OMA Stacks Four Interlocking Gridded Volumes on a Former Amsterdam Prison Site to Build The Martin

For almost four decades, the Bijlmerbajes complex in southeast Amsterdam was a place built to keep people in. The prison operated from 1978 to 2016. Its 7.5 hectare site is now being remade as Bajes Kwartier, an energy-neutral, mixed-use district planned for about 1,350 homes, roughly 30% of them social housing. The Martin by OMA is the newest residential building in the district's Central Cluster. Partner in charge David Gianotten and associate Mariano Sagasta led the design. It follows the studio's neighboring building, The Jay, which was completed in 2025.

Plenty of architects have built residential towers on brownfield sites. The Martin is worth a closer look because of how directly it answers what came before it. The building is four interlocking volumes, stepped and offset so that no two facades look alike. All of them sit inside a single aluminum grid that holds continuous balconies. Where the prison faced inward and stayed closed, this building is porous and turned outward, and it places that openness on the one axis that crosses the entire development. Whether a facade grid can carry that much symbolic weight is the question we want to test.

From Carceral Enclosure to Open Axis

The aerial view shows how hard the site's edges are. Rail lines, highway infrastructure and a cluster of mid-rise and high-rise blocks close it in. The physical site model shows the masterplan's reply: an island of buildings ringed by canals and organized around a central courtyard. The Martin stands on the district's main pedestrian and cycling axis. That position gives the building a civic job as well as a residential one, because the people who move through the neighborhood will pass by it every day.

The dusk photographs are frank about the moment the building was completed. It rises behind a concrete wall, across a bare sandy lot, beside a canal edge marked with graffiti. These are leftover fragments of the earlier condition, and they make the gridded tower read as a deliberate counterpoint. We would argue the contrast is strongest now, before landscaping and neighboring buildings soften the ground plane.

A Cascading Massing of Four Volumes

OMA has spent decades testing stacked and shifted boxes, and The Martin is a disciplined version of that habit. The volumes interlock and step down, producing a cascading silhouette that looks different from each approach. From the brick-paved lane, the building reads as a sequence of terraces. From the empty street at dusk, it reads as a single stepped mass. In one view, the cantilevered upper block juts out against the sky, a reminder that the stacking involves real structural offsets and not only surface articulation.

Stepping the massing is not new for housing, and it is often used to break up bulk. What counts here is that each step produces usable roof terraces. The cascade is a planning tool as much as a formal one. It turns the setbacks of a dense block into shared outdoor floors that residents can actually occupy.

The Aluminum Grid and the Continuous Balcony

The facade's main move is an external aluminum grid that ties the four volumes together. Continuous balconies run the full perimeter behind it, enclosed by transparent glass balustrades. The result is generous, because every apartment gets outdoor space. That is a meaningful standard for a project that spans small two-room units and larger family homes.

The grid also does atmospheric work. Its depth produces shadow and layering, so the elevation shifts with the light from flat white in full sun to a deep lattice at dusk. The obvious risk is monotony, since a uniform frame wrapped around everything can flatten a building into a diagram. Here, the stepped massing and the cantilevered offsets keep the grid from reading as wallpaper. The grid gives the composition its order, and the massing gives it variety.

Meeting the Ground

Towers tend to fail at the base, and the ground floor is where you can judge The Martin's claim to permeability. The entrance is a glass lobby set beneath rows of recessed balconies, opening onto a paved sidewalk. At another edge, a board-marked concrete wall meets glazed balcony bays and grey cladding. That change of material gives the plinth a heavier, more tactile register than the white frame above.

We think the transparent lobby is the right instinct on a street that doubles as the district's main pedestrian and cycling route. The test will come once retail, landscaping and daily foot traffic fill in around it. For now, the base looks open in principle. It still has to become open in practice.

Moss Atria and Shared Roof Terraces

Inside, the plan is organized around a central circulation core and two atria. The atrium photograph is the most surprising image in the set: a lit void lined with a moss-covered wall, framed by white slatted balcony walkways, with potted palms at its base. The moss surfaces add a soft, living texture to what could have been a utilitarian light well. They also tie into the district's broader sustainability goals, which drew in consultants including Wageningen University and The Waste Transformers.

Outside, the roof terraces created by the stepped massing hold raised planters of grasses and shrubs, along with wooden benches on the podium roof. These are modest spaces, but they matter. In a building meant to reverse the logic of a prison, collective outdoor rooms that residents choose to use are a more convincing argument than any facade gesture.

Plans and Drawings

The site plans show the canal-ringed island and the central pedestrian axis, with its bridges, planted courtyards and tree canopies. The floor plans at levels 4, 6 and 9 show a consistent strategy. Apartments are arranged around a central core, and each level opens onto a terrace whose size changes as the volumes step back. The level 6 plan, with its large planted roof terrace, shows the cascade most clearly.

The section and axonometric drawings show the stacking logic: offset gridded cubes sharing a vertical core, with green terrace floors at the base. The diagram sheet is the most revealing drawing in the set. It tests several arrangements of the same offset cubes, which shows that the final massing was chosen from a family of options rather than arrived at as a single fixed form.

Why This Project Matters

The Martin is not a radical building. It is a careful one, and it engages with the site's history through its organization. Turning a prison site into housing could easily have been handled with a plaque and a renaming. Instead, OMA turned openness into a set of concrete requirements. Every unit has a balcony, the base is a glazed lobby facing the main axis, and the stepped massing produces shared terraces. Shared atria let light and greenery into the center of the block.

The broader lesson is about how a single repeated element can carry a large ambition. The aluminum grid and its continuous balconies are standard residential tools, but they are applied here with enough rigor to unify a complicated massing and enough generosity to improve daily life inside. For anyone designing dense housing on sites with difficult histories, The Martin is a useful case: the meaning of a place can change through ordinary, repeatable decisions that put residents first.

The Martin Residential Building by OMA (David Gianotten, Mariano Sagasta), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, completed 2026. Photography by Frans Parthesius and Ossip van Duivenbode, courtesy of OMA.

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