Nederlands Dans Theater @ Domus

The first mayor work built by Office for Metropolitan Architecture is the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague.

Project: Rem Koolhaas, Jeroen Thomas, Willem-Jan Neutelings, Frank Roodbeen, Jaap van Heest, Ron Steiner, Dirk Hendriks, Frans Vogelaar, Wim Kloosterboer, Hans Werlemann, B.O.A. (Victor Mani, Chiel van der Stelt), Petra Blaisse
Structure: Stefan Polonyi (FGR)

Publication Nederlands Dans Theater @ Domus, Magazine for Architecture, Design and Art, Italy, 1 May 1989

Nederlands
Dans
Theater

The earliest recognition of the architectural qualities of Rem Koolhaas and OMA came with the entry for the competition of the enlargement of the Dutch Parliament at The Hague, in 1978.

The favorable reactions from public opinion and Dutch architectural circles were not, however, immediately echoed by concrete design commissions. On the contrary, nearly ten years had to go by before Koolhaas and the Dutch edition of the OMA were to put into practice, in an important building, the architectural ideas until then only outlined in theories, formal research and competition entries on a variety of scales. The official opening of the Dutch Dance Theatre at The Hague therefore marks a major step in the development of the OMA and especially of Rem Koolhaas, who has by now found a specific cultural and professional place in Dutch architectural culture. The chequered development and realization of this project are in any case symptomatic of the structural difficulties which Koolhaas had to overcome before finally getting his first work built. The story of the Dance Theatre begins at the end of the 1950s. The dance company had been forced to abandon its old premises in the historic centre, after the building had been declared unfit for use.

After a number of moves the director of the Dance Theatre asked Koolhaas, in 1980, to design an extension of the existent Circus Theatre at Scheveningen, the Dutch capital’s seaside resort situated a few miles from the historic centre, and temporary home for the Dance Theatre. This theatre was to contain spaces for dance work and rehearsal as well. a new hall for public performances. In the first and second projects for this rebuilding operation Koolhaas insisted on maintaining the existent cupola as the image of the Circus Theatre, and he introduced the theme of “enclosure”. concretized in a wall isolating the building. These projects, whilst playing an important role in the theoretic discussion of Dutch architecture at the beginning of the ’80s, remained a dead letter in that neither The Hague City Council nor the Dutch Ministry of Culture granted the necessary permission and funds for its completion. A radical change in policy, at The Hague, marked by the election of a number of angry young men from the social democrat party to the City Council, started a new phase in the history, of architecture and of the city. The councilor for planning and public works, H. Duyvenstein, approached up-and-coming architects, working outside the structures bureaucratic planning, to tackle and resolve some of the crucial problems of the city’s urban structure.

The beginning of this new urban policy came with the limited competition for the replanning a the Spui quarter in the historic centre. This zone had been the subject of long discussions and projects, one of which was submitted in the early ’70s by Pier Luigi Nervi. It was dominated by the towers of the Foreign Office and Ministry a Justice and was starting to look like an anonymous European city.

Architects W. Quist, C. Weeber and H. Hertzberger drew up a planning scheme and volumetric proposal for the completion f three public buildings (a library, a gymnasium and a theatre) and flats around the ministerial skyscrapers. The final choice fell on the project by C. Weeber who was given the brief to supervise the planning operation. At the beginning of 1984 the City Council decided to make available in the Spui district …be, of building lots which to locate the Dance Theatre, the Concert Hall and the new City Hall for the design of which a competition by invitation was recently won by Richard Meier. The first phase of the cultural complex the Spui has now concluded with the inauguration of the Concert designed by F. van D.g. and P.Vermeulen of the architectural office Van Mourik, of the Hotel Pulman, designed by C. Weeber, and of the Dance Theatre, by Koolhaas. This architectural ensemble now forms a plaza beneath which a parking facility has been built.

