Soul searching

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By Christoph Grafe

The perfect internal peace of Sanaa’s arts centre in Almere outside Amsterdam leaves the building somehow lifeless.

Almere was the last of the new towns built in the Netherlands’ polders, drained land claimed from the IJsselmeer in the fifties and sixties. A mere 20-minute train ride from Amsterdam Central Station it is also the most successful; its 175,000 inhabitants are for the most part traditional working-class Amsterdammers who left the Dutch capital in the 1970s in search of a suburban terrace house with a garden.
It is in Almere’s shopping streets that ethnographers are more likely to find evidence for the survival of the traditional Amsterdam accent than in the mostly gentrified popular quarters of the inner city. Over the last decade the descendants of this first influx have been joined by the new middle class of migrants, predominantly from Holland’s former colony Surinam, whose ideal lifestyle turns out to be very similar to their fellow citizens. Both groups appear to get on remarkably well, robust Dutch bonhomie mingling with Asian respectability and Creole expressiveness. In its suburban unpretentiousness, and supported by the shared aspirations of its denizens for comfortable living, Almere appears to provide a happy example of the co-existence of different ethnic groups.
The qualities of the “New town of the affluent society”, as Almere has been dubbed, are not necessarily obvious to the general Dutch public or even the inhabitants itself. With its extensive low-rise neighbourhoods Almere has become synonymous with suburban bliss and boredom, the emptiness of the polder corresponding with an absence of culture.
This is the received perception, and whether it is correct or not, it is one that local politicians understandably wish to counter. The project for a radical extension of the 1980s town centre with a scheme for shops and dwellings above a giant car park designed by OMA stems from the ambition to change the image of the city — or rather to provide it with one. Almere was to make a “quantum leap” from its provincialism to becoming a metropolitan core.
The relationship with Amsterdam was formalised in a covenant proposing the development of a “double city”. It is also reflected in developing the town into a destination for commerce and culture, the theatre-cum-arts-centre constructed on the edge of the new centre representing the latter. The location of the building was laid down in the OMA master plan. Situated on a reclaimed peninsula in the artificial lake that lies south of the town centre, the cultural centre is exposed to the wide polder landscape and was to contribute to the skyline the local politicians so desired.
Cultural provision

“Almere has become synonymous with suburban bliss and boredom”

The brief for the building combines two established programmes of cultural provision: It contains a conventional municipal theatre used by the professional groups that tour the country and as a base for three local companies; while the largest part of the building is occupied by what used to be a “centre for creative development” and is now referred to as “arts centre”. It offers courses and workshops on music, visual arts, dance and computer animation, and needed spaces for them.
The practices invited for the competition (MVRDV, Neutelings Riedijk, Wiel Arets and Daniel Libeskind) reflected the city’s ambitions to realise a public building attracting at least national attention. Rem Koolhaas introduced Sanaa (Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa and their associates), which initially teamed up with a Dutch firm specialising in theatre planning. Sanaa refrained from exploiting the imagery of metropolitan complexity that lent the project of the Dutch competitors an air of contemporary fun centres, nor did it play the card of expressionist gesturing with which Daniel Libeskind proposed to enrich the silhouette of Almere. In its winning design, the arts centre is a one-storey building, with three rectangular volumes of increasing size emerging from it. With its strictly orthogonal layout and rudimentary composition, the design commands the surrounding lake and forms an antidote to the collage city geometry of the shopping centre.
Internally the design defied any sense of hierarchy and distribution, organising the programme like a typesetting case. Cells of different sizes were juxtaposed, one leading into another. There was no distinction between spaces for specific activities and those for circulation. A series of patios suggested the experience of walking around would be one of silently and politely wandering from room to room, taking in views of the enclosed gardens and changing landscape of the water outside. Boundaries would be ambiguous, glass walls allowing and reflecting views, other partitions reduced to wafer-thin sheets of steel.

Intriguing as it must have appeared, the proposal of a building with rooms but no corridors would have required a consensus of extraordinary circumspection and politesse. In Holland, where these behavioural codes are not generally followed, the organisational concept was not entirely practical. The completed building, in any case, has a grid of perfectly ordinary corridors, which appear in the official brochure either unnamed or as “foyers”.
Dutch building practice may not always excel in precision and delicacy. But attempts in this direction here were made to an astonishing degree. The load-bearing walls are executed in 40mm-thick steel sheets, layers of Agglofoam sandwiched between plasterboard providing acoustic insulation. The internal surfaces appear smooth and white and rise from the light grey resin floor unmediated, no skirtings in sight. The smoothness of the walls continues in every detail; doorframes are set flush into the walls, ceilings are plastered or covered in translucent white polyurethane sheets lit from above.
Within the grid of passages and rooms, the three halls form distinct exceptions. The smallest is absorbed into the arts centre, the largest is the auditorium of the municipal theatre and the medium-sized is shared by both institutions as well as hosting the odd reception. Inside the main theatre, white gives way to dark perforated steel lining the outer surfaces. The theatre is a horseshoe auditorium, but on a rectangular plan, with three balconies overlooking stalls and stage.
“The contrast between the controlled interior and the outside world is dramatic”

Rare 3D incident

A steel circular stair winding its way up to the third floor and accessing the balconies provides a rare three-dimensional incident in one of the two tall foyers, while the other features the only moment where white is replaced by polychromy in the form of a large mural, a bold and colourful deviation from the absence of colour elsewhere in the building.
The strategy of extreme repression of material differentiation may not be new. But as an approach to handling a public programme it has not lost its stark appeal. Perambulation around the arts centre, at least in its newly finished state, is definitely extraordinary, and the contrast between the controlled interior and the outside world dramatic, even when the sky does not show artistic cloud formations. The views along the “foyers” to the water or, across mirroring glass sheets, into the courtyards make for delicious photogenic effects.
It is in this form, in the silent admiration of a building populated by human beings diligently exercising their keyboards or setting up a watercolour, or with no-one around, that the Almere arts centre is most credible. It is a building conceived with concentration, and one imposing it. That may not be a bad thing, but it is also a startling departure from the ethos of critical self-exploration that has been the guiding principle of creative education in Holland since the 1960s.
In 1967 the architect Frank van Klingeren designed a cultural centre in another new town in the polders, the “Meerpaal” at Dronten some 20km from Almere. Combining a theatre, café and library with a day market, the Meerpaal explicitly invited users to examine different atmospheres and activities. “Hindrance” and “de-clotting”, the dissolution of functional hierarchies, demanded a constant and active adjustment and allowed unpredicted encounters. The playing/learning/ living landscape served as a stage for discovery and experimentation.
Forty years later, at Almere, this sense of enquiry brought about by a radical elimination of physical boundaries has found its equally radical counter position. In the new arts centre the partitions may be thin, but they are no less effective for that. The experimentation across disciplines or the interaction between professionals and amateurs is neatly institutionalised, if it is indeed intended. And the foyer, which is used by both institutions and might be felt to belong to the general public as well, evokes reminiscences of an art hotel lobby complete with Arne Jacobsen furniture.
Sanaa’s arts centre may provide an appropriate, and beautiful, décor for serious artistic exercise, and should be praised for this. Yet its repression of just about everything that might disturb this peace and calm, also turns it into something of a very exquisite cadaver and the culture represented by it into a highly controlled, yet ultimately lifeless affair.
Project team
- Architect Sanaa, Structural engineer Sasaki Structural Consultants, M&E engineer Technical Management BV, Physics/acoustics DHV Consultant, Theatre consultant Janssen & Motosugi



Related files

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• Floor plan
• Section through audtioriums

• Fonte: BDonline