Beneath the Surface: An Amsterdam Hillside That Hides a Graffiti Sky Underneath

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This article was written by UNI Editorial and published on uni.xyz, a platform for design professionals and creative thinkers.

Q: What is "Beneath the Surface: An Amsterdam Hillside That Hides a Graffiti Sky Underneath" about?

This article covers topics related to Landscape Design, Architecture, Street Art, Cityscape, Amsterdam Impressionism, Amsterdam, Urban Landscape. A grassy, bike-laced terrace on top, a mural-covered plaza below: Adam Vadas splits one building into Amsterdam's calm postcard and its loud metropolis.

A grassy, bike-laced terrace on top, a mural-covered plaza below: Adam Vadas splits one building into Amsterdam's calm postcard and its loud metropolis.

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UNI Editorial published Results under Landscape Design, Architecture on Oct 15, 2026

Most buildings that claim to honour Amsterdam end up quoting it: a gable here, a canal reference there. This one does something stranger. It offers the postcard on its roof, with lawns, kites, a windmill on the horizon and cyclists drifting along a red lane. Then it lifts that postcard up and lets you walk underneath it, into a plaza where the ceiling is a riot of street art. The calm city sits on top; the loud city lives below.

Beneath the Surface is a proposal for Amsterdam, Netherlands by Adam Vadas, which received Editor's Choice at Overseas Oasis 2020. In the designer's own words, the building "pays tribute to the local Dutch heritage while reflecting the city's modern metropolis culture," and sets out to reveal "what is beneath the general preconceptions." The interesting part is how literally the architecture takes that sentence.

A Street Front That Slopes Away From the Street

From the pavement, the building reads as two gestures that refuse to agree. On one side, a white frame of floor plates steps back and down, each level dressed with a strip of planted slope, so the facade behaves less like a wall and more like a cross-section through a hillside. On the other, a long canopy on slender columns runs out over the plaza, its underside already flashing colour toward the street. A sign reading SHOPS sits at ground level while a lettered screen welcomes visitors "beneath the surface", which turns the entrance into a promise rather than a door.

The cyclist passing in the foreground is not incidental. Bicycles appear in almost every image of this project, and the street elevation is where that relationship starts: the building is low enough at its edge to feel approachable from the saddle, and open enough at grade to be cycled toward rather than walked around.

Rendering of the street facade with sloping green terraces and a mural canopy, a cyclist passing and kites in a cloudy sky. Image: Adam Vadas

A Roof You Can Ride Up

The rooftop view is the project's most persuasive image. The terraces read as a continuous green slope, and a red bicycle lane loops across the lawn before ramping up between the floors. Behind the glazing, illuminated words such as LEARNING and COMMUNITIES hint at the programmes tucked into each tier, while a windmill and hot air balloons fill out the horizon. It is a deliberately idyllic Dutch scene, and the design leans into the cliché knowingly: this is the image the building is about to subvert.

What keeps it from being mere scenery is the circulation. A ramp that you can cycle turns the roof into an extension of the street network rather than a private garden. Four people sitting on the grass in the foreground occupy what is, structurally, the top of a building, and nothing in the image tells them so.

Rendering of a stepped, grass-covered terraced building with a looping bicycle ramp, a windmill behind, and four people seated on the lawn beneath kites and bal. Image: Adam Vadas

Eight Moves to Split One Building in Two

The massing diagrams lay out the logic step by step: a footprint, a volume raised to match its neighbour, areas pushed down to form a new topography, a terraced descending form, then a roof on columns that creates a new ground plane and separates the two sides of the site. Bicycle lanes come next, then vegetation on the rooftops, then the remaining features. Read in sequence, the diagrams show a building that is carved as much as it is constructed.

The crucial move is the fifth: the roof on column supports. That single canopy is what produces the split identity. Above it and beside it sits the green, terraced, residential-feeling Amsterdam; beneath it, a sheltered plaza where something louder can happen.

Diagram sheet of eight isometric massing drawings showing the building's form developing step by step, above a rendering of the grassy terraces. Image: Adam Vadas

A Ceiling Painted by the City

Step under the canopy and the palette flips. The ceiling is a patchwork of graffiti-style murals: a swirling, painterly sky, a portrait marked with the three St Andrew's crosses of Amsterdam's coat of arms, tags and faces layered edge to edge. Below it, the ground is muted grey, stepped seating climbs toward the building, and a translucent pavilion glows at the far end. The contrast is total. The roof above is the city's preconception; the underside is its counter-argument.

There is a sharp spatial intelligence in putting the street art overhead rather than on walls. It becomes a sky for the plaza, visible to everyone at once, and it frames gatherings without dictating them. The woman raising a ticket at dusk suggests performance, but the stepped seating and open floor could hold almost anything.

Rendering of the covered plaza under a ceiling of graffiti-style murals, with stepped seating and a woman raising a ticket at dusk. Image: Adam Vadas

One Plaza, Many Calendars

The project proves that flexibility by repeating the same view under different conditions. On a market day, canopy tents line the plaza and crowds stream beneath the murals, with MARKET DAY projected onto the pavilion. At night, the same space fills with raised hands and yellow flags, and the pavilion reads KING'S DAY, a nod to one of the city's most exuberant public celebrations. The architecture does not change; the ceiling, the steps and the glowing box simply absorb a new crowd.

This is where the concept earns its title. The covered plaza is not a lobby or a forecourt but a civic room, sheltered from rain yet open to the street, where the multicultural, noisy metropolis can gather under its own imagery. The representation, with greyscale crowds beneath full-colour murals, makes the point visually: people come and go, and the city's portrait stays overhead.

Rendering of a crowded market day beneath the mural ceiling, with canopy tents and shoppers walking through the plaza. Image: Adam Vadas

Rendering of a cheering crowd with raised hands and yellow flags beneath the mural ceiling during a night festival. Image: Adam Vadas

Why This Project Matters

Beneath the Surface treats a city's identity as something with layers rather than a single style to be imitated. Instead of averaging heritage and modernity into a polite compromise, it stacks them: green terraces and bicycle lanes on top, a raw, mural-lit public room beneath. The section does the storytelling, and that is a far more architectural way to talk about place than borrowing ornament.

It also makes a quiet case for infrastructure as public space. A cyclable roof and a covered, programme-agnostic plaza are generous moves that ask little of the visitor and offer a great deal back. Whatever one makes of its imagery, the project's central idea, that a building can show a city its familiar face and then invite it underneath, is worth carrying into other contexts.