Architect:
Asymptote - New York, Co-architect:
Bronsvoort Blaak - Amerongen
Following an international competition , Asymptote has built the HydraPier, a municipal pavilion acknowledging and celebrating the fast growing city of Haarlemmermeer in the Netherlands. Haarlemmermeer is located adjacent to Schiphol airport, adjacent to Amsterdam. In contrast to the frequent sight overhead of large body airplanes arriving and leaving Schiphol airport, and the endless streams of highway commuters, the HydraPier is sited within an artificially manufactured pastoral landscape. This region lay beneath five meters of seawater and was reclaimed as land 150 years ago. Much of the nineteenth-century engineered dams and pumping stations are still in existance today and are potent symbols of Holland's tenuous relation with the surrounding sea. The HydraPier is an architecture articulating the struggle between land and water, nature and technological artifice.
