Nagele: a new polder village on CIAM principles

The village of Nagele is located in the Noordoostpolder and is one of the 10 new villages built on new land between 1949 and 1956. It was actually one of the last villages to be completed and has a distinctly different feel to the other new villages in the polder. The first reason is obvious,: it is the only village built according to modernist principles, all the other villages were built in the traditionalist Delft School. The second reason is that Nagele is the only village not built specifically for agricultural personnel.

The new village of Nagele was to be built southwest of the central town directly west of the former island of Schokland. It was not named after a former village lost to the Zuiderzee, but for a small island called de Nagel (literally: the nail) that lay between Urk and Schokland. This Nagel was swallowed by the sea at the end of the Middle Ages. The new village was designed during the 1950s by a team of modernist architects including Gerrit Rietveld, Aldo van Eyck, Cornelis van Eesteren and the landscape architect Mien Ruys. All members of the design team were part of the functionalist movement  "De 8 and Opbouw" or affiliated to CIAM. Based on the first sketches by Rietveld, Van Eesteren designed the layout of the village along an orthogonal grid, with a large open space at the heart, residential clusters around this and a wide windbreak planted with trees around the whole.

The architects favoured terraces with flat roofs and without ornaments to emphasise the pure forms within the green envelop. A spatial separation of functions underlies the layout, with through traffic being lead not though but along the village. The central green hosts the communal facilities like churches and schools and is surrounded by  a circular street that gives access to the houses. The residential clusters are all arranged around a central green meant for communal use, with small gardens behind the dwellings. Much attention was paid to providing a green structure of trees to counteract the openness of the surrounding polderland.

A schematic representation of Nagele with a central green and an envelope of trees surrounding 7 clusters of houses. The through routes go past the village. The canal however goes right through the heart of Nagele linking it to the polder beyond and the nearby industrial estate.

Originally the designs consisted of three churches, two schools, a cluster of shops, a cemetery, sporting grounds and 300 dwellings. The designs were built in adjusted form with over 400 dwellings in 7 clusters around the central green with the churches and schools and the shops in a ribbon in the west. Unlike other villages in the Noordoostpolder, people not related to agriculture could rent a house in Nagele. Thus this modernist model village became populated with farmhands and commuters. The village was designed with the motorcar in mind, whilst other traditionalist villages were designed for cycling. At present 1939 people live here.

As an example of a modernist model village the whole of Nagele had heritage status. Sadly this only seems to apply to the housing and not to the planting and open spaces as most of the detailed planting by Ruys has disappeared.

The orthogonal layout of Nagele is very clear as is the clustering of the several types of houses around public gardens. Most of the housing is arranged in terraced rows with some detached and semidetached housing in the edges making this an example of what is colloquially knows as a village with a gilded edge. At the centre we find the public amenities: church (c), school (s), medical post (m) and a community hall (h). On both sides of this now derelict building we find the shops and even a small supermarket. On the other side of the main road we find the cemetery (+) and playing fields (p) for hockey, football and tennis.