Amabel Chiarito

Interiors Buildings Cities

Warmoesstraat Entrance

Rethinking a Parking Garage - The City Hotel

The City Hotel is the fruit of a re-adaptation of the Q-Park Bijenkorf parking garage in the city centre of Amsterdam. It aims to be a place for Amsterdammers, small local businesses and tourists to appropriate. It hosts many different functions under one roof, from a hotel to a hairdresser, a bike maker, co-working spaces and ateliers. Its architectural form is not modified, although its purpose is. New functions become fluid and adapt to the existing fabric, while adaptation brings its users together.

The City Hotel is an example of how an extraordinary carpark can be readapted into a place suitable for people and avoid demolition. It is a building that is poetic in its ambiguity. A carpark that deserves the title of monumental building in memory of an age made around the role of the cars in the city. Multi-story carparks are silent giants that can be awakened.

The catalyst behind the approach of The City Hotel was ‘A Playground to Share Knowledge’, a contribution to the anti-squatter building in the old chemistry faculty of the TU Delft. It is an example of how readapted buildings and materials can find a second life and bring people together.

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