After getting off to a bad start, due to structural and architectural difficulties arising from objective problems of joint work between three different architects and the necessity for a radical revision of schemes that had been designed for other situations and programs, there followed a phase of harmony. This concluded with the drafting of an urban design project in which the different architectural themes and idioms could be stated without dissolving into a shapeless mass and anodyne architecture. Koolhaas in any case stuck to his original idea which is expressed in the formal inventions of his undulated roof, in the foyer and in the conical volume of the restaurant marking the borderline between the Dance Theatre and the Concert Hall. Behind the facade and beneath the undulating roof lies a highly particular world.

It is characterized by a sequence of spaces culminating in the hall, in which visual and acoustic aspects played a decisive role in the development of the project. The spatial suite begins with the foyer, celebrated in an entrance and nit place where the play of light and shade, the different heights, materials and colours give the impression of entering a building full of surprises to be discovered. From the foyer, with its diverse dynamic objects that deform the structural box, the staircase, imposing itself as autonomous elements and reinforcing the formal cacophony, leads to the main hall. Het the six gold-coloured acoustic panels, the blue seats in rows amphitheater-style for 1000 persons, and the waves of the roof giving the idea of an indefinite movement by breaking up the static state of the walls, conflict with the classic shape of the stage. Situated next to the hall is the service stack which begins in the cone of the restaurant, the element uniting and marking a radical gap between the architecture of the Concert Hall and that of the Dance Theatre.

The materials, finishings, colours and details accentuate the idea of congestion, chaos and cacophony, whilst confirming the value of an architectural idea in which formal and tectonic diversity and, most of all, movement, taken up from the re-searches of the 1920s avant-garde, perform a determinant role. The front of the stage tower, painted by Madelon Vriesendorp, who has worked with OMA since its foundation, crowns this building. Its architectural and formal sobriety and immoderate richness stand to demonstrate the concrete qualities of an architecture that had previously been displayed only in refined drawings.

From the architects’ report Projects 1 and 2 (by Rem Koolhaas, Jan Voorberg, Stefano de Martino, Willem-Jan Neutelings, Arian Karssenberg, Jeroen Thomas) unite offices, studios, ateliers, lodgings for the dancers and a theatre with a seating capacity of 800 equipped for dance as well as opera. These projects were to have be constructed in Scheveningen, and connected to the site with an existing theatre. Project 1 is designed as a rehearsal facility with an open-air theatre, eventually to be covered with a tent roof. In the second project the hall is covered with a steel roof, the structure of which is based on the sophisticated use of materials common to industrial buildings.

The third project, now completed, is located in an entirely different environment, the civic centre of The Hague. The most important part of this quarter is allocated to (new) governmental offices. The context is dominated by two slabs, the slope of an abandoned project for an inner-city motorway, now to be overbuilt, the main axis towards the houses of parliament, the elected site for the future town hall and a seventeenth century church.

On the site, with a socio-cultural function, the theatre is united with a concert-hall (Van Mourik, architect) and is built on a parking garage which it equally shares with a hotel (Carel Weeber, architect, also supervisor for the area). The fourth component of the site is a public square.

What has been conceived for Scheveningen as a functional machine, decorated with flamboyant exterior elements, in harmony with the vernacular of the bathing resort, becomes in the city centre of The Hague a formal facade revealing almost nothing of its inside. The public spaces within are designed as excavations of the envelope. The hall now has a capacity of 1001 seats.

The foyer of the theatre is located in a 7.0 meter-wide space between the concert-hall and the hall of the theatre, extended under the sloping floor of the latter. In the foyer are a balcony in the form of a half-moon and, on a still higher level, a floating oval satellite Skybar suspended on cables. The roof has a self-supporting structure in a double layer of trapezoid folded sheet steel. The theatre is constructed mainly with a frame of steel beams and girders, using metal cladding with sheet rock covered with stucco, marble and gold foil. There is a special emphasis in the use of colour the interior, whereas the exterior is in shades of black, white, gray and metallic.