While the West-Port of Amsterdam is undergoing a big transformation to a more sustainable future-oriented industry, 70.000 new homes will be built right at the border of city and industry as part of development project Havenstad. The municipality has an ambition to realize a datacentre of 500MW capacity, which is four times the size of the Zeewolde datacentre.
This project is an attempt to tackle both the spatial as the environmental impact of this industry. Through the research of metabolic energy flows it was found that up to 60% of energy can be recovered from liquid cooled datacentres in the form of waste-heat and by creating decentralized datacentres in public buildings, 65% of Amsterdam could be heated for ‘free’ by datacentre waste heat in 2040. De Centrale is an example of such a decentralized datacentre, within a public indoor swimming pool. Together with a mixed recreational and industrial program it manifests itself as an energyhub at the terrain of the old Hemweg coal plant. The 800 m2 datacentre produces the full heat-demand of the swimming pool, with a surplus which is used to heat the residential area of Havenstad. The landscape around the pool includes a helophyte filtering park, which cleans the harbour water and an urban beach offers a new public space to the city. Within the design, a symbiosis between port and city is established through form, scale, construction, materialization and composition of the façade.