Campus landscape - Utrecht University's Educatorium project

Architectural Review, The, March, 1999 by Connie Van Cleef

On Utrecht University's campus, Rem Koolhaas creates a remarkable stage set for the daily drama of student life.

The Educatorium project marks the first phase in a long term masterplan by OMA to modernize and urbanize the Utrecht University campus to the east of the city. Developed over the last 14 years, OMA's masterplan aims to transform the 1960s site from a soulless commuter enclave, to a campus community based on the American model, with student housing, library, research facilities and a recognizable social life. Among those invited to design new buildings are Mecanoo, Wiel Arets and Neutelings Riedijk, whose idiosyncratic geophysics faculty (p58) terminates the campus' north-west corner.

Its invented name intended to suggest a factory of learning, the Educatorium houses two lecture theatres, three examination halls, and a large refectory, which also functions as an informal study area and performance venue. These facilities are shared by the university's 14 faculties and many research institutes, creating an important new centre of rendezvous and exchange.

The Educatorium occupies a corner site and abuts an existing long, low building at its east end. Like a languidly undulating wave, it rolls away from its neighbour and swells out to the west. The ground floor rises as a continuous concrete plane through the building and rolls back to create a prominent bulge along the west facade. Defying conventional Cartesian geometry, this folded plane is the Educatorium's main organizational device, enclosing lecture theatres above and the refectory below. Examination halls are contained in a more conventional two-storey box joined to the lecture theatres by a large central vestibule. Around these large, static volumes, two intersecting corridors define cruciform axes of primary circulation.

The Educatorium acts as an extension of the campus landscape, synthesizing in microcosm aspects of university life - learning, socializing, being tested and so on - in a continuous, overlapping experience. Glass walls expose a dynamic interior realm of ramps, stairs and promenading spaces, animated by teeming hordes of students perpetually milling around the building.

Koolhaas' architecture of warped planes, layering and expressed structure contrives to engineer a sense of spatial diversity. The refectory, for instance, varies in character from intimate enclaves tucked under the sloping ground plane, to a soaring luminous volume enclosed by angular glass walls. The larger of the two lecture theatres is opened up along its north edge to a view of surrounding botanical gardens, like an amphitheatre set in the landscape. Two walls, one glazed and one lined with plywood panels gently curve round to envelop the horseshoe-shaped space. By contrast, the smaller blind box lecture theatre on the south side resembles an underground bunker, with raw concrete walls, kaleidoscopic seating and a curious ovoid projection suite clad in strips of polished timber.

The Educatorium is perhaps OMA's most conventionally successful big building to date. Unlike the Grand Palais at Euralille (AR December 1994), the folding slab used to sculpture and unify space retains the uncompromised clarity of the original paper model. Yet as some critics have pointed out, despite its carefully choreographed promenade architecturale and Corbusian antecedents, the building is like a labyrinthine and slightly inhospitable sculpture, more attuned to the eye and less accommodating of quotidian human needs, such as ledges, benches or recesses that might encourage casual encounters. The predominantly industrial materials also lack a certain warmth and tactility. However, there can be no disputing Koolhaas' capacity for formal innovation, and the extraordinary stage he creates for the spectacle of student life.

Architect OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Rotterdam

Project team Rem Koolhaas, Christophe Cornubert, Gary Bates, Luc Veeger, Clement Gillet, Richard Eelman, Michel Melenhorst, Jacques Vink, Gaudi Houdaya, Enno Stemerding, Frans Blok, Henrik Valeur, Boukje Trenning

Photographs Christian Richters