Team: Flavio Martella, Maria Vittoria Tesei
The Cultural Archipelago proposal for Amersfoort chooses preservation and patient adaptation over demolition, transforming a 1970s–80s complex into the permanent heart of a new cultural district.
It begins with The Wall, the long brick volume that echoes the city’s lost medieval second ring. Kept forever rather than temporarily, its interior is gently reconfigured into a neighbourhood library, workshops, galleries, co-working spaces and community offices, while its honest exterior remains almost untouched. Surface parking disappears, replaced by permeable surfaces, native planting and quiet pedestrian paths that recall the historic green belt; underground parking stays fully operational.
The Molenstraat ensemble—The Spine, The Cine and The Shell—is similarly retained and reinterpreted.
The Spine is hollowed out and reborn as an open, elevated public structure of ramps, terraces and gardens. The Cine becomes a vertical cultural landmark with cinemas, studios and public terraces; The Shell receives a new skin and an animated ground floor. Together they create a dense, welcoming threshold to the historic centre.
Most poetic is the existing Theatre, originally destined for immediate erasure. Its structure and materials are salvaged and reused—bricks, concrete and steel returning as cladding and narrative surfaces—while light steel-and-timber additions form generous new halls, studios and a public foyer. The reimagined Spine extends into a continuous landscaped promenade that drifts above streets, softly linking all four buildings into one walkable cultural ribbon.
