Heart of the Hague.

A grand civic gesture and an elegant mega-structure in one project, this combination of city hall and library is a harmony of systems/masterfully integrated into the city fabric, urban space and natural patterns of movement.

Richard Meier summarised his largest project to date by saying: 'I look forward to the atrium functioning as the heart of the city.'(1)

As the culmination of a series of recent urban buildings in northern Europe (AR December 1994 pp58-62; AR June 1995 pp38-46; April 1995 pp22-37), this project is again founded within the site plan - an analysis of the existing city fabric, its geometry and pathways.(2) But in this case a vast 12-storey mega-structure of City Hall offices has been made the subject of a tapering perimeter plan that occupies an entire urban city-block, creating a voided centre - the citizens' hall or atrium. This overall form is terminated at its main south-western interface with the Spui in a rotating mass that contains the city library, forming the main entrance plaza to the City Hall. This is in response both to the Nieuwe Kerk and the Spuiplein - the 'culture square' precinct of the Hague that includes the Koolhaas Netherlands Dance Theatre (AR September 1988 pp32-40). At the opposite north-eastern end of the site, a further secondary entrance plaza is captured in the terminal arm of commercial office space. The two entry plazas thus recognise both the historic core in the south-west and the city centre in the north-east, while the wedge-shaped perimeter wrap of offices unites the 10-degree shift in the city grids that are resolved for the first time at this point within Meier's site plan. Movement as an organising device is central to the project - the City Hall is now an integral part of moving through the city itself, with its plazas and the atrium.

As with Meier's Stadthaus in Ulm (opened in 1993, AR April 1993 pp22-25) The Hague complex represents the resolution of an extended history of both unrealised projects and subsequent urban decay.(3) The seventeenth-century port and trading district lost its economic significance with the removal of maritime business to Laakhavens at the turn of this century, leaving in its wake an impoverished urban condition, while the city itself also lacked a visible centre, despite notable places such as the Groenmarkt or the Voorhout within its existing fabric.

In the 1980s the establishment on the Spui of the Netherlands Dance Theatre and the adjacent Hotel Mercure signalled a point of change. But it was the brilliant initiative of Alderman Adri Duivesteijn in 1986 that combined the previously separate functions of both City Hall and Library on to the single site, resulting in the subsequent architectural competition won by Richard Meier and taken forward in 1987.

Meier accepted the need for dialogue and revision, and the library has undergone change in its emphasis and form, but the principal characteristics of the project have been remarkably durable. The finished building, opened in September 1995 by Queen Beatrix, is not only the largest, but in the light of the astringent budget, the most refined achievement within Meier's programme of public buildings to date.

The Hague project is a grand civic gesture and an elegant mega-structure in one project containing a public space of spectacular scale. It also establishes Richard Meier as a civic architect of international stature, capable of delivering a new form of urban order - a creator of the public realm. This creation is essentially very direct and simple, related not just to the city but to the climate - the visible city centre is the people's atrium, a sheltered celebration of democracy, space and light.

The great public space of the Hague Atrium clearly has European precedents, for instance in the Milan Galleria or in the scale of the piazza San Marco in Venice, to which it approximates. Meier has also cited his own local parallels: 'the Berlage Beurs building in Amsterdam, with its wonderful toplit space, shows that for the Dutch it is a familiar way of making an interior space for the public, flanked by offices around. What makes the city hall atrium unique is its scale.'(4)

The Hague Atrium is surrounded at ground level, both on the facades of the Kalvermarkt and the Turfmarkt, by lettable spaces for shops, boutiques and cafes. The whole form is lifted on pilotis that establish a grand two-storey order at ground level. This is repeated again at roof level in the form of a colonnaded loft. The atrium volume is crossed by two tiers of aerial bridges - one long and narrow, the other wider and short, resulting from the extended wedge form plan. These bridges also locate the interior elevators and form busy nodes within the granite paved space. The bridges are a set-piece example of the great care that has been lavished on the refinement of form, structure and detail. The continuity of the atrium space is enriched by these interventions, whose finesse can almost go unnoticed in this vast architectural ensemble. The same quality of refinement applies to other elements such as window mullions, panel joints, handrails and especially to staircases. Throughout, on a low budget, Meier has lifted the standard details of an office building to a higher level: 'an architecturally splendid Meier could be built for the same price per square metre as any anonymous office monster somewhere on the edge of the city.'(5)

Within the space of the atrium, two other main forms occur. Adjacent to the main entrance from the Spuiplein is located the embedded circular domain of the council chamber with the splendid 'political terrace' on its roof - a deck for receptions and parties overlooking the atrium volume. At the diagonally opposite south-eastern corner, the part-solid/part-open promenade staircase to the wedding hall is situated, and this space also echoes the semicircular geometry of its counterpart. Externally, the two further semicircles of library and commercial office atrium contain the extremities of the site plan. Otherwise, the strictly rectilinear geometry of the project is a calm background for the life of the building and its teeming population and the formation of trapezoidal interventions occurs naturally from the site profiles within this geometrical framework.

Light has been a central principle and preoccupation of Meier's work. As Meier says: 'Light gives life to the activity in the interior of the city hall. The light in Holland is totally different from the light in New York, Los Angeles or even Barcelona. One sees a different colour of light, a different perception of light. When you look at the Dutch landscape paintings, you see that the sky is an enormous part of the painting. It has to do with the flatness of the land. The presence and colour of the sky is quite different from that of Southern Europe or America.

