The underground club is sited in the centre of Amsterdam, above Vijzelgracht station on the 'North-South' metro line. My brief invites discussion of what is meant by architecture and structural design. Indeed, it is questionable whether a building with no exterior can be called architecture. This for me was the reason to elevate the issues surrounding the tricky relationship between inside and outside to a key principle guiding the planning process. Here, the underground space takes on the air of a subterranean cathedral where life is celebrated. In stepping outside daily life, the design gives shape to the city's subconscious. The cathedral, which takes up the entire area above the station, is assembled from vaults whose interior and exterior spill over into one another. This newly developed form can be compared to a Möbius strip or Klein's bottle. The surface binding inside and outside in a single movement exposes the artificiality of the distinction between interior and exterior. This makes a mockery of the no exterior, no architecture issue and weakens its case. Taking on-site qualities and subtly changing them, the intervention registers as an 'undercurrent of suspense'. The metro station has been widened and the street modified.

The design takes up the challenge of building underground in the structural sense too. Its subterranean structure has to prevent the groundwater, which rises as much as 30 metres above the station floor, from forcing the entire construction upwards. The surface of the vaults divides the underground volume into two equal parts. Here mass and space are complementary. The mass is sufficient to safeguard the club building from upward movement. The horizontal forces are transferred from the weighted edges of the vault by way of the deep wall to the ground which acts as a buttress for the underground cathedral. In order to be able to calculate the heavily loaded thin shell structure of the double curved vaults I have developed a method of modelling the complex geometry into a mesh suitable for use with Ansys software.

I have made a virtue of the limitations of building underground to give the design greater power than would have been possible above ground.

Place of education: TU Eindhoven
Specialization: architecture
Tutors: Frans van Herwijnen, Hans Ruijssenaars, Christian Kieckens, Henri Achten, Monique Bakker