Reviving a Brutalist Beast

The chance to reinvent Eindhoven’s Bunker building for contemporary life was an opportunity to revive an extraordinary Brutalist statement by one of most important postwar Dutch architects, Hugh Maaskant. On a personal level, it was also a chance to revisit a major location from my university days.

by Stijn Kemper - Partner at Powerhouse Company

As an architecture student at Eindhoven University, I used to go to the Bunker quite often. I still remember it vividly: Thursday nights, I’d usually ride my bike from university after working late into the evening on project work. I’d be greeted by the peculiar smell of the wooden floor stained with beer and cigarettes. I always liked the building, even though other people sometimes said it was ugly. Brutal, even. But wasn’t that the point? The Bunker is a Brutalist building. Designed by Hugh Maaskant at the end of his career, when he had let go of the more rigid rules of Modernism in favor of an architecture that offers a certain kind of grandeur and monumentality, but also liveliness and a human scale.

I have always admired Maaskant’s buildings, both Modernist and Brutalist. He was, of course, one of the Netherlands’ most famous and prolific architects, leaving a legacy that embodies the optimism of the postwar period. Industrial structures like the Tomado Factory and corporate headquarters like Johnson Wax; landmarks like the Euromast and cosmopolitan hotels like the Rotterdam Hilton; public buildings like the Provinciehuis Brabant and the Technikon educational complex: They are all bold architectural statements, the architecture of progress.

Then, in 1969, came the monolithic, multi-use building for the student union, social clubs and cafeteria of the new Technical University Eindhoven: the Student Centre, which was nicknamed ‘De Bunker’ almost as soon as it was completed. This building became a focal point in the lives of almost all Eindhoven students, myself included.

In my first year at university, the Bunker was where the party was. You went there for drinks with friends, perhaps a bite to eat, and the possibility of hanging around long enough for late-night fun. Apart from the introductory week, the bigger and taller spaces at end of the building were reserved for the student societies. But there was a shared bar for everyone, a nice long space with a balcony over its full length. Sometimes we would get food at the cafeteria, which we accessed via a beautiful staircase flooded with light from above.

From an architectural point of view, I particularly remember the Bunker’s richness, although to be honest, by then it was already quite messy and run-down. The variety of spaces was my favorite feature – tall, long, compact, small, lit from above, the balconies. Sometimes you could almost get lost in there, but then the balconies and external views helped you remember where you were again.

So when Powerhouse Company was presented with the opportunity to work ‘with’ this building, I immediately knew we had to reuse the original Bunker, not only because of its architectural merits, but also because of its emotional value. For me personally, and for large numbers of other people as well: students; Eindhovenaren, as natives of Eindhoven are known; architecture buffs.

As part of Eindhoven’s heritage, the Bunker is an essential building. It’s at the starting point of the big postwar growth of Eindhoven into a center of technology, design and knowledge. We did not need to argue for why the Bunker should survive; but how it should survive was more of a challenge. It soon became clear that, if we wanted to save the existing building, the last thing we needed was to have it listed – which is ironic, to say the least. There was a lot of arguing and discussion involved while we explained our vision for reworking the building. And later also a lot of respect and appreciation for the way we did it, actually resulting in having the Bunker become a listed building immediately upon its completion – which in itself is pretty unique.

Our solution was unorthodox, just as Maaskant’s would have been. We added verticality to what is primarily a horizontal building. We added a new volume, a new program and new users to breathe life into the old, disused building.

In fact, I like to think that Maaskant would have appreciated the way we treated the Bunker. We analyzed and researched a lot of his buildings, and also the design steps he took in the Bunker, and we projected all of that onto the new tower addition. In that way, the tower also became very prominent, as an extension of the language of the Bunker. And I believe Maaskant would have appreciated this prominent and bold statement. He wasn’t a humble architect, after all!

Meanwhile, there is more appreciation for Brutalism these days – I think because a lot of the buildings and typologies that caused the negative connotations have been cleaned up or (sometimes unfortunately) demolished, paving the way for a new recognition of the more well-built, rich and interesting examples. What I like about Brutalism comes down partly to a certain nostalgia for postwar optimism: You really see that people wanted to embrace the future, and Brutalism was one of the ways they did that. This is beautifully illustrated in several examples in London, like the Southbank Centre and the Barbican.

My tips for restoring Brutalist buildings? On a practical level, I would say clean up the concrete – and keep it clean. The rough materials usual in Brutalist buildings need extra attention to keep them looking good. Spatially, it’s always tempting to add some extra facade openings to increase their transparency – because, while Brutalist buildings can be quite transparent in a paradoxical kind of way, they don’t always appear so in their extreme concrete expression!

These were among the considerations that we applied to Maaskant’s Eindhoven monument, with great success. Going by its nickname you would hardly think it needed it, but with our design we have made the Bunker future-proof again.