Festival dell'architettura

Je maintiendrai [I'll keep] the continuist motto of the royal dutch house for centuries has perfectly suited to the nature of a substantially conservative city as The Hague. Closed between the sand dunes of the coast and the internal network of channels that innervate the districts of three-storey houses, The Hague has developed at the intersection of the axes represented by the Prinsengracht-Grotemarkt and Spui, near the Binnenhof, the seat of national Parliament.

In the most recent post-war period, however, the city has seen the sum of many and often incongruous proposals to reorganize urban inherited much planning lacks from nineteenth century as a messy process of growth. Many of the large-scale projects concern the persistence of ministry offices or on the crucial role of Den Haag Centraal hub, the main railway station. This infrastructure represents, from the beginning of '900, an attractor and, at the same time, the greatest constraint on urban growth. In 1908, Berlage try to overcome this barrier in his plan of expansion, but even if he set the problem anyway he not opened to solutions. After almost forty years of inaction Willem Marinus Dudok, chief architect of the city between 1946 and 1950, reconsiders the issue that is taken inaugurating but tensions between opposing design factions, modernist and traditionalist, in a sequence of aborted plans and partial solutions. Political will, legislative inertia and local conflicts have accompanied the history of urban Spui until the '70s but sanctioning too the inextricability of the station's problem. Some significant moments at times highlights the complex events, among them is the Schedeldoeksplan, by Pierluigi Nervi with a group of local developers who, in 1962, showcases as a Leitmotiv the future of the Spui with a concrete and glass tower 140 meters high. The sinking of the entrepreneurial project however inaugurated a solution "by architecture" of this crucial urban area in the shallows of planning marked by the one-dimensional layer of infrastructure or roads. In the late 70's design is the work of Carel Weeber to play an important role as a catalyst in identifying the main urban hubs of Spui, opening the door to architectural initiatives in the following decades, although sometimes in ways dissimilar from the premises.

Along the sections of underground channels of the late nineteenth century and especially on La.Vi. Kavel, the lot of the former Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture, converge the main interventions of urban regeneration in the name of high-rise building. This process of redevelopment has seen a significant acceleration in the early '80s, particularly the initiatives of the Mayor van Duvesteijn in the operation for the new town hall entrusted to Richard Meier. This work initiates a comprehensive reassessment of the soon to be added, since 1988, the masterplan "De Resident" by Robert Krier. In the space of a decade, the area will change the face and collects massive complex of office space, almost all ministries, such as the skyscraper by Kohn Pedersen Fox, towers by Pelli and Graves and a more measured complex by Natalini as well as a tower of Krier himself. The transaction also includes a review of the road system and tramway tracks that come across the huge building of Ministry of housing by Jan Hoogstad which come out within the central train station. At the same time the work of Rem Koolhaas OMA buried a large part of the tram lines that run along the Grotemarkt converging in Spui.

After the "deResident" a new municipal development plan for the area was approved in 2002 following some basic regulatory steps born between 1988 and 1991: plans-program "Vinex" translate into effective tools for recovery and reuse while Vierde nota over de Ruimtelijke Ordening (Fourth document on land use) aims, among other things, reducing the movement of private cars in the prospect of an increase in the infrastructure of public mobility. The new partial plan for the Spui - the part called Wijnhavenkwartier - places significant new volumes evaluating alignments, heights - up to 140 meters - and especially points the visuals of the new towers that face the coast and other urban emergencies.

At the end of two decades of achievements, today Rotterdam sees its role as a city of skyscrapers disputed by other Dutch cities: if Amsterdam has more than ten towers ranging between 94 and 150 meters built after 1995, in The Hague the Spui, after some debate and concern about the national historic Landmark Protection, has assigned to receive high-density buildings. With the recently completed ministerial towers by Hans Kollhoff and the next one by Rapp + Rapp, almost entirely residential, the district can be said to be next to a ending mark. In particular, the Rapp's tower De Kroon (125 meters) is comparing with the Turfmarkt and the axis of Spui according to a formal solution whose peremptory monumentality, reminiscent of early American skyscrapers of 900 or Perret tectonics, envisages a revision of the urban way of living within an average European city as The Hague.

Within walking distance the “New Babylon” tower, by Meyer and van Schooten, overlooks the railway station and acts as a link between the Spui area and many other high-rise buildings of the nearby Beatrixkwartier, as if to establish the need for distant horizons of a people who lives under the sea level.

V. Van Rossem, Civil art: urban space as architectural task. Rob Krier in The Hague: The Resident, Nai Rotterdam 1996.

B. Colenbrander in Rapp+Rapp. De Kroon, an european skyscraper, Nai : Rotterdam 2012.

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