Building for Provincial Youth and Recreation Domain De Boerekreek
Nature and the landscape play a crucial part in the Provincial Domain project, where the nearby nature park is continued through the new buildings.
The Youth and Recreation Domain in Sint Jan in Eremo addresses sports and nature appreciation on a protected site with streams, dikes and polders.
A wooden stockade is to enclose elementary dormitories, a restaurant and a manège. The complex counts three wooden wings in a U-shape establishing a spatial hierarchy. The public function of the domain gains the allure it deserves but at the same time gives the impression of being a farmstead which claims its place in the landscape in a dignified conscious way.
The pearl of the whole scheme is the manège. The grid of the classic stables with separate stall for each horse is modified here because of landscape considerations. The stables and the covered riding path lie in a single axis beneath a single sculptural roof. The roof of this building spans the space like a bricabrac of wooden planks. Finally the form and structure was associated with the internals of a violin. Its ondulating movement, justified by the wish for optimal ventilation and airiness, expresses such an impressive elegance and plasticity.
The three wooden wings are arranged around a semi-open central courtyard, a resemblance to a cour dŽhonneur, that mediates between the building and nature. This organization of the whole complex, with a drinking trough for the horses and a playing field for the children, acts as a subtle social condenser, refering to the typical agrarian building culture.
The direct contact between sleeping and activity, between inside and outside, gives the architecture an existential dimension existential for the people as a group as well as individuals.
The Provincial Domain had to meet stringent requirements for environmental impact. No exterior lighting is allowed at night, but the horseshoe-shaped layout of the three wings provides an evident sense of orientation and place.
The vertical articulation of the structure stands visually in a direct relation to the surrounding wooded landscape. The architecture of the complex seems to echo the beauty of the rhythmic planting of the poplar trees on the dikes (in relation to the Greek Ancient aspiration to match the beauty of nature at an abstract level).
The serial narratives of columns, vertical plank walls, plinths, friezes and fenestration all play their part in a visual transfiguration of music.
Rhythms are placed before, against and behind one another so that at a certain point mutual interference and fascinating consonances arise.
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