This design consists of an underground media centre and 'media-machines' located 56 metres up in the Rotterdam skyline. The media centre is sunk 25 metre below ground level where, free from all external influences, its interior is fully manipulable. An artificial world with its own time and its own climate, it functions quite independently of the world outside.

Tunnels connect the media centre with the metro rail system and the ground plane. The entrances at ground level are the media centre's links with the world above it. Visitors emerging from the museum need to get their bearings in the same way as passengers leaving the metro. Hence these 'media-machines', framed in the view from the ground-level entrances to present an anamorphosis of the city's contours. These 3-D billboards use real-time videos or computer animations to show off the productions and exhibitions happening in the media centre underground.

The design for the subterranean centre constructs a spatial framework within which visitors can wander freely and enter the tunnels. A number of the tunnels lead to the glass lifts carrying departing visitors up to the media-machines. There, temporary media-art experiments are enacted with virtual reality, video art, robotics and the like. The idea behind the media centre is to create a social platform for new technological advances in the information society we live in.

Place of education: TU Eindhoven
Specialization: architectuur/architecture
Tutors: Wim van den Bergh, Jef van Hoof, Cees Kleinman & Jan Westra