Ichthus Academie
learn • live • relax • work • heal
For one of the departments of the Ichthus College a proposal was made for the interior of a whole floor in the former Ned Lloyd building on the Zalmhaven in Rotterdam, a nondescript office complex near the city centre. Hemmed in on all sides by office and residential blocks, the 70’s complex clad in garish panels is faceless and boring. The building envelope enclosed a floor plan composed of a series of bays interrupted by a veritable obstacle course of service cores and columns.
Maximum energy was spent on creating an inspiring interior as an antidote for the featureless exterior.
Maximum energy was spent on creating an inspiring interior as an antidote for the featureless exterior.
In order to organise the various college spaces within the uninspiring straightjacket luminous walls that linger through the open space of the floor to separate the classrooms from the foyer. Digital prints depicting colourful natural imagery, blown up almost beyond the point of abstraction, wrap the tilted, ribbon-like outer walls of the four classroom clusters.
Circulation space between clusters expands and contracts, their flow broken bij rhythmically by vertical panels of translucent glass illuminated from behind. In weaving the classrooms around the maze of columns and cores, the existing office shell vanished without trace.
In the centre of the floor a sculptural ‘fish’ is placed which contains several functions; the volume contains three pouch-like meeting rooms crowned by a star-spangled ceiling, is at the same time a physical separation between the public space and the administration offices, and its tail tapers off an turns into a comfortable bench.
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