Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet

Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet is a recreation park on the northern outskirts of Hoogvliet, a postwar New Town satellite to Rotterdam. The Heerlijkheid programme is based on desires expressed by the inhabitants of Hoogvliet in terms of leisure and recreation. It includes a Villa where people can organise their own parties, a swimming lake with beach, sports facilities, barbecue spots and hobby huts. The Heerlijkheid is a social and communal space, which aims to attract other Rotterdammers to visit Hoogvliet.

The Villa is the centerpiece of a new park. It houses a large hall for community events, a café/restaurant and two mini-cinema rooms as well as offices and other support spaces. The uses of the hall extend to all sections of the community – from children’s groups to hosting weddings and holding large parties.

It was built to a very demanding budget with construction techniques derived from light industrial units (a vernacular of suburban highway zone it inhabits). The architecture of the building however attempts to create something specific and unique to its place. The facades graphically connect to the uniqueness of Hoogvliet – referring to the buildings natural and industrial context. It fuses these iconographies to create a unique building that is both rooted in its surroundings and which becomes a new form of civic expression of the town.

The park features a new landscaped hill (a novelty to the flat landscape)– which both acts as a boundary to the northern edge of Hoogvliet, a bund to the highway and a new green corridor for wildlife. The hill forms part of the perimeter of a new lake, designed in the shape of Holland. The park is populated with bespoke bridges, follies, furniture and fences which explore the relationship between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ – responding to the sites green surroundings, with its skyline formed by the Shell oil refinery (an environment that might be described as ‘pastoral Blade Runner’).

The Park and Villa de Heerlijkheid are ambitious attempt to create a new symbolic parkland and community space which has responded to the extensive collaboration with the organization Wimby - the projects initiators. Wimby (which stands for Welcome into My Back Yard) conducted extensive community participation and fundraising for the project. The consultation included a number of ‘summer festivals’ for which FAT designed stages and other temporary features. These festivals were experiments – testing the ways in which diverse community groups would come together to create more public, mutually supportive and positive relationships and facilities.