Souterrain, The Hague

Commuters at the new underground tram-station designed by OMA in The Hague - built as part of a larger city-wide regeneration strategy.

Project Details

• Project: Souterrain, The Hague
• Status: completed October, 2004
• Client: The City of The Hague, Projectbureau Tunnels Centrum (PTC)
• Location: Center of The Hague, Netherlands
• Budget: 234 million EU
• Design: OMA & LAB-DA
• Advisor: Gemeentewerken Rotterdam (construction), Technical Management (installations)
• Contractor/s: Tram Kom, consortium of Van Hattum en Blankevoort, Ballast Nedam and Strukton

Program

Tramway tunnel (1250 m), 2 tramway stations, parking garage for 375 cars, poster museum. Lowest point 12 meter from ground level.

The 600-meter long tunnel accommodating the two tramway stations.

The Project

The Hague in a certain sense is an imprisoned city, confined by the sea, the highway connecting Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and neighbouring cites. It is therefore the only city that for its growth relies on redefinition of sites within its boundaries. To grow, for this city, means to become more dense.

The Hague, the Dutch capital of conservatism and bureaucracy, has planned the completion of more than 30 projects in the centre - most of them much larger than any of the existing buildings, which will transform the character and scale of the existing fabric before the turn of the century radically. Surprisingly, the increase in density (+ 500.000 m² of program) goes hand in hand with plans to minimize car traffic on street level. To achieve this, a so called parking-road is strung around the heart of the city, defining a 1.000.000 m² 'island' forbidden to all but local traffic. This loop-road will connect to a number of - largely underground - parking garages.

The underground facilities located within OMA's project include a poster museum.

Most - existing and new - parkings connect to the loop individually, each one of them isolated from the others. One of the new projects that is as much an element of infrastructure as it is a building, is the digging of a multi-storey tunnel ( a 1250 m long subway 'scoop', with 2 stations and a 375 car parking-garage). This tunnel-building is the necessary addition that makes all other buildings work. It acts like a spine connecting the separate 'organs', creating a body of underground connections that serve the city from underneath.

Souterrain, The Hague - Schematic drawing [opens in a pop-up window - 54 KB image]

The city is turning into a kind of 'La Defense in reverse', the slumbering and existing are being reanimated by an 'underworld' of interconnecting spaces. Namely - parking garages, rails, tram stops and roads even; bringing everything that is necessary underground.

Souterrain, The Hague - Cut-away drawing - A [opens in a pop-up window - 100 KB image]

Souterrain, The Hague - Cut-away drawing - B [opens in a pop-up window - 100 KB image]

At ground level: surface of the main market street overhead scoops in to facilitate public entry into the underground station facilities.

The main challenge of this project was to prove that architecture can have a positive effect when applied to the rigour of transport pragmatism. The building is a sandwich of a subway-line with 2 layers of parking on top and a station at either end. Its stretches out below the main shopping street, repeating its outlines, leaving a 'workspace' of 600 by 15 m approximately.

Interior view of the tram station, with an assortment of ramps, escalators and staircases criss-crossing the height and width of the space.

To overcome the boredom of a 600 m long continuous section, and to provide an answer to the question of underground orientation/isolation, every opportunity has been taken to modify the height and the width of the space, to connect physically or visually to other parts of the tunnels program, to provide views of the outside - city or sky, to link the tunnel with surrounding shops.

Usually, built parkings are victims of technical and economical constraints, the full weight of all structural and mechanical difficulties imposed upon them. In this case, the linearity of the site turned out to be an escape from this prison of practice. Ventilation: the tunnel is the duct; structure: the tunnel is the walls, the beams and the slabs.

The fluid, sloping space of the parking lot.

Transparency maintained within the 'building'

The parking becomes a fluid space, making use of the slopes in the rail and exploiting one of the gives, its enormous length, as an unprecedented quality. Where parking and stations meet, partitioning walls have been kept transparent.

The rugged, rock-like concrete walls left bare.

Architectural finishes are almost non-existing due to the surprising beauty of rock-like concrete walls, pored in the irregular coast soil of The Hague. Only light, daylight and electric, gives texture and clear readings of the fluid spaces underground.

Credits

• Text, Courtesy of Office for Metropolitan Architecture
• Photographs by Hans Werlemann, Courtesy of Office for Metropolitan Architecture
• Compiled by Suprio Bhattacharjee