The Ministry of Social Welfare is on the south-east edge, opposite and some distance from the beautiful old town of The Hague, of a soulless area of dull office buildings. Oblique view of faceted towers of front elevation overlooking tram and train tracks ‘During the 60’s London, and soon perhaps elsewhere in Europe too, began to be invaded by the highly serviced, homeostatic nowheres of empty shelland-core office buildings’Ĭompounding its significance the building was not built by a mega-rich corporate client wanting a conspicuously extravagant symbol of confidence in the future but for a conservative civil service bureaucracy (that sets and oversees standards for others but was rather resistant to embodying any high ideals itself) on a standard stringent governmental budget. In offering so much choice, and because the semi- public spaces are not just visually impressive but also very sensitively shaped as generators of social interaction (and so source of much of that choice), the building is far more important as an exemplary model for the future than are either the Lloyds or Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank buildings- despite much lower standards of servicing and finishes. Flexibility goes hand in hand with fixity so that the building offers far more choice than any conventional arrangement- in part because all the options for social interchange provoked by the building will remain untouched while all those of office layout are exploited. Solid and substantial structure provides a stable yet rich, hierarchic yet egalitarian, framework of spatial and social relationships within which many forms of office and departmental layout are possible, both initially and through perpetual change. Architecture then is reduced to fashioning the flimsy fictions of the facades.Īgainst such basically American imports that serve largely as electronic switching stations for global finance the Friendly Castle, as Hertz berger calls his latest building, stands as a bastion of resistance, a demonstrably viable antithesis. In these there are no rooms or any other appreciable form of space, only temporary corrals of partitions sandwiched between acres of floors and ceilings that conceal all the crucial engineering of structure and services. If Herman Herzberger’s headquarters for Centraal Beheer summed up in extreme form the egalitarian ideals of the ’60s, the decade in which it was conceived, then his new Ministry of Social Welfare in The Hague stands in opposition to the place-eroding internationalist pressures of the ’80s, the decade over which its design was developed.ĭuring this decade London, and soon perhaps elsewhere in Europe too, began to be invaded by the highly serviced, homeostatic nowheres of empty shell-and-core office buildings. Originally published in AR March 1991, this piece was republished online in Januray 2016 #Overloop train license#A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.The Ministry of Social Welfare stands in opposition to the placeeroding internationalist pressures of the ’80s, the decade over which its design was developed. #Overloop train software#Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. CC BY-SA 3.0 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 true true
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |