Point of Inclusion: A Vine-Draped Threshold Where Amsterdam's Locals and International Students Meet

Arriving in a new city rarely happens at the front door. It happens in the gaps: the bench where you watch strangers, the path you walk twice before going in, the room where nobody asks why you are there. Most buildings meant to bring people together skip these gaps and deliver everyone straight into a hall. This proposal treats the gaps as the main event.

Point of Inclusion, by Daria Naumochkina and Anastasiya Sharapova, reinterprets how a flexible space can be organized for interaction between international students and local residents within the urban context of Amsterdam, Netherlands. The project was Shortlisted at Overseas Oasis 2020.

A Pergola That Makes Arrival a Walk Instead of a Door

The entrance sequence starts well before the glass. A long colonnade of slender posts carries a grid of beams overgrown with vines, and the paved path beneath it runs straight toward a fully glazed facade. The posts repeat at close intervals, so a visitor moving forward sees the building framed again and again, approaching it gradually. Windblown grasses press in on both sides, softening the boundary between park and project until it is hard to say where one stops.

Seen from the park, the same structure reads as a light canopy floating over the planting rather than a wall. A single bench sits just outside its edge, an invitation to stop and watch before deciding to enter. That small gesture matters: a newcomer can be present without being committed, and a neighbour passing through can treat the pergola as part of their everyday route.

One Section, Two Speeds: Stepped Landscape Against a Stacked Frame

The key conceptual section explains the strategy in a single cut. On the left, broad steps descend under the pergola, setting a slow, open pace among trees. On the right, the building stacks its floors around a central void where a tree rises through the full height, with occupied levels below ground and a planted roof above. Figures appear on every level, on terraces and steps, so the drawing reads as a continuous route rather than a set of separate rooms.

The restraint of the volume is telling. Against the ornate perimeter blocks drawn faintly behind it, the building stays compact and gridded, letting the landscape carry most of the civic presence. It is a modest frame that gives more room to the outdoor ground than to its own silhouette.

A Courtyard Organized Around a Mound, Not a Monument

At the heart of the plan sits a courtyard whose centrepiece is a low planted mound, a quiet, grassy hump instead of a fountain or sculpture. Pergola beams frame the space on three sides and draw the eye toward the slatted facade beyond. People lie on the paving, sit against the edges and cluster in pairs. Nothing tells them where to go, and that is the point. The mound offers a shared focus without dictating use, which suits a space intended to host whatever a mixed community brings to it.

Reading Rooms That Look Through a Tree and Down a Gallery

Inside, the calm continues. Timber columns order a reading room where open shelving forms partitions instead of walls, and a glass enclosure holds a tree at the centre of the floor. Readers at long tables can see across, through and past one another. The visual openness lets a person study alone while staying aware of others, an easy middle state between isolation and forced interaction.

Along the edge, a concrete walkway with a thin railing runs beside a slatted timber screen that filters the city outside. From this gallery, one looks down onto the reading tables below. Movement becomes a form of observation: you pass the activity, register who is there, and choose when to join. The building's real circulation is also its social gradient.

Why This Project Matters

Point of Inclusion argues that integration is a spatial sequence rather than a programme label. By stretching the approach under a vine-covered pergola, centring the courtyard on a soft planted mound and opening the interiors with shelving instead of walls, the design gives both newcomers and residents permission to linger at the edge before stepping in.

For anyone designing shared civic space, the lesson is to design the hesitation. Benches outside the threshold, galleries above the action and rooms you can see into before entering make a building easier to belong to. The proposal's quiet, grey-and-timber palette lets people, rendered in orange throughout, become the most visible element, which is exactly where a space for community should put its emphasis.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Daria Naumochkina, Anastasiya Sharapova

Competition and award

Shortlisted, Overseas Oasis 2020

Location

Amsterdam, Netherlands

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