Judicial Centre for Somatic Care

Lucas van der Wee

• Interior Architects

The penitentiary in Scheveningen has expanded to include a Judicial Centre for Somatic Care. This is both a penitentiary and a centre for care treatment and nursing. For this complex programme, cepezed and cepezedinterieur designed a healing environment, where incarceration is as humane as possible. Due to the proximity of two Natura 2000 areas, the care centre was built low on nitrogen - this also influenced the design. For the State Property Agency, it is a pilot for low-nitrogen construction.

The dpcp consortium, a collaboration of du Prie and cepezedprojects, realised the Justice Centre for Somatic Care for the Government Property Agency (RVB) in a design, build & maintain contract. Within the consortium, cepezed and cepezedinterieur designed a healing environment that also takes into account the security of the detainees and the safety of the care workers. As user of the care centre, the Dienst Justitiële Instellingen (DJI) was closely involved in the design.

The care centre is located on the site of the existing PI Haaglanden, but is intended for detainees throughout the Netherlands. They can go there for care that cannot be provided in one of the other judicial institutions. Offenders can recover there after surgery and rehabilitate. The emphasis is on physical care, although psychological care is also provided. The gross floor area covers 3,300 square metres.

photo_credit Lucas van der Wee — Lucas van der Wee

comb structure

The care centre is intended for litigants with different degrees of security and there is, for example, a special lock where a dentist’s van or ambulance can park and where patients arrive on a bed. Despite the complex programme, we managed to design a pleasant, stylish and spacious building with a soft atmosphere.

Initially, the RVB thought of a cross shape and two storeys, but cepezed arrived at a comb structure during the tender phase: three single-storey care wings with bed rooms at right angles to a two-storey volume with all facilities such as the pharmacy, an outpatients’ room, offices, waiting rooms et cetera. Between the wings are gardens with grasses, shrubs and trees and a large air space.

This layout has three major advantages. First, the walking routes are shorter and therefore safer; there is less lift transport of patients. Second, it guarantees the privacy of the litigants in the bed rooms, as there is no view from a floor above or through the garden. This allows for large windows, which give good views of the garden and let in plenty of daylight, which aids recovery. Third, a single-storey building allows for a simple, lightweight and sustainable construction with hsb walls and a wooden roof.

speedy recovery

Wood is also an important part of the interior, because of its calming effect - cepezed applied it wherever possible. In addition, the break-out, lattice-free windows of the bed rooms are as large as possible and, like the full-glass façades of the communal areas, offer a view of the garden.

The garden is decorated with lush dune vegetation, there are height differences and there is a wheelchair-friendly airspace in an abstracted dune pan. This sunken location and the positioning of the greenery also guarantee privacy. Closed facade sections are finished in low-maintenance, reddish-brown Corten steel. The location of cameras and other installations outside and inside was immediately included in the design, so that they could be integrated in the façades, walls and ceilings and would not disturb the image.

In addition to views of greenery, daylight and colour are important design elements. Daylight enters through the aforementioned windows and from above through skylights. It is further brought into the building by glass partitions. H.W. Mesdag’s Panorama of Scheveningen provided inspiration for a balanced colour palette, matching the surroundings. These calm shades of blue, brown and green can also contribute to patients’ speedy recovery. And because each wing was given its ‘own’ colour, it is easy to get your bearings.

pleasant working environment

The abundance of wood, daylight, garden views and colours also make the care centre a pleasant working environment for staff. As already mentioned, unnecessary risks such as lift transport are avoided, and great attention has been paid to sightlines. Corners and recesses have been avoided and the direction of rotation of doors, for example, has also been geared to optimal supervision. Corridors are spacious, to allow beds to turn properly, and have high, impact-resistant skirting boards integrated into the whole.

low-nitrogen construction

In this design by cepezed and cepezedinterieur, patients, staff and safety are central, but also circular construction and the environment. Because of the two neighbouring Natura 2000 areas Meijendel and Berkheide, high demands apply to sustainability and low-emission construction. Here, too, the comb structure offers a solution. The concept of single-storey construction and cepepezed’s usual choice of a lightweight kit or parts construction made it possible to use electric construction equipment.

In low-nitrogen construction, transport plays a role in addition to design and equipment - in fact, everything intertwines. As early as the design stage, the maximum weight of construction parts must be considered so that the precast elements can be transported as flat packs, and placed with light, electrically powered equipment. At the PI, concrete precast units for sanitary ware are an exception to this, due to their crucial function in the design. An additional advantage of electric construction equipment is that the litigants staying in the neighbouring PI buildings experience little inconvenience from the construction. For example, the foundation was not driven, but barely audible electric screwing.

kit of parts

With prefabricated elements, you as an architect not only have more influence on the quality of the parts, but also more control over emissions. Pollutant emissions are easier to capture and control in the factory than on the building site, and the elements are assembled quickly and ‘dry’ on the building site. This shortens construction time, reducing movements of individual personnel and suppliers to and from the building site. Moreover, the prefabricated components are reusable. If the care centre loses its function, it can be dismantled to be remounted elsewhere, in parts or as a whole.

With a view to reducing material use, a kit of parts at cepezed is full of clever details. For instance, the concrete prefab units for the sanitary facilities are already equipped at the top with a shaft for the air intake and a sound buffer. As a result, the wooden roof can be put on just like that. The prefab units support this roof and serve as a solid partition between the bed rooms. The design of the units allows the shower head and toilet bowl to be attached on the outside, so that the litigants cannot unscrew them from the inside and blockages can be quickly remedied.

pilot

Remarkably, when the legal nitrogen standard was scaled back during the tender phase, the Government Property Agency stuck to the previously set standard. For the RVB, the project is the pilot for low-nitrogen construction. cepezed and consortium dpcp gladly went along with this. Each party took a broad responsibility; du Prie, for instance, kept control of the logistics and RVB actually acted as a pioneering client, or ‘launching customer’. The original goal of staying below a deposition of 0.005 mol N/ha/year guided integral, joint choices from the outset.

Nitrogen emissions were monitored on site to test the detailed forecast. The outcome provides insight into how low-nitrogen construction can improve in the future. The key insight about the use of electric construction equipment is that there is far too little of it available. du Prie solved this by investing in new, electric equipment himself. But if we want to start low-nitrogen construction on a larger scale, this does not just require a different way of designing.

Another area of concern or improvement that emerges from this pilot is the sustainability of steel and concrete production processes. In the long term, the steel industry could switch to using hydrogen, but not all the pros and cons of this are yet clear. It also sometimes proved difficult to convince subcontractors and suppliers. They perceived the conditions to meet low-nitrogen construction as demanding, which created additional challenges and higher costs on the procurement side.

unique

Construction of the Judicial Centre for Somatic Care began in June 2022 and was commissioned in the summer of 2024. All in all, the construction of the care centre at the PI Haaglanden can be called quite unique. The highly complex programme took shape efficiently and, despite some challenges, the parties involved stuck to the set nitrogen ambition of 0.005 mol N/ ha/year so that it was met. Within a high-security facility, they realised a justice centre with the most pleasant experience possible, whose furnishings with lots of wood, daylight and greenery can be healing.

The design of the care centre followed the RVB document ‘Leefklimaat in Justitiële Inrichtingen’ (Living Environment in Penitentiary Institutions), aimed at safe and humane housing by the Judicial Institutions Department. The design of the new care centre is an example and inspiration for the further development of that document and the way a prison should be designed and built.