Faculty club, Tilburg
Inspired by Bedaux
TILBURG (NL) - On a picturesque green site on the edge of the 18th-century 'Oude Warande' park, one of the few intact star-shaped forests in the Netherlands, Shift Architecture+Urbanism has designed a Faculty Club for the University of Tilburg. The building is intended as a meeting and conference place for staff and guests of the university.
A few hundred metres from the club is the university's main building, dating from 1962 and designed by the well-known Tilburg architect Jos. Bedaux (1910 – 1989). Shift's project architects, Harm Timmermans and Pieter Heymans, were strongly influenced by Bedaux's restrained style of architecture. Like the main building, the new club has a solid, horizontal form and stone cladding. And also like Bedaux's building, the new pavilion is detailed in such a way that it appears to float free of the ground.
Interestingly, both Bedaux's and Timmermans' fathers were building contractors, with the result that both architects were quite familiar the finer points of construction, which is evident here in the carefully executed detailing. A lot of the building services have been integrated so that the clean overall image is nowhere spoiled by elements like rainwater pipes.
The 500 m2 building contains a restaurant for 80 people, a kitchen, a lounge, two separate conference rooms and storage and plant rooms. In two places, fully glazed spacious terraces have been carved out of the mass. The mandatory ramp is also contained within the main volume and thus hidden from view.
The simple, powerful design, in combination with chic materials and a meticulous execution, delivers a pure, spatially lucid and very elegant building. An architecture with at least as many good qualities as Bedaux's buildings.
Learning |
Emiel Lamers
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