Bijlmer Museum Apartment (Flat Kleiburg)
Kleiburg is the last surviving giant honeycomb apartment block of the original 1970s Bijlmermeer urban experiment, and it has been spectacularly reimagined as a self-renovation housing project that won the prestigious Mies van der Rohe Award in 2017. Walking its endless open galleries is a lesson in utopian architecture, community resilience and Dutch design ingenuity all at once.
The Bijlmermeer Story
In the late 1960s, Amsterdam built the Bijlmermeer — a vast modernist housing estate of raised honeycomb blocks intended to be a model city of the future, with cars banished below and pedestrians free above. Reality proved harder than the blueprint: social problems, crime and neglect plagued the estate for decades, and most of the original blocks were demolished between the 1990s and 2010s.
Kleiburg alone survived, and rather than a top-down renovation, the city offered individual apartments as bare concrete shells for residents to finish themselves. The result is a wildly eclectic building where every front door opens onto a different world — a living monument to adaptive reuse.
Exploring the Galleries & the Bijlmer Museum
The long external galleries that run the length of each floor are open to the public and offer a fascinating architectural walk. Look for the varying window treatments, balcony gardens and personalised front doors that make each unit unique — it reads like a vertical street.
Nearby, the open-air Bijlmer Museum on Anton de Komplein preserves original street furniture, information panels and a section of the old elevated road system, telling the full story of the neighbourhood's dramatic rise, fall and reinvention. It's free, always open and deeply moving.
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