Relink: Leiden University

Abstract

The Project is located in Leiden University’s Humanities Campus (Leiden, Netherlands). Specifically, this project is about intervening on two Structuralist buildings, PN van Eyckhof and Matthias de Vrieshof designed by Joop van Stigt in 1982; the brief calls for their regeneration and adaptation in today’s society, while focusing on one of the two clusters. Although the buildings do not fulfil the criteria to be considered as monuments they have a significant value due to the movement they represent, making their preservation an obligation for our generation’s architects.

Starting of through an analysis at the scale of the city, context and buildings, allowed me to understand the architect’s original intentions and investigate which of these were actually realised. Through this analysis I found the architect’s initial ambition of creating an open building that would be linked to its context, to be the most intriguing aspect. Those bold differences between the architect’s ambitions and the realized proposal were also the ones that defined my project’s research question, “How can I re-link the cluster’s buildings with each other, the university as a whole and with the wider context, Leiden and its inhabitants?”.

My intervention’s aim is to fulfil the architect’s ambitions; achieving this aim could be done using two types of interventions, programmatic and architectural. Regarding the Programmatic Interventions, following the tendency of educational facilities to be associated with the professional environment from early stages, the introduction of an entrepreneurial hub to the university, would become an innovation for the University of Leiden, giving a new essence and spirit to it Leiden and engage it with the society of Leiden. A series of well-considered architectural interventions, including the replacement of the original top floor, glazing of the courtyard, introduction of the tower, and others, have resulted to a project which fulfils my initial aims, respects the existing building and is a contemporary translation of van Stigt’s design.

Talking about the value of my proposal for specifically the Humanities faculty and its context, through my proposal my aim is to positively affect the development and regeneration of the university and its context though programmatic and architectural (form & image) alternations, strengthening the Humanities Buildings’ position both in the university and the wider context.

That being said, throughout any decision I took during the design process, my aim was to always respect van Stigt’s ambitions and values in his building and at the same time consider how users currently experience the building and what are their needs. Looking back at my proposal and reflecting to its quality both in programmatic and architectural language terms, I believe that my intention to respectfully adapt my proposal to the original design, and at the same time giving a new essence and revitalizing the historic composition and its context, has been achieved. Through my proposal, I have managed to show that despite being hard to intervene on such historic buildings due to all problems that underlie them, a deep preliminary study, together with concrete reasons for every decision an architect takes considering the values of the existing composition, can lead to innovative ideas and results, showing new ways to intervene on Structuralist monuments