'What amazed me was the greyness of the days. The clouds in The Hague are incredible. When the sun comes through the clouds it is often like a beautiful painting. The natural light in the city hall is a reflection of that light and you experience it as you move through the city hall.

'There are many grey and rainy days in Holland. Thus the atrium is a covered space that can be used all year around. It is, in a sense, a covered outdoor space. In this space one can experience rock concerts, lectures, demonstrations, dances and other activities.'(6)

The Library and the City Hall offices both respond to another of Meier's central principles - the zoning of public and private uses. The Library is particularly transparent and publicly accessible at ground level, and includes a reading cafe. At this level it also shares the street frontage with the re-housed Hulshoff furniture store. As it rises, with escalator transportation banks, the control tightens and the inner floors open on to a magnificent private four-storey library atrium facing the City Hall entrance plaza. The profusion of views from space to space and the play of transparency is especially intense at this point. The roof levels incorporate paved terraces and the ensemble is capped by the Haages Salon. The private offices occur at the high levels in a rectilinear protrusion from the main cylinder of the library. The library interiors are furnished with modest but impressively scaled custom-built furniture generally of beech and white laminate. There is space for expansion within the floor area provision.

The City Hall offices are conventional in form, with a limited measure of open-planning. All office workers have a window area and views outwards, or inwards to the atrium. The City Hall atrium serves many purposes including that of registering passports and driving licenses - this activity is conducted in the open and Meier resisted proposals for bullet-proof glass enclosures, insisting on the expression of open democracy. More private consultations take place in the contained offices.

The transparency of the design means that both visitors in the atrium and officials in their offices are visible to one another, and in their journeys across the bridges and in the glazed lifts within the atrium. The Council Chamber itself is open to the atrium via a big window.

In the tradition of the great 1930s functionalist project of Josef Havlicek and Karel Honzik for the Pensions Institute in Prague, or Alvar Aalto's Pensions Institute in Helsinki, Richard Meier's Hague Town Hall embodies a similar spirit of progressive, functionalist social architecture. The provision on every level for the public and visitors in the main public spaces is both remarkable and exemplary. For the staff and occupants there is car and bicycle parking below ground and impressive canteen facilities on the penthouse floor above the handsome offices.

Meier's architecture is preoccupied with light, space and its existence in whiteness. In this case the technology of the fabric and the environment of the atrium are of particular interest. The detail design of the building fabric and its structure incorporate measures to handle rainwater and reduce staining. The aluminium plate cladding is designed to extremely fine dimensional tolerances and both the cladding and glass have to be washed at regular intervals, inside and out, in order to fulfil the contractual guarantees of the supplier with regard to exposure, dirt and salt in the marine environment.

Similarly, the control of daylight, heat gain and air movement within the atrium has been carefully engineered, including the use of airlocks related to public access,(7) the use of E-glass in the atrium roof to avoid heat gain and heating coils below the glazed roof to avoid cold-drop in various environmental conditions, all coupled with variable natural ventilation and cooling.

The whole ensemble has a simple unity, an example of Kahn's 'harmony of systems'. Overriding this is a sense of related types: the parallel of the City Hall with Brinkman and Van der Vlugt's canonical Van Nelle Factory at Rotterdam of 1927 is a much quoted example. The intensely repetitive facades, rotational terminal forms and the use of flying bridges are all elements common to both projects, but related to different uses. However, it is also possible to find all these elements within Meier's own work, over a very long period, and the development and refinement of his repertoire is an equally likely source, even if the City Hall arrangement evokes some contextual relationship with Van Nelle. Meier's unrealised project for Renault in Paris, 1981, is a particularly notable precedent for the City Hall, as is the Siemens office and laboratory complex at Munich, 1985. But ultimately what makes the City Hall belong to The Hague is not about style at all, but rather its masterly integration into the substance of the city fabric, urban space and natural patterns of movement. The atrium is deeply contextual, expressing both the climate and, crucially, the community itself.

In his final remarks at The Hague, during the process of the City Hall inauguration, Richard Meier paid tribute again to Dutch painting: 'I have had a lifelong fascination with Dutch art, and as I look at the light filling the atrium today, I am thinking particularly about the Old Masters - van Ruisdael, de Witte, Hals and Rembrandt - whose paintings have been an inspiration throughout my career. These artists were above all concerned with exploring illumination, not only as a visual occurrence, but as an emotional and even spiritual phenomenon. The great Dutch painters found, through light, a form of communication beyond language and, therefore, timeless.'

1 From a recent appreciation, prepared for the inauguration of the City Hall and Library in The Hague, and quoted in Fred Feddes' interview with Richard Meier - 'Representation and the making of space and light'. Stadrhuis/Bibliotheek, The City Hall and Library Complex, by Richard Meier in The Hague, NAi Publishers, 1995, pp19.

2 See Richard Meier Architect Vol. 2, Rizzoli, 1991, pp196, for an assessment of the urban site plans of the Spui district of the Hague.

3 Victor Freijser in his essay 'The City Hall as a pivot of urban Renewal' records the history of the Spui district of the Hague. Stadthuis/Bibliotheek. The City Hall and Library Complex, by Richard Meier in The Hague, NAi Publishers, 1995, pp33-39.

4 Fred Feddes, op. cit.

5 Ed Melet in his essay 'The Atrium, livable climate and technology' describes the environmental and constructional technology of the project, op. cit. pp59-65.

6 Fred Feddes, op. cit.

7 Ed Melet, op. cit.