'...The memory of monastery life is gradually being expunged. Many monastic orders are steadily disappearing through the increased secularization and with them their material and spiritual history. If this is not to vanish entirely, it is imperative to preserve these cultural collections, centralizing them and making them accessible to the general public. To this end, a national monastery archive is to be founded at the oldest still inhabited monastery in the Netherlands: the Order of the Holy Cross at St Agatha...'

Landscape
The forthcoming monastery archive is to be sited outside the monastery walls where it is part of a public garden. This throws up new relationships between the monastery fabric and the landscape. This outside position is complementary to that of the monastery. The new building owes its existence to what is already on site, and the existing needs the new to take on new meaning within current developments in society.

Architecture
Key to the design is the interaction between the different user groups. Passers-by experience the building visually. Visitors observe, hear and feel the building from the inside. Guests staying the night sleep close to the memories contained within the monastery. The building's spatial structure offers all these users moments of contact that invite them to explore the hidden world. A thin layer of black polyurethane and glass set tautly in the facade plane envelops the entire building in a sensual, slightly glossy skin. A minimum of means is used to secure an object as abstract as possible in the received landscape structure.

Monastery type
The building can be read as a transformation of the traditional monastery type. The monastery is turned inside out, with its inner courtyard now as the periphery. The customary monastery programme organized round a central court is transformed into a long line in the landscape. Hollows divide up the long ribbon. They are moments of stasis in a building marked by movement, moments between heaven and earth packaged in Corten steel. In time they will turn an orange colour. This link to the process of deterioration establishes a subtle connection with the archive rooms. The objects in the archives likewise gain a greater beauty and meaning through ageing. The lion's share of the programme lies buried in the ground. It is only on approaching the building that a hidden underworld unfolds. This game of expecting and the unexpected, fathomable and unfathomable, brings about continual contact with the architecture. This strategy of alienation serves as the springboard to a more specific attachment to the place as well as to valuable memories from the monastery. The design eschews immediate legibility in favour of a stratification that can offer changing, intense spatial experiences.

Place of education: TU Eindhoven
Specialization: architecture
Tutors: Hans Ruijssenaars, Ralph Brodrück, Bert van Schaijk