Touch of Evil

Photograph by Hans Pattist, Courtesy of NIO Architecten.

Project details

• Project Name: Touch of evil, Interarea tunnel in Pijnacker
• Client: Municipality Pijnacker-Nootdorp
• Project Type: Infrastructure
• Design Team: Joan Almekinders, Samir Bantal, Hans Larsen, Enrique Moya-Angeler, Maurice Nio, Arek Seredyn, Tine Silvester-Iversen
• Contractor/s: Dura Vermeer (Dubbers-Malden)
• Date of commencement of project: 2002
• Date of completion of project: 2004
• Location of site: VINEX location Tolhek, Pijnacker, Holland
• Site Area: 2000 sq. mt.
• Built-up Area: 2000 sq. mt.
• Cost of Construction/Execution: € 3.600.000 (10% spent on architectonical finishing)

Photograph by Hans Pattist, Courtesy of NIO Architecten.

Words from the Architect

What happened here?

On the walls and ceilings of the tunnel, a strange imprint is visible - a big, whimsical and brightly colored imprint, an imprint of an unreal and immeasurable shape. As if during the building, an 'unearthly thing' got stuck between the formwork. As if the soul of the former landscape, being rooted up by bulldozers, has gone underground. As if the winding pattern of old polder roads, which has made place for rigid urban developments, takes revenge in the tunnel.

Photograph by Hans Pattist, Courtesy of NIO Architecten.

Compared to the furthermore generic tunnel the thing seems to have loomed up out of nothing. The thing is stranger still because the rest - the other concrete walls, the asphalt, the paving stones, the fencing, the illumination lines that are at right angles with the road and the bicycle lane/footpath - look quite normal. The only extravagance being that orange-red thing.

Photograph by Hans Pattist, Courtesy of NIO Architecten.

It is not art, even though it was designed and made with the same limitations. It was not invented to externalize an intimate or personal experience. No, on the contrary, it wants to make an inhuman form of life visible in a usually anonymous tunnel. Only in this way the tunnel is more than a connection between two areas: an alien, immeasurable, asymmetrical and disoriented experience. A tunnel that: you will never understand, even though you have been driving through it every day, all your life.

Photograph by Hans Pattist, Courtesy of NIO Architecten.

Photograph by Hans Pattist, Courtesy of NIO Architecten.

Photograph by Hans Pattist, Courtesy of NIO Architecten.

Photograph by Hans Pattist, Courtesy of NIO Architecten.

Photograph by Hans Pattist, Courtesy of NIO Architecten.

Credits

• Text, Courtesy of the architecture firm NIO architecten
• Photographs, by Hans Pattist, Courtesy of the architecture firm NIO architecten