BRINK CENTER – HENGELO
TYPOLOGY: Masterplan
COUNTRY: The Netherlands
CITY: Hengelo
YEAR: 1998
COMPETITION: 1995
CLIENT: ING VASTGOED
PARTNER: Bureau Boukunde, Rotterdam
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters, BOLLES+WILSON
BOLLES+WILSON won the competition with a choreographed ensemble of heterogeneous objects:
- A shopping passage with housing above
- A department store (Vroom & Dreesmann)
- A Klok Tower – which anchors both the BRINK ensemble and the Hengelo market square
digital klok – market day
THE SHORT LIFE OF A DIGITAL KLOK:
The BRINK campanile (Klok) forms a triangle with city hall + church towers. After 10 years the Klok came down with digital Alzheimer's. BOLLES+WILSON were asked for an avatar. The gold angel (local artist) blowing a raspberry in the direction of Enschede survived.
The market square has now undergone green washing, also the klok tower – we hope!!
(on the right – the condemned V&D)
Loddenheide Water Purification Plant
TYPOLOGY: Technical
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Munster
YEAR: 2021
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters, © BOLLES+WILSON
40 Years of Water Research – 20 years of Water Pumping
The 2001 Loddenheide Water Filtration Plant is almost BOLLES+WILSON’s smallest building. It has for the last 20 years been cleaning and filtering road runoff before it lands in the re-absorption pond of the Loddenheide Business Park. The pond itself is a re-naturalizing success, now a bird sanctuary for countless water foul. The glazed vitrine of the pump house now stands serenely in winter snow or spring blossom. Its machines turn two Archimedes Screw Pumps, aerating the water before splashing into a circular filtration tank. The rectangular plan geometry of the first is set against the circular form of the second. A line of poplar trees, now fully grown, bisects these two fundamental geometries. For those inexperienced at reading metaphoric content into infrastructural equipment the fences surrounding the two machines come with subtext – although the supergraphic H2O on the fence mesh is not readable when approached front on, only when seen in the oblique is it there to underline the theme of ‘Water’.
The Business Park was at the outset renamed Freedom Park by the Dalai Lama, then visiting Münster. The Dalai Lama Commemoration Stone stands 120 meters away from the pumping facilities – just follow the line of poplars. It is certainly BOLLES+WILSON’s smallest work. To read its text one must walk three times around the dark green stone. We like to believe that the rainy day inauguration photo documents the Dalai Lama gleefully asking Münsters lady Mayor – ‘Is it really a BOLLES+WILSON design’.
BOLLES+WILSON water research began in 1976 with Peter Wilson’s Iconic Water House. In 2018 the watery trajectory continued with the second warehouse for RS+Yellow both with ‘Infinity Pool’ roofs.
WLV Office Building
TYPOLOGY: Office
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Münster
YEAR: 1995
COMPETITION: 1992, First prize
GFA: 7.200 sqm
CLIENT: WLV
AWARDS: German Architecture Award 1996, commendation
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters
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.
Moebelum
TYPOLOGY: Retail
COUNTRY: Germany
CITY: Munich
YEAR: 2016
GFA EXISTING: 4.047 sqm
GFA NEW: 755 sqm
CLIENT: Möbelum Zentral GmbH
PHOTOS: © Florian Holzherr
Möbelum furniture outlet – a new facade for an existing industrial building/furniture showroom.
The stacked cassettes of the display facade integrate existing office windows.
Spuimarkt
TYPOLOGY: Shopping // Retail, Leisure, Cultural
COUNTRY: The Netherlands
CITY: The Hague
YEAR: 2008
Masterplan 1997
Design Commercial Block 2005-2007
GFA: 36.400 sqm
CLIENT: ING Vastgoed, The Hague; Pathé Theatres B.V.
COLLABORATOR: Bureau Bouwkunde (facilitating architect)
AWARDS: Shopping Centre of the Year NL 2009
PHOTOS: © Christian Richters
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.
