This new home for the provincial government of Noord-Holland is sited in the immediate vicinity of Welgelegen, a pavilion built in 1789 and since 1927 Noord-Holland's present seat of government. With its white neoclassical presence, L-shaped plan and carefully staged succession of interior spaces, Welgelegen is a unique building by Dutch standards. My design takes a reflective approach, proceeding from the theory of imitation in architecture as reasserted in particular by the French theorist Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy. The title of my project, The Presence of the Imaginary, refers to this theory which presents imitation as the abstract and imaginative treatment of models taken from architectural history. At the same time, the notion of the imaginary literally refers to images. The rise of image culture in the 18th century found expression in, among other things, architecture parlante and the picturesque English landscape style, both of which belong to the historical context in which the Welgelegen pavilion came about. An undisputed peak in this development is the oeuvre of Etienne-Louis Boullée for whom architecture was an essentially expressive art of built tableaux. No coincidence, then, that my design has been inspired by Boullée's notion of an architecture sunk into the ground.

The new 'Provincial House' is to include a conference centre along with a new State Room, offices and a capacious parking facility. The programme is contained in a gleaming, sunken volume whose mirror-glass facades and steel plated roof reflect its surroundings. Below its sloping roof is a continuous route that stitches together the parking decks, the various congress and office components and the surrounding park. The design's spatial underlay is a full-height incision oriented to Welgelegen's main axis of symmetry and freeing a row of columns in the car park grid. Relieved of their loadbearing duties, these columns have now only to succeed visually. They figure in a central perspective view of the main gateway of Welgelegen as orchestrated by the incision. The incision is one example of sundry mental and sensory links made between the neoclassical pavilion and the new sunken building. These links are not explicit, however, and leave much for the viewer to decide. It is precisely this leeway that Quatremère de Quincy regarded as a key condition for taking pleasure in architecture.

Place of education: TU Eindhoven
Specialization: architecture
Tutors: Gerard van Zeijl, Gijs Wallis de Vries, Sophie Rousseau, Hüsnü Yegenoglu