The Bijlmer Area South East of Amsterdam was a globally unique urban devolopment concept based on the work of the Swiss Architect Le Corbusier. It was the utopia of a functional city.
When the buildings were finally finished, living ideals had changed and the buildings were mostly left empty. At the end of the 80s the community was mainly black unemployed people depending on social welfare. This implied as well a high criminal rate.
Kleiburg is a building block in Bijlmer Area, which was supposed to get demolished. Resistance of the residents led to the building being sold for 1 Euro and the appartments could be bought as a DIY Project cheaply.
Today the Kleiburg building is home to more than 1000 people with a different social and cultural background.
I was fascinated by the history of this building block – from the failure of Corbusier’s utopia to its current use.
The visual snapshot of the “Kleiburg” shows a hardly changed building on the outside since it was built in 1970 (static and brutalistic), whose use can today seen as successful project due to changed urban-sociological attitude.
Patrick Saringer is an Austria based photographer. He is working and living with his family near the city of Innsbruck. He has a great passion for analogue portrait photography and also works as a teacher for a local institution.
Mainly working as a commercial photographer and running a rental studio, he is always exploring new fields of photography and has a strong interest in the history of photography.
