B67

Abstract

In Oxford
and Cambridge, higher education arose around the 13th century and has undergone
major developments. One of the first colleges in Oxford was Balliol College
started as an act of charity in 1260 by the King of Scots, John Balliol, where
Balliol housed poor students in a house rented by him (Jones, n.d.). Over the
years, several colleges have been built, each with its character and identity
and mostly horizontally organised. These colleges are, sometimes, connected by
footbridges but are mainly self-contained complexes. The complexes are
organised out of several courtyards to which university facilities are
attached. The resulting colleges are introverted due to the courtyard-facing
facades that create close street frontages and have little connection with the
public realm. Many campuses continued developing using the traditional layout
and are mostly still segregated from the surrounding city fabric. The
densification of cities necessitates the integration of campuses into the city.
This ensures that cities are open and more accessible and spaces and programmes
of the city and campus can reinforce each other and contribute to challenges
within the society (den Heijer & Curvelo Magdaniel, 2018). As an answer to
the studio brief, the Temporary House of Representatives of The Netherlands in
The Hague was selected as a project site for the new campus. This building is an
obsolete office building that is, due to its function, for many parts closed
for the public. The new campus will accommodate lecture halls, workspaces,
housing and other public functions. These programmes have specific requirements
and dimensions and therefore the building needs to be transformed. However, in
The Hague’s densely built Central Innovation District (CID) there is little
room for a horizontal extension and creating a horizontally oriented campus as
in Oxford. In fact, in the future, the Municipality of The Hague plans to
densify further the CID (Municipality of The Hague, 2021), leaving even less
space for buildings and public spaces. On the other hand, it creates
opportunities for more multi-use high-rise buildings with different types of
public programmes and spaces. Therefore, the campus needs to grow in height
which causes implications for the more “traditional” circulation patterns
between different floors and functions within and around the campus. How can
vertical circulation be created by breaking through the stacked floors as
Musiatowicz (2008) argues? Additionally, at the moment the building of the
Temporary House of Representatives of The Netherlands, colloquially named the
Monkey Rock, is seen as a monotonous closed structuralist building. Although
the building has a distinct identity and is part of “the unity of the
archipelago” (Koolhaas, 1994, p. 296), how can the new campus incorporate the local
identity which could be represented by the kiosk typology of The Hague, which
is now lost in the high-density area?