Rehabilitation Center Groot Klimmendaal

Cor Wagenaar, Noor Mens

Description

Winner of many awards, this rehabilitation center represents the first phase of a project that will ultimately replace the seven cluttered, low-rise pavilions, forming a somewhat dispersed campus, by three larger buildings; the area now occupied by the existing pavilions will be returned to nature. Supported by a forest of beams, the top floor of Koen van Velsen’s 120 m long clinic hovers high above the entrance, anticipating the planned extension. 3,400 rehabilitants will be treated here each year. The rehabilitation therapies offered here focus on children and on patients suffering from respiratory problems. All therapeutic facilities are grouped together in this building; the additional building volumes will accommodate a school and staff housing. The ground floor is designed as an open space that contains several blocks with semi-public functions: a sports hall, a swimming pool, a theater and the restaurant. When not in use, these are open to the public. The glass walls offer a view onto the woods in which the building appears to hide itself. Painted dark brown, a series of V-shaped steel beams is left exposed, contrasting with the right angles of the floors, the balustrades, the subtle grid of the windows and the lightwells. Using bright colors – dark blue, light green, yellow, orange – as sometimes rather dominant accents against a palette of light beige background tints, the architecture emphasizes the interplay of planes and lines intersecting at right angles. The colors produce a lively, light atmosphere without evoking an overly playful impression.

Seemingly hovering above an abyss where the terrain slopes, what appear to be five glass-encased vitrines protrude into the woods, forming a dented wall that makes the border between building and nature fluid, an effect enhanced by the reflections in the glass. The special functions are located on the ground floor and the level above. Consultancy rooms are situated on the second floor; the third is the domain of the inpatients. Here we find 60 bedrooms overlooking the landscape, four salons where patients and visitors can meet and a central area with four lightwells. The roof is reserved for a Ronald McDonald house where parents can stay the night. By saturating the building with visual connections between the floors (using patios, lightwells and staircases) and from the floors to the surroundings, and by using unusually wide corridors as part of the sequence of spaces on each floor, Koen van Velsen creates the suggestion of a palimpsest of overlaid trajectories that invite people to take part in this play.