The Münster Library was BOLLES+WILSON’s first major public commission. After more than ten years it remains near the top of Germany’s ‘library-user-ranking-list’. A verification not only of functionality but also of the attention to detail, to spatial multiplicity and to the ambience and atmosphere within.

The complexities of the overall building form are derived from internal organisation and from a careful re-constitution of the fragmented context. A new pedestrian street on the axis of the nearby Lamberti Church divides the not inconsiderable mass of the Library. This fissure in the library volume is closed with folded screens (copper outside, acoustically absorbing perforated wood panels within).

A transparent entrance zone (café, newspaper salon) leads via an information supermarket to the main information desk on the connecting bridge. This in turn is adjacent to book stacks in the ship-like outer volume. The atmosphere is quiet, studious. Books line the outer curved wall, a dramatic stair leads down through a 22 m void to the basement media library, which connects in turn to the courtyard facing children’s library and back up to the entrance zone. Up to four thousand users enter the Münster Library on one day.

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Münster City Library – Update 2010
With a newly painted facade and new automatic check out and 24-hour return automat the Münster City Library in its 18th year remains near the top of the German public library ranking list.

The reflective surface of the ‘dark green glazed’ brick animates a monolithic self-focusing form. An ambiguous surface alternating between the brilliance of the sky or the depths of black shadow. Mass is also the subject, a single building block in the urban fabric. A block further animated by the vectorial trajectory of the adjacent railway which instigates a façade curve and lean. A relatively simple slippage whose justification lies not in its formal but its tectonic resolution. Each brick course slips out one cm from the one supporting it. For the train traveller the WLV building is an event of a few seconds, its deflection perhaps only the effect of speed, its roof perhaps only temporarily hovering.

The three floors and 7.000 sqm of offices house a branch of local government that deals with the administration of psychiatric services. Shops on the ground and rooftop canteen-restaurant complete the sandwich. A specified planning module of 1.625 m results in a deep precast concrete fin on each axis, visible structure in unpainted concrete defining a window zone for heating, cable canals and glare blinds. From inside window frames disappear behind fins, to the south sun screens extend the internal ceiling line beyond the window. Systematised cellular offices are animated by contextual deflexions in the overall plan form, resulting in serpentine office strips, floating service islands, the ‘elastic plan’. Not high but low-tech is here and in the entire building thematizing, the simple, the well made, the long lasting.

The 1990-93 shiny aluminum shed was the first of three big-box warehouse buildings built successively side by side to store and distribute furniture for the ever-expanding chain of RS + Yellow Shops. As well as this home base BOLLES+WILSON built for the same company shops/outlets in Münster, Hannover, Munich and Berlin.

The dimensions and form of the 1993 RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 1 were prescribed by the ruins of a half-built industrial structure. The problem was to economically clad this given form.

The skin of corrugated aluminum has been seen as a reference to Australian wool sheds, a typology here projected to a length of 120 m. It landed like a UFO in its fragmented peripheral context. At the time B+W were propagating such large self-evident forms (see Technologyhof Münster 1993) to anchor and give scale to the fragmentation of ubiquitous post-industrial Eurolandschaft Fields.

The critical detail for RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 1 was the façade section, two intersecting plates of shiny metal. Avoiding a capping plate as well as regular downpipes, that would compromise such a pure extended surface, runoff water from the barrel-vaulted roof courses down the inside surface of the upper façade panel to be delivered in turn by the lower façade panel into a pebble drain at ground level.

The rear end of this super-shed housed the office of the company owner, this subsequently moved to the spectacular Waterscape rooftop of RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 2 built directly beside RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 1. A third adjacent big-box was to be capped by the client’s rooftop villa (RS+Yellow Distribution – Phase 3) but his tragic death meant that it was completed as meeting rooms, standing in another infinity pool.

The Spuimarkt is a permeable block, it hosts the life of the city (tides and eddies of shoppers), it leads Bioscoop and other leisure seekers dramatically upward, and perches them in grand foyers, outlook windows, privileged vantages. The Pathé cinema foyer is a Piranesian space, its stairs flow dramatically upward, they cross, they hover. Just arriving at one of the nine cinemas (2,270 seats) is a cinematic experience – along the way some of the best views in Den Haag.

A richly textured brick facade gives unity and dignity to the whole block; the tactility of the rotated and projecting bricks is comparable to a tweed jacket, its hand-made quality both abstract and traditional. Spuimarkt’s sculptured corporal autonomy is carefully dovetailed into the wider context, mediating between the Bijenkorf and the City Hall to form a trilogy of major urban statements. The building’s varying scales respond to the surrounding context, the grand Grote Marktstraat facade steps down behind to the more intimate street scale of Gedempte Gracht. The lower Pathé cinema entrance reflects the height of the traditional houses it faces.

The sinuous roof silhouette, moulded around the cinema within, is like a topographic landform; an anchoring that gives measure and scale to the complex Den Haag skyline.