After three years in the ATELIER project, the demonstration site of Poppies started construction in November 2022. The project had a long run-up to reach this stage. Long before the outbreak of Covid and the war in Ukraine, Poppies’ design was the winner of a tender in 2018 to be allowed to build on plot 3D in Buiksloterham. After that, time passed by through some issues on the environmental permit and ground lease agreement with the Municipality in 2020, followed by a participation procedure. The building permit became irrevocable in January 2021. The ground lease agreement with the Municipality was signed April 2021. Reaching financial closure took most of 2021. At the end of 2021 a lot of activity took place “behind the scenes” through detailing the energy system and doing the Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Poppies. This was needed for obtaining a final offer from construction companies. Around that time the expected completion data for Poppies was mid 2023.

The gallery shows the state of construction works from January & February 2023:

However, then the Ukrainian war started, resource prices for steel, concrete, wood soared, worldwide logistics were problematic and the construction offers turned out to be much more expensive than expected too. This led to a further delay as negotiations needed to be conducted with the investors and optimizations to the design needed to be made. Fortunately this was solved in the summer of 2022, leading to the construction start mentioned at the top of this article.

So actually, there have been no major setbacks in the development of Poppies, apart from the rising prices. The latter took some time solving as the building needs to comply with “medium-level rent” and that cannot be changed easily. It appears that external influences determine project flow to a large extent.

As the construction method is pretty industrial, with all the dwelling modules prefabricated, the on-site building process is relatively short and Poppies is now expected to be completed end of 2023:

Author: Rudy Rooth, City of Amsterdam

Picture credits last image: MaMa pioneers