Heritage impact assessment of H-schools in Amsterdam: Slotermeer school as case study

This report presents the results of a research on Amsterdam H-schools in New-West. H-schools are amongst the buildings with high cultural value and three of them are municipal monuments. The research has an objective to explore the cultural significance of this type of schools by text analysis of the inscription texts of the three monumental H-schools and further, assess the impact of a recent intervention on the cultural significance of Slotermeer school by implementing the suggested method of ICOMOS (ICOMOS, 2011).
From this research it is concluded that, urban design of the area and attributes regarding the urban context, like the role of the school in the urban context, has the most mentioned values in the inscription texts. Furthermore, assessing the impact of an intervention that has recently occurred in Slotermeer school showed that approximately 17% of all the attributes in Slotermeer school altered after building a new exterior addition and most of the changes happened on the attributes related with urban design of the school. This intervention has led to put a new exterior addition next to the old building and the analysis revealed that windows and generally transparent surfaces are the most important part of the building that has changed, because it has an effect on several values.
Therefore, it is recommended that heritage management parties provide a clear overview of the attributes of the cultural value in H-schools. Therefore, architects can use this overview in order to understand “what” needs to be preserved and “where” the most valuable attributes of the building is located. This overview can also help the parties in charge of heritage preservation in assessing the impact of any change on the cultural significance of the H-schools.