The ‘PRO’ in the firm’s name stands for ‘Plan en Ruimtelijke Ontwikkeling’ – Plan and Spatial Development. The firm has shown that it can handle any design commission, including the development of large residential areas in complicated existing settings such as Entrepot-west in Amsterdam’s former docklands (1993) or complete centres of new developments, such as Amersfoort’s Emiclaer (1993). Their work is difficult to place within existing traditions and trends. If it is modern then it is chiefly in the sense of ‘present-day’. PRO do have a style of their own: masses of brick in varying shades of grey, high-grade concrete, stucco and glass. The system and pragmatism reflected in their schemes is offset by ‘luxury’ details such as beechwood, glass brick, glass roofs, awnings, arcades and turrets. Ideally, the firm likes to design the interior and the immediate surroundings of the buildings as well. Their Emiclaer shopping centre is such an Atelier PRO world, down to the paving and street lighting.

Certain forms keep recurring in their work, serpentine forms, strips, arcs, applied in ever-varying combinations. They permit a greater complexity than the classic plot forms such as the perimeter block. What is more, they can serve to underline specific features of the location. The forms are chosen for pragmatic reasons, ‘to get a grip on the narrative,’ as Hans van Beek puts it. But they are then elevated to the level of Name: De Slinger (the serpentine), De Boog (the arc), De Ovaal. The words in retrospect lend the forms meaning and logic. This also implies they cannot be repeated, at least not within the same project, as this would undermine the purpose of naming them.
That Atelier PRO have designed several large higher education complexes within a short span of time is bound up with this approach. The merger of higher education colleges into mega-institutions, some catering for over 10,000 students, demands not only the efficient management of funds and space but also a distinctive architecture. That applies not only to the college as a whole but to its component parts as well, since the amalgamating bodies wish to remain recognizable. The firm’s experience with large ensembles is clearly an asset here. Sizable educational institutions can no longer be accommodated in a single building. They require ensembles of buildings, preferably in symbiosis with the environment: a ‘city within a city’.

The Hague College of Higher Education

Serpentine, Strip, Oval, Triangle – the names of the component buildings of the Haagse Hogeschool (The Hague College of Higher Education) had already penetrated to the signposting by the time it was appropriated. In designing the complex, a merger of fourteen higher education colleges into a single educational institution with 13,000 students and a staff of 1300, Atelier PRO had to contend with two seemingly irreconcilable factors: the need for a clear identity for the five component educational sectors and the fact that their individual programmes scarcely differed. The latter consisted mainly of lecture rooms and corridors, with here and there specialized rooms, studios and workshops. Thus aside from the common facilities, Atelier PRO argued, recognizability had to derive from the location of the respective sectors on the campus rather than the programme. Hence the distinctive forms, which at the same time serve to structure the campus: the enormous eight-storey Slinger which snakes along the road from The Hague’s Hollands Spoor train station to the heart of the campus; the low Strip diagonal to Laakhaven which cuts right through the Slinger; and the Oval containing the main hall, administrative offices and lecture rooms. The Oval is indeed egg-shaped, with at the place of the yolk a massive, free-standing conical auditorium bearing aloft the hall’s glazed roof. This roof, an inverted glass umbrella, has a very fine supporting structure, designed in association with ABT building technology consultants. Every day throngs of students cross this covered forum on their way to the various sectors via the overhead walkways which link the oval with the Slinger at various levels. The triangle of low buildings around the central hall house the other ancillary functions, including the sports halls on a triangular ‘park’, the restaurant in the Strip and the library in the relaxation area between Slinger, Oval and Strip. The forms are perspicuous and instantly recognizable. The clarity is particularly resonant in the interior of the Slinger. The overhead walkways open into wide corridors connected to the floors above and below by narrow stairs. Variations in the width of these corridors and stairs produce diagonal views over several floors. The corridors underline the bipartition in this part of the complex, with the ordinary lecture rooms down the west side behind the supporting concrete walls, and the special teaching areas on the east side behind the coloured Poriso brick partitions between load-bearing columns. This pattern is deliberately interrupted here and there by the multi-storey-height voids of the sector centres (communal areas, reading rooms and areas for teaching staff and management) which are identifiable from the outside by their large windows. Because all specialized areas abut one or other of the sector centres whereas the neutral lecture rooms are farther away, the boundaries between sectors are variable. Through this simple solution Atelier PRO were able to meet another important teaching requirement, the need for flexibility.
Great complexity arises where the basic forms converge, such as where the Oval meets the Strip and the Triangle. The centre of the Economics and Management sector is sited at one such convergence point. From above one looks down on Escher-like vistas amid a crisscross of stairs, corridors, balconies and terraces. Wherever Oval and Triangle meet, spaces and recesses of varying shapes and sizes arise whose ultimate function in college life is hard to predict. On an ordinary school-day there is a pleasant hubbub of sound and movement around the hall. Whether intentional or not, the spatial complexity seems to wed well with the growing need in education for special corners and improvised teaching settings. But here and there this leads to chaotic situations, as in the photocopying areas, the canteens and the corridors, particularly since the daily running, maintenance and cleaning of the college are centrally coordinated. At the design stage it was possible to bring the amalgamating parties into line using the narratives of the Strip, the Slinger and the Oval. But in interior arrangement and use each sector once again goes its own way, witness the proliferation of litter bins, cupboards and chairs. These are all the more intrusive considering the lengths Atelier PRO went to in the design to detail the ambience and furnishings. But in a building like this, one not just subject to use but to over-use, a certain amount of reserve on the part of the designers is decidedly in place.

