Gerrit Rietveld College
Gerrit Rietveld College
Gerrit Rietveld College
'Continuous wheel' around the central court
Urban building block
The basic form of the design is a three- and four-story building block with an open courtyard. On the side of the main road, the block is four floors and three to the Garden Village. Such a building block is the ideal shape for a flexible school building, because functions can 'move' within the peripheral buildings. The peripheral buildings have load-bearing facades with a row of columns and an open plan with flexible walls. This building block shape also ensures that more than enough daylight and fresh air can enter the building from the facades. There is a diversity of outdoor spaces for students and employees: the park-like zone outside the building block, the space in the courtyard, and the two roof terraces.
The building block with the open building structure in the peripheral buildings makes a high degree of flexibility possible. The growth and contraction of the various domains are easy to absorb and domains can make use of each other's spaces. Within the building structure, walls are easy to move so that new trends in education can be responded to. The size of the peripheral buildings has been chosen in such a way that it can even be housed in offices and homes in the future. Although that is not expected in Tuindorp and the surrounding area, that is still something to take into account. The building structure can handle it.
The heart and domains
The main and evening entrances are on the parallel road to the Eykmanlaan. Parking and public transport stops are also located here. A second direct entrance, the student entrance, can be accessed from the bicycle shed under the building. A third but informal entrance runs through the courtyard. Each of the entrances leads into the heart of the building, the atrium where the reception desk is located and the auditorium next to it. This heart is a three-story interior with stairs. Each domain profiles itself here and students from all domains meet each other.
On the ground floor, specific domains such as Exact, Art & Culture and Sports are located. These spaces can be rented out to external parties separately from the school. On the first floor are the generic domains such as People & Society, Languages and HAVO/VWO. Because these domains have the same type of space requirements, they can shift between them. The Sports & Movement and MAVO domains have been placed on the second floor. All these domains can also be reached from the atrium, which also functions as a main staircase, so that other domains do not have to be crossed.
Integrated design process
The design process was an integral assignment where atelier PRO was responsible for the consultants. PRO managed the design team and together we were able to design a building with low operating costs. Atelier PRO and the consultants worked together in a building information model BIM linked to it with a database of material quantities, qualities and costs. At any moment during the design process, the design team was able to provide insight into both the investment costs and the operating costs for our client. In this way, decisions could be made wisely by the municipality of Utrecht. For each phase, PRO calculated the investment costs and operating costs and ensured that the design remained within the project frameworks that the client, the municipality of Utrecht, gave us.
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