Cuyptuin, Roof Top Blues in Amsterdam

A few days ago I was visited by a housing inspector. He told me that my green tower was an illegal building which didn’t fit the formal destination ‘garden’. Today a formal letter arrived which tells me I have a building stop and will be fined 5000 euro for every day that I will continue.

When I was working on the green tower I was visited by an housing-inspector of the city council who was interested in the project I was working on. I gave him all the information he liked to have. We also had a nice juridical dispute about whetter building the greentower and the pergola needs the posession of a building license. We both agreed that this should not be the case for a garden on the ground floor. But we differed in opinion on the question whetter a roof garden is also legally spoken a garden. We really had a hilarious discussion. The official destination of the roof(garden) is ‘garden’. The definition of the term garden in the destination plan allthough is that wide that it can contain every building, no matter what size, you like to build. The inspector was exhaustively explaining me what the enlightening ideas of the legislator where to let stone buildings fit under the destination ‘garden’ whereas a roof garden shouldn’t be able fit the destination. So I wasn’t that wondered anymore when I found a formal document on my doormat a few days later. The document told me that I had a building stop on the creation of a ‘roof garden’ and it fines me 5000 euro for every day I will continue.