Description

Clad entirely in white, glossy ceramic tiles reminiscent of industrial interiors, The Platform in the Dutch city of Amersfoort has already become something of a local talking point since its completion in 2019. It is, after all, the shiny white building that has been perched atop an old warehouse built by the toothpaste manufacturer Prodent – a visual pun that is not lost on its architects, Amsterdam-based studio Space Encounters. “People started to say how it shines white like your teeth, and when people anecdote your work it means it stays in their mind” says founding partner Gijs Baks.

Providing 5,270 square metres of office space across two floors, The Platform is the latest addition to the ambitious, ongoing transformation of Amersfoort’s post-industrial Oliemolenkwartier or ‘Oil Mill Quarter’ by Dutch developer Schipper Bosch. Given the bold name of De Nieuwe Stad – meaning ‘The New City’ – this development follows in the footsteps of many across Europe, transforming once industrial areas into neighbourhoods of small creative industries and start-ups. But rather than a wholesale redevelopment, the process here has been deliberately slower. It was Prodent who first developed this once-rural area just northeast of Amersfoort’s railway station and alongside the river Eem in the 1930s, covering it with some 13,000 square metres of factories and warehouses that grew throughout the 1940s as the company branched out into shoeshine, shampoo and deodorant.

As with many Dutch cities, the compactness of Amersfoort sees many subsequent forms of development jostling alongside one another, and this industrial pocket soon became a slightly out-of-place island in a sea of modern development that began in 1970s with Amersfoort’s recognition as a “city for urban growth”. Housing developments appeared to the North, and directly next to the Oliemolenkwartier the area known as Eemplein was completely redeveloped to become a cultural destination in 2014, with residential and cultural buildings by a roster of well-known firms, among them Neutelings Riedijk, Meccanoo and Dick Gameren.

Amid this development, in 2011 Prodent moved its production facilities to France, and while Eemplein blossomed the neighbouring Olimolenkwartier was left largely abandoned. As Baks describes, “it was an abandoned field of asphalt. If you wanted to sell your car you would put it there with a sign in the window.” Located as it was directly in the path of the city’s expansion, it was of ripe for a redevelopment of its own. Schipper Bosh, well versed in industrial sites such as this, took on the challenge. Today the site is still occupied by cars, only they are electric cars making use of the charging points surrounding the Olliemolenhof or Oil Mill Court – a new circular plaza at the heart of a 2013 masterplan by Rotterdam-based practice Zones Urbaines Sensibles (ZUS) which The Platform now overlooks.

ZUS’ masterplan was based around a core concept of “permanent temporality”, envisioning the site as one that would avoid a “tabula rasa” approach (seen at Eemplein) in favour of something more incremental and reactive. Space Encounters were invited in 2017 to propose how new buildings could be worked into this plan, and this is an ongoing exploration that other firms will likely continue into the future. “This may not be the most efficient way of bringing the area forward,” explains Baks, “but it is very dedicated and thorough – it’s letting creativity about the area flow and in certain periods when the energies and politics are right you can bring things forward.”

The Platform can be seen as one of these alignments of energies. Schipper Bosch’s in-house creative team had already been exploring ways in which the site’s existing structures could be developed – by building over, through or atop them. A certain aesthetic was already defined when in 2018 Schipper Bosch relocated their project offices to the site, giving a new lease of life to a series of metal pavilions originally designed by Robbrecht en Daem for Documenta IX and refitted by De Kort Van Schaik (also an indication of Schipper Bosch’s dedication to interesting architects and architecture). The Prodent warehouse atop which Space Encounters were tasked with building was already occupied – half by the music venue FLUOR and half by online supermarket Picnic – and a combination of both practically not wanting to disrupt these functions and what Baks calls the “conceptual clarity” of building the new directly atop the old guided the approach.

Sitting just 80 cm clear of the top of the existing warehouse, the two-storey red steel structure straddles it like a table, formed by a series of seven 34-metre-wide trusses supported by columns at either end. Requiring no wet concrete works and in theory able to be unbuilt and re-located, The Platform takes forward the meeting of temporary and permanent that ZUS had defined – at once a bold and contemporary addition but one that leaves the old completed untouched. There is a conceptual beauty to this 80 cm gap, although this too was a practical requirement, giving space to the installations that help ventilate the venue below. While Schipper Bosch were keen for this gap to remain open – allowing those at the right height to see straight through – it was closed-off with black cladding to prevent it becoming a breeding ground for pigeons and rats.

The new volume sits almost flush with the warehouse, extending outwards three metres at on the front elevation to create an arcade-like space at ground level and a covered balcony for the new office, creating an outdoor space for workers in dialogue with the square below finished with a pastel-pink balcony and Fraké wood window-frames that soften the otherwise industrial-looking facade. While the trusses avoided any columns needing to enter the existing structure, they also enabled the interior to be kept as open as possible, organised around a central planted courtyard onto which the offices look with contrasting wood-panelled elevations.

This interior is split into three – an office for consultancy TwynstraGudde as well an area of rentable desks and another office space that is still being fitted-out. These “no-nonsense” spaces are configured as a series of movable acoustic screens and colour-coded carpets that allow the space to be easily reconfigured – the result of workshops with the tenants that determined what Baks calls an “active platform” would be most effective. Based on the studio’s revisits to the space, it is an approach that has been embraced.

Save for the aligned rhythms of the tile-clad legs of the new and the concrete facade of the old, this is a meeting of contrasts, and consciously so. Space Encounters cite the 1960s Italian practice Superstudio as a reference, not only for the aesthetic of their famous grid which has informed the tiled exterior, but for what Baks calls the consideration of architecture as “an urban phenomenon”. Through this lens, The Platform becomes like Superstudio’s famous Continuous Monument collages made real in miniature, a slightly surreal new structure stretching not across the globe but across a single warehouse.

But this reference isn’t pushed too far, and nor should it be. Crucial to Baks is being able to make these slightly unexpected transformations “within the boundaries of everyday life”. It is a constant preoccupation for the studio, seen also in the ‘Boring Furniture’ collection of elevated basics which has been used to furnish the interior of The Platform. A subtle example of this is the three-metre concrete staircase leading up to The Platform, which unceremoniously slams into the Oliemolenhof in front. Again, this was a meeting of contextual research (many of the surrounding buildings meet the ground in a similar way) and conceptual thinking with a high level of pragmatism, its steepness defined by an area around the plaza that needed to be kept clear for emergency vehicles.

It is in the subtle – even “banal” as Baks says – touches such as this that The Platform’s charm lies, deftly marrying the ordinary and the heroic and setting a structural precedent that can easily be imagined springing up all over The New City.

Originally published in Bauwelt 11.2020, pp. 38-41, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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