B67

Abstract

In Oxford and Cambridge, higher education arose around the 13th century and has undergone major developments. One of the first colleges in Oxford was Balliol College started
as an act of charity in 1260 by the King of Scots, John Balliol, where Balliol housed poor students in a house rented by him (Jones, n.d.). Over the years, several colleges have
been built, each with its character and identity and mostly horizontally organised. These colleges are, sometimes, connected by footbridges but are mainly self-contained complexes.
The complexes are organised out of several courtyards to which university facilities are attached. The resulting colleges are introverted due to the courtyard-facing facades
that create close street frontages and have little connection with the public realm. Many campuses continued developing using the traditional layout and are mostly still segregated
from the surrounding city fabric. The densification of cities necessitates the integration of campuses into the city. This ensures that cities are open and more accessible and spaces
and programmes of the city and campus can reinforce each other and contribute to challenges within the society (den Heijer & Curvelo Magdaniel, 2018).
As an answer to the studio brief, the Temporary House of Representatives of The Netherlands in The Hague was selected as a project site for the new campus. This building is
an obsolete office building that is, due to its function, for many parts closed for the public. The new campus will accommodate lecture halls, workspaces, housing and other public
functions. These programmes have specific requirements and dimensions and therefore the building needs to be transformed. However, in The Hague’s densely built Central Innovation
District (CID) there is little room for a horizontal extension and creating a horizontally oriented campus as in Oxford. In fact, in the future, the Municipality of The Hague plans
to densify further the CID (Municipality of The Hague, 2021), leaving even less space for buildings and public spaces. On the other hand, it creates opportunities for more multi-use
high-rise buildings with different types of public programmes and spaces. Therefore, the campus needs to grow in height which causes implications for the more “traditional” circulation
patterns between different floors and functions within and around the campus. How can vertical circulation be created by breaking through the stacked floors as Musiatowicz
(2008) argues?
Additionally, at the moment the building of the Temporary House of Representatives of The Netherlands, colloquially named the Monkey Rock, is seen as a monotonous closed
structuralist building. Although the building has a distinct identity and is part of “the unity of the archipelago” (Koolhaas, 1994, p. 296), how can the new campus incorporate the
local identity which could be represented by the kiosk typology of The Hague, which is now lost in the high-density area?