De Citadel is the most distinctive building in Almere's centre — a colourful, sculpted mixed-use block by the French architect Christian de Portzamparc, finished in 2006. It sits on the edge of the Stadshart and contains shops on the ground floor, offices above, and a row of apartments on the top. The façades are a deliberate jumble of materials — coloured render, glass, terracotta, zinc — broken into a series of separate "houses" that step and tilt against each other.
The point, like much of the Stadshart, is to give a freshly planned city the texture of a place that has grown over time. Whether you find it convincing or contrived is a matter of taste, but it is exactly the kind of swaggering architectural set-piece that Almere was built to host.