The heart of Almere-Stad was masterplanned by Rem Koolhaas and OMA between 1994 and 2007 and is the most ambitious experiment in Dutch town-centre design of the last thirty years. The brief was to give a young, fast-growing planned city something that resembled a real urban centre — a difficult ask in a place that had been a polder fifty years earlier. Koolhaas's solution was to lift the entire shopping district onto an artificial deck, with car parks, service roads and bus platforms hidden underneath and a layer of pedestrian streets and squares on top.
Around the deck stands a deliberately mismatched collection of buildings by different architects: De Citadel by Christian de Portzamparc, the Kunstlinie theatre and arts centre by SANAA, the new public library by Meyer en Van Schooten and Concrete, and the residential blocks of Will Alsop and Claus en Kaan. The effect is dense, occasionally awkward, and unlike anything else in the Netherlands. It rewards a slow walk and frequent looking up.