• Project: architecture
• Program: health care; green daycare for mentally disabled people
• Client: Visser & Bouwman architecten
• Design: Harmen van de Wal, Smahan Amrach, Cady Chintis, Karzan Kakahama, Sonia Sousa
• Technical elaboration: Visser & Bouwman architecten
• consultant: LEX
• Structural engineering: Karel van Moorsel
• Built area: 930 m2
• est. building costs: 1.700.000 Euro
• Location: Purmerend, The Netherlands
• Start design: Januar 2007
• start building: 2011

The green corner is a project for a daycare center in the city of Purmerend. It is part of a larger development aimed at a total redevelopment of the Prinsenstichting area, a compound for the care of mentally disabled people. Originally laid out as pavilions in a lush green area, the whole compound proved too expensive to maintain. Therefore the area will be redeveloped as a suburban neighborhood in which the buildings for the Prinsenstichting are to be integrated. In the south west corner of the neighborhood the Green Corner, a daycare center for outdoor activities, is to be last reminiscent of the previously green environment.

The urban planners of the new suburb thought it wise to attach a theme to the neighborhood; the English “cottage style”. Being in the corner of the area, we could deal with this theme by applying rough cottage-like materials (wood, white painted brick and ivy), meanwhile using our own architectural language for the rest of the building.
Rather than a pasted-on identity we are interested in the spatial implications of ensuring at the same time both a comforting enclosure, and a relationship with the outside that is as open as possible. Three main spaces were identified, each with their own specific inside-outside relationship. The workshops, whose main function is to provide shelter against the climate, the canteen, that needs a cosy atmosphere, and therefore is more enclosed, using the shape of the roof to create a house-like or barn-like space, and finally the experience garden for the most disabled clients, using both roof and floor to create a shell-like space.

Tags: architecture, health care, ongoing