Samenvatting

Hof van den Houte’ is the new name for a shopping and housing district in the present heart of Etten-Leur, once the site of a castle by the same name between the villages Etten and Leur. The site was still an open field when a modern freestanding shopping mall was built in the 1960s to serve the growing population, attracted by new industries like Tomado. Till 2005 the city center was bisected by the highway A58, but after the construction of a new ring road the empty space was soon filled with a large underground parking garage and apartment blocks with more shops in the plinths. The shopping mall had grown as well but has become outdated and is mute to new insights in urban planning. The design retains part of the original mall, but the rest of the area is cleared to make a phased renewal possible, with a mix of programs and new interconnected urban spaces. The new functions are cleverly combined, and the housing solutions serve new target groups in a creative way, like in the shops with living above. To find a new order for urban development where there is none, is a strong quality of this project.