The Booster Station-Zuid is primarily a public utility building which covers a technical installation, a pumping-engine for sluicing out sewage. The location in the public realm asks for a careful design that will appeal to the public now as well as in the future. There is a busy traffic junction in the vicinity of the Booster. The area forms a corridor, a no man's land structured by a layered infrastructural network where elevated metro lines, railways, roads and highways intersect.

The building can be seen as a metaphorical reference to a streamlined engine. The clinging, aerodynamic skin is an envelope for the buildings program: high-and low voltage spaces, an overhead crane, three pumps, a bypass and an entrance area. To emphasize the relation between form and function the building reveals its incoming and outgoing ducts. The constant stream of passengers by car, metro, train or bicycle perceive the Booster Station as a futuristic sculpture. With its cladding of stainless steel panels it reflects the movements, shapes and colours of the environment. At night the buildings tectonics come to the surface. The illuminated seams in the steal skin make the pumping-engine look like a mesh-model. Mass turns into mesh.

Photos: Digidaan