Recladding the Seventies
A tired 1970s block in Zoetermeer gets a new face of coloured panels, and its residents keep their homes.
The easy answer for a leaking, poorly insulated 1970s block is demolition. It is also the answer that puts two hundred households somewhere else for three years. The housing association in Zoetermeer asked for the hard answer instead.
The new facade is a prefabricated rainscreen, fixed to the existing frame from outside while people carried on living inside. The panels are coloured in a sequence that reads as one composition across the whole block, so that the building looks designed rather than patched.
"Nobody moved out. That was the brief, before the colour, before anything."
Behind the colour is the real work: 240 millimetres of insulation, new triple-glazed windows, and a ventilation system that finally deals with the damp. Heating bills have roughly halved. The residents' committee chose the palette.
It is the kind of project that rarely gets published, because it is not new. It should be published more, because it is how most of the city will actually be fixed.
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