The Eastern Docklands — Java Island, KNSM Island, Borneo Island, and Sporenburg — are among the most significant urban planning projects in 1990s Europe. The old harbour basins east of Central Station were decommissioned in the 1980s; the city then commissioned a series of housing projects that gave different architects control over different islands and peninsulas. The result is a concentrated urban architecture show unlike anything else in Amsterdam.
Java Island is the most conventional of the group — a long, narrow finger of land divided into four sections, each by a different architect, arranged around a single main canal. The residential blocks are four and five storeys, varied in facade treatment but consistent in scale. It is pleasant to walk the length of the island and back on the canal side.
KNSM Island has the largest individual buildings — the massive Emerald Empire and Lloyd Hotel complexes that gave the island its distinctive scale. The Lloyd Hotel is worth visiting even if you're not staying: built in 1921 for emigrants bound for the Dutch East Indies, then repurposed as a prison and refugee detention centre through the 20th century, it reopened as a design hotel in 2004 with a deliberately varied room specification — rooms range from one-star to five-star and are priced accordingly. The restaurant, open to non-guests, is the real draw, a grand double-height room with a seasonal Dutch-leaning menu. The Looskade waterfront promenade runs along the island's southern edge.
Sporenburg, at the southern end, is the most architecturally dense: 2,500 low-rise houses on a tight grid, each by a different architect, with the result that every facade on every street is different. Two bridges connect the peninsula to the city — the Pythonbrug, a distinctive red S-curved footbridge to Borneo Island, and the lifting bridge at the tip. Walking the streets here on a quiet morning is one of Amsterdam's stranger pleasures.