Media monitor: an official building, the seat of the Netherlands state broadcasting censors, shows how what could be a dreadfully bureaucratic institution can be humanized

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2003 by Connie van Cleef

Older readers may remember Hilversum etched on the dials of Bakelite wireless sets, along with other exotic locales--Luxembourg, Moscow, Monte Carlo et al--in the pioneering days of early radio. Hilversum is now the Netherlands media capital and home to numerous broadcasting corporations whose activities are monitored by a national watchdog agency, the stern sounding Commissariat for the Media. Though its name suggests faceless state bureaucrats housed in glum Stalinist offices, the reality is rather different. The Dutch media police occupy a bright, permeable, low-rise block on a woodland campus that could, at first glance, be mistaken for a fashionable gallery or some kind of cultural centre.

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Paradoxically, for a building concerned with technology and electronic artifice, its relationship with the corporeal, natural world is especially intimate. A chunky, cantilevered canopy projects over the entrance, with both new and existing trees projecting through cut out sections, so that nature appears part of the architecture, the trunks like gnarled, arboreal columns. This theme is reprised throughout the building with a series of acacia-planted internal patios carved out of its low-slung mass, bringing daylight and views into the deep plan. An external skin of clear glass and sleek corrugated aluminium reflects changing patterns as light filters through the surrounding foliage. From the conference suites, corridors and meeting rooms, nature never seems far away, brought into play as a seasonally changing backdrop to office life.

Designed by Koen van Velsen, who also has his offices in Hilversum, the new building joins the ranks of slightly outre local projects generated by the presence of media companies. Hilversum's Media Park can boast at least two ironically wacky contributions by acronym-loving funsters MVRDV (the VPRO headquarters, AR March 1999, and the RVU building), but van Velsen's scheme is more thoughtful and restrained, as befits its role as the sober media monitor. Symbolically, the authority headquarters are located outside the park proper, which is now enclosed by a fence installed in the more security conscious national climate following the murder of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn last year. Van Velsen exploits the gently sloping topography, positioning his building lengthways along the site so it steps up gradually over 2m from the cantilevered entrance. The double-height entrance hall is a luminous box enclosed in walls of clear glass that dematerialize the boundary between inside and out. Apart from being a powerful formal gesture, the canopy also shelters a small car park and, this being the Netherlands, the ubiquitous bicycle racks.

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Office accommodation is compactly arranged in tight blocks, around the internal patios. Principal circulation routes are placed on the perimeter, with two corridors running along the long edges of the rectangular footprint. Almost domestic in scale, the landscaped patios can be used by workers for breaks, meetings and general social interaction. In contrast to the lightweight aluminium and glass external skin, the walls around the patios are made of brick painted Mediterranean white and embellished with Mondrian-esque planes of red, blue and yellow to lift the spirits. The same approach extends to the inside, with flashes of colour applied at intervals to walls, providing visual incident and points of orientation. Coloured foil on the glass skin adds a further kaleidoscopic dimension. Apart from the usual cellular offices and meeting rooms, the building houses a series of viewing suites, where broadcasts are monitored, and a court-like chamber where hearings are held and broadcasters called to account. Yet the seriousness of the brief is offset by whimsical details, such as the collection of boulders used as seats for watching television in the entrance lobby.

This project reflects van Velsen's flair for transforming unpromising building types into complex, arresting architecture. An earlier scheme in the centre of Rotterdam (AR May 1998) elevates the spatially mundane, introverted form of the modern multiplex cinema into the centrepiece of a new public square, with cinemas and promenading spaces wrapped up in a corrugated translucent skin. Here, the serious but necessary business of policing the Dutch broadcasting media is conducted in a boldly conceived building that responds imaginatively to its tranquil setting, but is still capable of holding its own within a wider campus ensemble. Moreover, through the use of space, light, colour and reinterpretation of archetypal forms such as modestly scaled internal courtyards, it manages to humanize and civilize workplace life. All this is achieved without resorting to the gestural posturing and theorizing characteristic of much of the current Dutch scene. Instead, van Velsen's architecture speaks lyrically and clearly for itself.