Photographing in Amsterdam for AHMM
What stays with me about AHMM’s work at the University of Amsterdam is not simply the scale of the intervention, nor the boldness of the canal-spanning block, but the way the project reflects the spirit of a modern city. Amsterdam is a city of continuity, its historic neighbourhoods shaped by water, by trade, by exchange. To make a new campus here is to engage in a dialogue about community, diversity and respect for place. It asks for care, for an understanding that a university is not an enclave but commanding part of its setting.
The commission was prolonged and laborious. Multiple visits, stretched across years, to capture the project as it went through redefinition, remodelling and final reveal. Over time you make relationships, gain insights, learn the hidden workings of a complex and challenging program.
Ninety per cent of the concrete frame was reused, not only preserving embodied carbon but also preserving memory, retaining the weight and grain of the original masterplan while allowing for a completely renewed purpose. This is adaptive reuse as a demonstration of respect, proof that sustainability and bold creativity are not opposing forces but can be reconciled when a team sets its mind to it.
And it was very much about the team. Projects of this duration, stretching across more than a decade, demand resilience. They demand a shared belief between client, architect, contractor, photographer, and all those who play their part in shaping a city. What I saw here was a coherence of working relationships, a genuine culture of listening, adjustment, persistence and generosity. The architects’ insight and resourcefulness were matched by the university’s patience and ambition, and by the many hands that found a way to translate strategy into built form.
The result is an environment that feels neither corporate nor institutional, but civic. Spaces are open, transparent, welcoming, and carefully judged in scale. The suspended city room, hung over the canal, is not a gesture but an emblem of connectivity, an act of bridging both literally and metaphorically. It speaks of the city as a place of encounter, where neighbourhoods meet, where disciplines overlap, where people gather not just to work but to share experience.
Architecture at this level of ambition is never the achievement of a single author. It is the outcome of corporate, social and creative respect, each professional voice contributing to the integrity of the whole. Allford Hall Monaghan Morris have shown here that form and function can be integrated with a clarity of purpose that endures across shifting circumstances, proving the city is strengthened when design is conceived as a communal act.
It is in this sense that the campus stands as a lesson: that the most enduring projects are built from collaboration, patience and the conviction that many working parts can create something generous, engaging and ready to be of service for years to come.
