As far as school extensions go, a cantilevered, crystalline, timber-clad volume supported by a bright red truss and accessed by a 15-m-wide flight of stairs would strike a foreign note in most ears. However, the addition to the Geert Groote College - a Waldorf secondary school located on the leafy southern edge of Amsterdam - does not feel out of place.
Unlike the ‘old’ section of the school, built in the 1990s - where deviation from the right angle was a dogma - the new annexe, designed by Search, achieved its final form through a series of contextual cues, architectural ambitions, municipal concessions and programmatic requirements.
‘The entrance to the school was a narrow stairway that we brought closer to the street - with a little nod to Hertzberger,’ says project architect Marijn Mees, who attended the school as a youngster. Mees and I are walking up the deep-stepped stairs, picking our way through clusters of loitering students.
Inside the school, a new, glazed entrance hall, which doubles as a cafeteria, sits above a half-sunken gymnasium belonging to the original structure and facilitates a gradual transition from the street to the heart of the building. Even though the upper floors are organized in a typologically conventional manner, they are replete with architectural quirks, such as the cantilever containing small stepped lecture rooms, a sculptural stair that snakes in front of a large triangular window overlooking the street, and a corridor that widens and bends. Art classrooms occupy the top floor, with its ceiling of bare corrugated steel. A sawtooth roof completes the picture. In this school, no two spaces are alike.
Rather than causing damage, the less-than-generous budget allocated to schools - always a sore spot for Dutch architects – allowed the architects to work with industrial, rough-around-the-edges finishes. ‘The building with all its idiosyncrasies reflects the school’s curriculum, which encourages students to discover themselves and their place in the world,’ Mees concludes.
