Rijkswaterstaat Zeeland

Edited by R. D. Kushner

The new office building for Rijkswaterstaat Zeeland, the (Department of Water Management and Transport), in the Netherlands, is a prominent building sited on the periphery of the medieval town of Middelburg.

The scale and materials of the long rectilinear glass building contrast sharply with the medieval town, providing a thought-provoking juxtaposition between old and new. The contrast in scale is a direct translation of the Dutch landscape: small scale medieval villages in an uneven grid of fields and orchards, contrasting with the long straight lines, distant views, and wide horizons of the new polders and waterways. The building borrows from these natural and man-made geographies as it imposes its cadence of long modern lines onto the natural landscape.

The building program is contained in one long, stretched volume sited close to the water, where the building acts as a front to the periphery of the town while benefiting from the views along the channel into the surrounding countryside. The building is lifted up of the ground plane, and cars are parked underneath, leaving a portion of the site open to use as a public park. This recovered public space, that would otherwise have been a paved parking lot, is situated along the water and allows the building site to functionally engage the landscape. Another benefit of such an arrangement is that elements of the building that would normally be on the ground floor, are raised up onto a grand piano nobile, offering views over the water, the park, and the town beyond.

The glass building façade enables light and views to filter through allowing the RWS to soften its technocratic image as passers-by are invited to engage this literal and figural transparency by gazing into and through the building. Since the building lies in a park area along the water, and is oriented facing the south, the working spaces have constant contact with nature and receive ample natural light. The building serves as a meeting point for its mostly outdoor working personnel, and offers an enlightening atmosphere to stimulate the communication between them.

The building houses 500 employees and contains a crisis centre, with emergency power backup for the computer infrastructure needed to manage all the sluice-gates in the province of Zeeland (including the Delta works), in case of an emergency. The building also contains the state archives, a restaurant, a conference centre an a fitness centre. The ground floor is partially open to the public, while the rest of the building is strictly secured. By utilizing flexible construction methods and modular installation components many divisions of the interior are possible. Careful planning, and the flexibility of the generic structural grid, also allows the building itself to be divided into separate rental units, without compromising the security of the RWS office.

Existing techniques were used in an innovative way to make the building energy efficient, without interfering with the economic feasibility of construction. The building can save and reuse energy, by making use of passive sun energy, climate facades, atria, storage of cold and heat in the soil, and use of active concrete, with building heating, cooling and ventilation systems. The result, is a building which is approximately 40% to 50% more energy efficient than a normal office building. Sustainable materials and techniques are also used to further reduce the ecological footprint of the building.

For additional photos of this project, click on the thumbnails below.