• Project: reconstruction
• Program: guarded housing for ex-psychiatric patients
• Design:Bart Goedbloed and Harmen van de Wal with Smahan Amrach, Celia Faria, Hector Mora Tena,Wei Xing, Zhu Yiwen
• Client: De Nieuwe Unie
• Contractor: Van Omme en de Groot
• Construction: Baas bv, Broersma
• closets: Ernst Sluijter
• Technical advice courtyard: Bureau B+B
• Building costs: Euro 695.000,00
• Area: 700 m2
• Photo: Ximena Davalos, Rob’t Hart (rechten via Rob ’t Hart)
• Photo maquette: Ximena Davalos

In an old neighborhood in the south of Rotterdam, five houses in the corner of an old building block, containing eleven apartments, have been thoroughly restructured and turned into a special kind of mental care facility. Former patients of psychiatric institutions can use this facility as a stepping stone into normal life. Guided 24 hours a day they learn how to live independently again. Eighteen people will each get their own sleeping-living room and share four communal spaces.
Still bearing in mind the bad reputation of the previous years, the neighborhood is just as vulnerable as the inhabitants of the facility. Five houses, eleven adresses, are turned into one, with, for reasons of control and security, a single entrance. Cuts through the building mass are marked on street level with large windows in blue frames. The neighborhood is granted a view inside.

The Millinx is organised around a courtyard that is won back from scrappy backyards. Lifted up 65 centimeter above street level, the courtyard is elevated above the daily life of the outside world. Everybody entering the facility passes a large window of the staff’s office. The courtyard gives way to a communal living room, a smokingroom, two kitchens and four entrances to staircases leading to the bedrooms. The courtyard is extended into platforms in each of the communal spaces, cutting right through the building mass. Big sliding windows can be opened to the street and the courtyard, enabling the plaforms to serve as an intermediate space, a verandah. Thus, in spite of the introverted character of the facility, the contact with the street has been redefined.

Tags: architecture, health care, realized, renovation