Kasbah quads - architect Mecanoo designs new faculty building for the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands

Architectural Review, The, June, 1996 by Connie Van Cleef

Mecanoo's new faculty building for the University of Utrecht is a synthesis of traditional collegiate and kasbah forms, dissected and reassembled in an invigorating modern idiom.

Located in the Uithof, Utrecht's university campus, the new Faculty of Economics and Management is a curious synthesis of kasbah-collegiate: compact, low level and organised around a series of distinct, trapezoidal courtyards. The adoption of an enclosed, urban form was encouraged by the campus' OMA-engineered masterplan, but is also related to the enduring notion that tranquillity and introspection are inherently conducive to cerebral activity.

Like most college buildings, the new faculty is made up of two basic types of space - larger lecture halls and smaller cellular classrooms. Here, the faculty's quartet of lecture halls is housed in a transparent, rectangular structure that defines the building's northern edge. Within this glazed carapace, each lecture space is isolated in a hermetic, autonomous container, clad in extravagantly contrasting materials. Vivid, metallic blue panelling is juxtaposed with cream-coloured stucco; untreated high-tensile steel is set against rustic strips of western red cedar. These volumes protrude surreally through the roof plane; their strangely textured and coloured bulks are also highly visible from the outside. At most times of day, but particularly when classes are changing, the interior is animated by the activity of students.

The long glazed volume is the dominant element in the overall composition. Apart from the lecture halls, it also contains an interstitial congress zone of communal facilities such as library, mediatheque, student cafeteria and internal streets that lead off to the numerous smaller classroom and seminar rooms. The narrow three-storey voids of the internal streets are slung with ramps and staircases; places of interaction as much as circulation. The cellular teaching spaces are strung in jagged lines, like beads in a necklace, around the three contrasting kasbah quads. Computer labs and administration spaces occupy the east and west sides, with offices arranged along the southern perimeter.

As with the lecture hall volumes, each of these internal courtyards is imbued with a different character. The largest central court is filled with rampant stalks of bamboo and is traversed at first floor level by steel grid footbridges that afford a bracing, elevated passage through its mock jungle terrain. Steel 'bamboo' stems are integrated into the supporting structure. This lush enclave is flanked by a smaller water and rock filled court, which provides a long vista across the surrounding polder landscape through a glazed connecting passage on the south side of the building. The third enclosure is a Zen garden, a meditation courtyard, with a contemplative arrangement of gravel, shingle, rocks, and two strategically positioned trees. The surrounding walls are faced with gridded panels of western red cedar; other external surface treatments include aluminium louvres around the water court and fine mesh grilles around the central bamboo quad. The building resonates with unexpected polarities - between rough and refined, metal and timber, complexity and simplicity, solid and void. It also has an engaging muscularity, acting as an armature for both studiousness and sociability, capable of absorbing and nurturing the extremes of student life. Mecanoo have dissected a traditional college form and exhilaratingly reassembled it to provide an inspiring contemporary model for a place of learning.