This project explores the concept of an urban approach to campus design. where the campus is integrated into the urban life of a city, as opposed to traditional Anglo-Saxon learning style (Weber, 2018), where students learn in an isolated machine, often located in the outskirts of a city, to gain knowledge and then enter the real world.

With this project the campus is introduced in the dense city centre of The Hague. At this location there is no site left to build. This brings the challenge of expansion while dealing with existing resources. Verticality might be the obvious answer, yet verticality brings its own new problems of vertical isolation, vertical travel times and only a small contact area (the plinth) with the public realm. The risk of a mono-functional monolithic approach to building, overrepresented in the location area, has to be avoided in order to create a campus that is truly interacting with city life and the public realm.

The form of learning is also getting rethought with this project. The design explores learning as a way of enhancing creativity, freedom, intuition and multiplicity as opposed to the more traditional platonic approach of the one, the analogues, the similar and the negative as mentioned by Deleuze (1994).