Even on a sunny day like today, this part of Amsterdam is stark. North of the city’s historic center, the canal is straight as an arrow and unforgiving, the sheds and warehouses on its concrete banks prove that the area’s industrial origin is not far behind us. But take a turn onto a set of interconnected wooden walkways and into a new floating neighborhood, called Schoonschip, and things start to feel homey.

After 10 years of planning, designing, and building, the community’s 30 floating houses have moored along five interconnected piers. Commissioned in tandem by like-minded neighbors-to-be, the two- and three-story buildings are now home to 46 households. They are fairly close together, and as you walk by, you notice people sitting on their terraces or roofs. You can hear neighbors chatting, and through an open door you look up at an owner reading the newspaper. There are children splashing around in the canal as one of their mothers lies on a towel on the walkway, enjoying the sun.

In 2009, the city decided to dedicate this once exclusively industrial part of the north of Amsterdam, called Buiksloterham, to mixed-use projects and to allow experiments in sustainability and low-to-zero-waste residential developments. All of Schoonschip’s floating homes are made of sustainable materials and produce their own energy, making the neighborhood—by its own claim—Europe’s most sustainable floating community and an experiment in a new, resilient way of living in cities in times of climate change.

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In Dutch schoon means both clean and beautiful, and the expression schoon schip maken means making a fresh start. The residents have done just that. It started with TV director Marjan de Blok, who had a dream of living in a self-supporting houseboat. “I went to the city government, and it turned out that after the financial crisis of 2008, this part of northern Amsterdam had been designated an experimental area for sustainable living and working.” She laughs at how easy that makes it sound. “Back then it actually looked pretty grim here—just rows of big gray warehouses along the canal and not a single streetlight.”

About half the houses are single-family homes. The others are shared by two households and one by three households. Residents designed their own houses, with some sharing an architect or a contractor. But all the floating homes have certain design principles in common, says architect and resident Sascha Glasl, whose studio, Space&Matter, planned the neighborhood.

“We wanted to use materials that were as sustainable as possible in sourcing, production, and maintenance,” he says. “That excluded steel and polyurethane foam, for example, and limited the materials for the facades to wood, bamboo, and cork.” The city also had its demands. For example, one-third of each roof surface had to be covered with vegetation to absorb rainwater.

Wouter Valkenier and his wife, Mijke de Kok, are both architects, but even for them, building a floating house with new energy and water systems and sustainable materials was a learning curve, they say. “The facade is made of leftover wood bought from a sawmill and upcycled wood from an old bridge. The insulation is made from flax,” Valkenier says during a tour. “The windows come from an office building, and the ‘chandelier’ is made of glass shades from streetlights.”

What really makes Schoonschip special, Valkenier says, is not the technical innovations each in their own right, but the fact that these systems are working together. “Soon all of this will be proven technology—and no longer special. That’s a good thing,” he says.

A case in hand is Schoonschip’s innovative energy system. The houses produce their own electricity from 500 solar panels. All 30 houses together have one connection on land to the municipal electricity grid, so they can give excess energy back when they have it.

Schoonschip was an experiment not just in sustainability, but also in social dynamics. “Of course there were tensions and conflicts, and it all took much longer than anyone expected, but we always managed to work them out,” says Marjan de Blok. Valkenier adds: “The composition of the group changed during that ten-year process. But recently one family returned who had left—and they bought the first Schoonschip house to come on the market.”

For now there are no plans to expand the number of floating homes. Many residents are still finishing construction and settling in, after having been towed from various building sites to their mooring place by tugboats just a year ago. Still, the day will come when it feels less experimental and more established—but Schoonschip will never feel ordinary.

Project Credits:

Master Planning: Space&Matter