completion
2004
project team
Snelder architecten
photography
Luuk Kramer & Jeroen Musch
location
Kees Boekelaan, Bilthoven
client
Werkplaats children's community
new construction of a school community for secondary education HAVO/VWO with 1,400 pupils
Especially for growing children, it can be annoying to be permanently surrounded by well-meaning, reasonable adults – teachers, parents – who have the best intentions for you, and who, with all their understanding and empathy, know how to stifle any tendency to recalcitrance. A school building that caters too much to your world of experience is also not necessarily what you are looking for when you are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
Therefore, certainly at first glance, the building of the Werkplaats does not look like a school. In fact, it does not look like anything else. This has a lot to do with the exceptional character of the Werkplaats, where there is no classroom education. As a result, this school building does not have the usual stacking of identical classrooms along a corridor. It is a combination of different volumes and functions and of rooms that flow into each other.
Because of its versatility, the Werkplaats does not evoke a uniform image; it manifests itself differently in every direction. The fact that there is no real front or an unmissable main entrance fits in perfectly with this.