Laakhaven

The question arises as to who ultimately determines the identity of a building: the designer or the user. With an ensemble of this magnitude this does not only apply to the interior but, given the desired symbiosis with the city, to its surroundings too. The advent of the College with its guaranteed intensive daily use has led the Hague authorities to exploit the complex as a trend-setter for the sweeping urban renewal of the Laakhaven district, once a transshipment area where goods were loaded from train to ship and until recently the desolate rear of Hollands Spoor railway station. In the district’s master plan (also the work of Atelier PRO), the College forms part of an ‘urban compartment’, where, together with the partially retained Laakhaven harbour basins, 100,000 m2 of offices, some 400 dwellings and an underground car park, it is to become a new urban component. It will be accessed by an attractive route, in effect a sequence of urban squares, which penetrates from the station between two office high-rises, over the water, past the Slinger with its plinth of shops and cafe, to the heart of the College campus and then, passing under the Slinger, veers off to the new office centre to the west of it. The route links up with Holland Spoor’s new southern station entrance and the new pedestrian and cycle subway under the station, effecting a direct link with the city centre.
At right angles to this route the urban compartment is accessible to cars via an underground car park, built as a two-storey tunnel under the arm of Laakhaven and the Slinger. It is a singularly lucid and clearly organized subterranean world, with unobstructed parking lanes largely due to the use of V-shaped columns. Within the quay walls, the Laakhaven basins have been converted into a shallow pool from which the car park exits pop up like lanterns. Walkways along and across the water, footbridges, a small park, rows of plane trees, arcades, passages and views through are to give the urban compartment a vibrant, public character. The north side will be bordered by a unbroken wall of offices, sliced through at right angles by tall office slabs which step down in height towards the water. The courtyards thus created are bounded along the water by housing. On the east side, blocks of flats standing on stilts along the water are intended to screen off like a coulisse the now completed wall of housing designed by Geurst and Schulze along Rijswijkseweg. All the non-market related elements have already been realized or will be shortly: the College, the car park, the tunnel and entrance to Hollands Spoor, and the furnishings of the urban compartment. The market-related parties still need a great deal of persuading to join this risky venture. The realized office slabs on the north side have an abandoned and cryptic look without the rest of the projected development. This is particularly true of the fine ‘Poseidon’ tower block at the station exit, a sphinx-like entity with a head, body and hindquarters in different colour brick. This and a virtually identical building (both designed by Kees Christiaanse) are to form the gateway to the area. The housing blocks along the water are likewise waiting for a developer.
The riskiness of the undertaking lies partly in the fact that the goal is not, as it was in the seventies, to forge a symbiosis between educational institute and city predicated on a sense of community principle or a Forum-style ‘neighbourhood idea’. Rather the object here is to effect a marriage of autonomous functions and activities using a detailed composition of buildings and space. It remains doubtful whether a college, however dominant its presence, has much to contribute to a rich urban environment other than the throngs of students who go in and out of the building every day. Atelier PRO have sited the Strip diagonally to Laakhaven, partly with the idea that the liberated belt of land along the water will be widely used by students to sit out in the summer. At the same time, however, this belt is the most isolated part of the compartment, in the sense that it is only used by the College. The compartment is dominated by the Slinger. However inviting this may seem from Hollands Spoor, and however tranquil inside, viewed from the east (and the west) it is a gigantic wall which only then gives a good impression of the sheer size of the College.

