Haagse Hogeschool (University of Prof. Education)

Narratives

Architect Narrative

1. Strategic intervention
Large scale provision of facilities can ensure, in a single stroke, a substantial stimulus to the development of the city.
A good example of this way of upgrading an urban area is the building of a large school-complex in a former harbour and industrial area that fell into decline after the disappearance of these functions. The school became a strategic intervention to put new life into this area.
The specific function of the school, the provision of education, and the facilities will attract many people to this part of the city. This will contribute in many different ways to the social and economic developments of the city.

2. School as a city
The design of the building plays an important role in the usefulness and appearance of the institution. The composition of the building is based on the city’s planning vision of the whole area.
The most important reason for this urban integration is the desire to give a human scale to the large volume of the buildings (12,000 students and 1,200 personnel). That’s why the school is not designed as just one building but as an assemblage of volumes. This puts enormous demands on the internal organisation and logistics. The network of the access structure of the complex shows similarities to that of a city.

3. A collage
The school is configured as an assemblage of ‘teaching wings’ reaching out from a central core that also houses the service unit. This oval-shaped core is the spatial, functional and symbolic hub of the extensive complex.
The education given at the school is clustered in five sectors. As these have to cope with wildly fluctuating numbers of students, the physical territories of these sectors are able to expand and contract accordingly. Each sector has a centre where sector-specific teaching- and staff-rooms are concentrated. Around it are arranged such non-sector-specific spaces as classrooms and teachers’ common rooms, which are neutral, and can be used by any sector (though of course expanding one sector is inevitably at the expense of another). Furthermore, the two elongated wings contain flexible space to accommodate future expansion (or contraction).

4. Hierarchy
The school has a hierarchical access structure. In the central core, the thousands of students, teachers and other staff join one of the five ‘flows’ leading to the various sector centres. These flows, aided by an ‘urban fabric’ of internal squares, main roads, side streets, alleys, footbridges and stairs, steadily exfoliate into a finely meshed labyrinth of pedestrian routes. The elongated upper storeys of teaching wings are diagonally incised by rectilinear cascades of stairs. Just like in a normal city you’re able to take main routes, to cut off routes or just walk along without having a destination.

5. Safety
As the school grounds are also crossed by public cycle paths and pedestrian routes, a large part of the horizontal pedestrian traffic is lifted up to the first storey. Taken up in the ground floor ‘plinth’ of the teaching wings are shops, cafe’s, restaurants and spaces for commercial services. A move to ensure safety in the public open space by interweaving the university into its surroundings.

6. Controllable
The design as a collage of smaller volumes rather than one large volume and the integration in the urban surroundings make the school more controllable and the area as a whole more liveable.