Symbiotic Squares - urban renewal in Hengelo, Netherlands

Architectural Review, The, April, 2001 by Peter Blundell Jones

A small and heavily industrialized town in the Netherlands has received a renewed heart in a comprehensive but economical programme, which provides urban spaces and invigorates the existing fabric with new functions.

Hengelo is a small Dutch town near the German border, and was just a village at a crossroads until the railway came through in the nineteenth century. It then grew as a seat of industry: a mass of factory sheds, tall chimney-stacks and workers' housing, with little to relieve the daily grind. Badly damaged in the Second World War, it was rebuilt on a grid plan mostly at two storeys, with a handful of medium-rise office and apartment blocks dropped in here and there. Like much of Holland, the landscape is flat, and the main feature visible from the air is the broad east-west main railway-line between Germany and Holland. The weak town centre tried to focus on a market place, but by the 1990s this had been given over mostly to use as a car park.

Opportunity for change came with the liberation of the site between market place and railway station due to the demolition of one of Hengelo's largest and oldest factories. At first, the loss made things worse by opening a gaping hole in the urban fabric, but it prompted action. In 1995 a competition was held to repair and retrieve the town centre, and was won by Bolles Wilson. The brief demanded that this be done mainly with commercial elements, including a large department store, shops, offices and some housing. It was not a matter of integrating a new building carefully into a valued historic setting as with their famous library in the centre of Munster (AR February 1994) for the town never had much sense of place or much fabric of value. Rather there was a need to give heart to an increasingly incoherent and low density town, to make sure that when you get off the train at Hengelo there's some there there.

One starting point was the huge underground car park required beneath most of the site, which both provides for customers to the new shops and replaces lost parking in the reclaimed market place. On economic and rational principles this needed to be made with a regular column grid set at 7.8m, which set up a structural module for the whole thing. Unlike '60s architects who would have let the module dominate the forms while ignoring the edges, Bolles Wilson have played off the site shapes against the grid, often using the diagonal in ingenious ways. The result is a truly late twentieth-century expression of plan libre, with basement and ground so different that at first it is hard to see how they fit together. In fact the whole car-parking grid is orientated to Bolles Wilson's new pedestrian arcade linking the market place to the station, which lies directly above the easternmost lane of the car park. All the rest plays against this grid, for the ground level composes itself around quite another set of rules.

At the start of the project, the market place tapered towards its southern end, its south-east corner being terminated by a square six-storey building built in the 1960s with an exposed frame and recessed top floor.

This offered its main facades to north and west, and if it was to remain it needed to be left some breathing space, suggesting a prolongation of the market place to the south-west. The answer was to create a smaller square with one side open to the larger --an urban arrangement compared by Peter Wilson to St Mark's Square in Venice. Opposite the existing block was placed the department store, a deliberately shed-like large-scale building with horizontal facade and big overhanging roof. This makes the west side of the new square. The south side takes the form of a seven-storey block of shops and flats, modest in scale and fenestration to partner its neighbour to the east. Between this and the existing 1960s block, the southernmost corner of the double square opens into a new pedestrian shopping arcade which leads to the station, Bolles Wilson's main idea. To the outer south and west side of the development, a road had to be accommodated to connect the centre of town with an existing underpass beneath the railw ay. Lined with conventional street facades, it has shops at ground level (apart from the west which is a back) and apartments on top. The new block between the western road and the arcade has a ground floor given over to shops, with access to upper apartments at each end by open gallery.

The fabric of the town is relatively horizontal, the roofscape punctuated only by the town-hall and a church spire, both slightly to the north. To give some sense of focus to the double square and make it visible from afar, Bolles Wilson have added a kind of campanile in the form of a modern clock-tower standing exactly on the boundary between new square and old. It has a large digital clock at the top and a glazed kiosk at the bottom to be used as an information and display point. This rhetorical element is partnered by a similar horizontal one: a cigar-like canopy suspended over the pedestrian arcade propped up on skewed legs and advertising 'De Brink', the name of the development. It shelters the arcade and draws attention to it, while the strong form makes a clear sign both from the station and from the square. It certainly works to draw people through, and the offer of real shops on a truly public route makes a nice change from the increasingly ubiquitous interior world of the mall.