Van Hall Institute

Atelier PRO has also recently completed new premises for the Van Hall Institute in Leeuwarden, a college of higher education for environmental, nutritional and agricultural studies, abutting onto the existing secondary Agricultural Training Centre. The brief was more modest and less urbanistically ‘loaded’ than that for the Hague College of Higher Education, a fact that resonates all the way through to the building’s appearance. The institute still caters as before for 3000 students and a staff of 450, with an outdoor programme comprising 10,000 m2 of gardens and glasshouses. The college needing realized on an elongated tract on the edge of Leeuwarden, between a green area to its north containing the river Potmarge and a small residential development to its south. To the west the site is bordered by a trunk road and a monumental church. Once again Atelier PRO resorted to ‘name-forms’ to articulate the design: Arc, Forum, Strip, Wings and Workshops (Hallen).
The Arc, clearly the head of the building, contains the representative functions, but not, as one might expect, the main entrance. This is located in the Forum, off the large round clearing now doubling as a forecourt for the church. On either side of the main entrance with twin accesses on the north and south sides are the audiovisual centre, the auditorium and the canteen. The Strip, with the three free-standing wings at the north end and its succession of technology workshops or Hallen at the south, accommodates the actual teaching area. In contrast to The Hague, there is a greater sense of balance here between the standard lecture rooms and the special teaching spaces so that formal differentiation could be justified on the basis of the programme. The Strip forms the 140-metre-long spine of the teaching zone. A void, its glass elevation extending the full length of the north side of the building, offers a fine view of the gardens, water features and fields. Stacked on the south side are the studios and workshops. The three wings square to the Strip contain lecture rooms and staff rooms; the roof of one wing is primed to receive some of the glasshouses. The Hallen on the south side of the strip house the agricultural machinery, the animal quarters and the laboratories and so have a more industrial character.
One fascinating aspect of the task was that educational training at the College could be reflected in the form, construction, technology and material of the building, turning the building itself into a visual teaching aid. It became a veritable testing ground for the application of ecological inventions, especially water-saving and energy-recycling devices; a further experiment, done in collaboration with the Forestry Commission, was the exclusive use of Dutch-produced timber, especially larch and beech. The unadorned character of the building may also be seen as ecologically friendly, with its visible structure and unworked materials including concrete. Be that as it may, the general public usually has difficulty with the nakedness of modern architecture. Atelier PRO have therefore sought to compensate for this through refinement of design and lavishness of detail. This is best illustrated in the Strip. Despite its great length, it vibrates with life through the many overhead walkways, stairs, galleries, coffee corners and study balconies. The austerity of the Strip is effectively relieved by attaching different corners of the triangular balconies to the wooden columns. Order and informality complement each other well in the Strip. The glass wall of the north elevation and the rooflight beneath the arched roof of the south side generate a pleasant well-lit climate. Prefabricated concrete coexists harmoniously with the timber columns and laminated rafters made from the 1600 larches logged from the production forests of Drenthe.
Atelier PRO have once again shown that they are up to a difficult task. But in The Hague it seems the limits have been reached as to how far a design can influence matters. Not only did their distinctive forms have to keep the merger process going, these had to structure an entire urban district into the bargain. As if conscious of their responsibility, these forms continue to exert a significant influence on planning, but stubbornly refuse to become architecture. In Leeuwarden, their mission accomplished, they modestly stood down and allowed architecture to take the floor. That must have been a liberating experience for Atelier PRO too.