A new use for Nijmegen Post Office to bring city life back to this former place of communication.

With the national postal service gone, dedicated places of communication and interaction, often in the heart of the city, have gone too. All across the Netherlands, post offices now deprived of their duty are being sold off to private parties. At the same time, technological advances are making communication quicker and easier but also more private. If interaction is on the increase, sensory contact is dwindling.
P@ST takes up a stance against both developments. It intensifies the public zone of the former post offices. In its extreme compaction and openness to events, it allows heterogeneous programmes to physically pass by and over each other.

Multifarious activities including an exhibition, a market hall, and sports, fitness and overnight facilities are brought together in one place, generating an intense domain of unexpected sensory encounters between dissimilar population groups. Market stallholders sell their wares against the backdrop of an exhibition. Hotel guests pass a basketball match on the way to their rooms, sleep above a public yard and wake up to a market in full swing. Generic day-to-day activities are confronted with the dedicated and specialized, widening and recolouring one's view of the world.
To make this task manageable design-wise, the project makes use of the poché or leftover space. With functions ordered in such a way that they can serve each other, modelling them as each other's poché, every activity is charged with others. A defining condition in this respect is how the elevation or skin is structured. The form given to the membrane gives a greater or lesser degree of confrontation between the different worlds that come together. Sensory contact takes place here in the membrane. In material and detail, then, it tends towards the slender, light and open, making a wonderful contrast with the heavy eclectic architecture from the early 20th century. The skin between city and market is a succession of thin curtains, just enough to bring to bear a temporary space for encounter. Delicate slits allow the smells and noise of the swimming pool in the catacombs to drift up to the central quadrangle of the former waiting room now transformed into a court delivering air to the facilities round about. The exhibition envelops the market hall as a close-fitting garment and doubles as the entrance to the hotel.
By extending the city ground plane into the building and making the corner plot accessible on two sides, you get a natural concourse, an urban constellation in which even the casual passer-by gains a place. In welcoming happenstance and the temporary, this former world of communication is a space of encounter again. A true sensory experience and thus a true city space.

Place of education: AAS Tilburg | Specialization: architecture | Tutor: Frans Sturkenboom