Type: Museum & visitor center Client: Province of Utrecht Size: 1.500 m2 Location: Fort Vechten, Bunnik, The Netherlands Team: Marieke Kums, Eunyong Kim, Yuka Takeuchi, Yong Il Kim, Adriana Suarez Engineering & Costs: ABT Status: Competition, Finalist The project concerns a museum and visitor center for the “Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie”, a historical defense line consisting of waterways, fortresses and dikes. From the 1700’s to 1940’s, the site was flooded to keep foreign enemies from occupying the western cities. Today it is declared a National Heritage Site.
About forty fortresses span the waterline and our intervention positions itself within one of the historic fortification’s outdoor patio space.
Programmatically, the building is organized into a visitor’s center, gallery spaces, and an auditorium, planned and articulated to provide a unique spatial exhibition experience. In contrast to the heaviness of the fortress, we proposed a covered path that is bathed in light, that flows alike the movement of water and in which one would intuitively follow a sequence of information and events.
The walls and floors of the patio space are designed in soft reflecting material, creating a dynamic world which is simultaneously enclosed and endless, much alike the landscape it aims to represent.
