Biopartners 5, a three-story laboratory building on the outskirts of the Dutch university town of Leiden, looks bland. It is a rectangular block with ribbon windows between gray fabric panels on a reddish base punctuated by rubble held in gabions. Its most distinguishing characteristic is a greenhouse of the same height, tacked onto to one end, that acts as the lobby and gathering space for the warren of rental labs crammed into the structure.
I knew it was remarkable because of the way the architects, Popma TerSteege Architecten (PTSA) had used a variety of reuse techniques in its construction that went far and beyond the usual scrap lumber or left-over lighting systems. The very structure out of which the building is made, as well as many of the other elements and furnishings, came from what PTSA calls “donor buildings,” so that what looks like a new object is largely an assembly of old pieces. After studying it from pictures, drawings, and descriptions (it was finished in 2021), I finally was able to see it in real life recently, and I was curious if the results were any good.
They are, but not if you are looking for spectacle. One of the design’s immediate virtues is its modesty and simplicity. It sits in a sea of such structures with similar functions in a development (Leiden Bio Science Park) that is meant to cluster start-ups generated by the University of Leiden a few kilometers away in the old downtown, and almost all of its neighbors in the latest section, where the structures are more or less the same size, try hard to distinguish themselves with colored glass, a swoosh or a swirl there, or at least a dramatic lobby. None of those gestures have anything to do with site, structure, or function.
Biopartners 5, instead, looks like what it is: 70,000 square feet of divisible lab space organized around a slot courtyard that accepts the rainwater collecting on the roof in tubs made of reused Corten steel and surrounded by planting.
Its main feature is that greenhouse, which PTSA bought off-the-shelf, not adding or subtracting any of the modular elements. Their argument in terms of sustainability for that tactic is that the pieces were designed to be reused elsewhere. The space is also only semi-conditioned but, on the somewhat frigid fall day I was there, still filled with people having something from the small canteen, working, or meeting. Filled with light, it is beautiful exactly in its forthright functionality.
The real story is in the bones and some of the textures and furnishings that make up Biopartners 5. When PTSA received the commission, they realized that an older and larger laboratory building in the Science Park, a few decades old, with similar functions was being torn down –thus are the vagaries of a society that never can seem to figure out how to properly reuse its structures. They figured out that they could utilize three floors of its steel construction, and duly dismantled and re-erected those pieces at the new location.
They then also found stacks of ruble in front of the “donor building” that had made up the central ventilation shafts. They took these bricks, which had been tiled where they faced the public interiors and turned them into the gabion pilasters around the base, with their bits of glazing showing, which gives Biopartners 5 an unexpected formality: rusticated classical base (though made up spolia) below, minimalist modern office building above.
On one of their trips to the site, they passed work crews cutting down over-aged trees along the side of the road. They asked whether they could have the lumber, and used that for, among other features, the reception desk. Then they kept scavenging. They found toilets in an office building in Amsterdam that was being renovated. Elegant stone from a lawyers’ office that was also being spiffed up became part of the floor in the new building’s public areas. When you look carefully at the ribbon windows zipping around the façade, you realize that they have a rhythm of different widths. That is because they were reused from an office building that was being torn down in the nearby town of Haarlem. Whenever someone told them of another renovation, they found elements to reuse for their project.
When that was not enough, they scavenged remainders. What furniture they could not assemble out of found wood or bits and pieces of other offices they sourced at secondhand stores (“antique stores” might be too grand a designation). They located a large pile of mismatched and irregular carpet tiles, which they assembled in such a way as to turn the defects into an overall pattern.
When you walk in and around Biopartners 5, the seeming normalcy and even blandness that had made me wonder in photographs whether this was a better story than a building dissipates the more you notice both the confidence and clarity of the building’s composition and proportions and the cleverness of its details. Unlike in most office and research buildings, where the architecture resides almost solely in the atrium, usually with zigzagging stairs or, better yet, a stair/auditoria, and then disappears in the work-a-day parts of the place, here the public space, from greenhouse to courtyard to the modest staircase and the corridors, is thought out and assembled with care and precision and, what is most important, with materials that bring their own textures, varieties, and even stories along with them.
Those effects are modest. I would contrast PTSA’s approach with that of Jan Jongert of Superuse Studios, whose work I have discussed here before. Jongert was one of the people who started the idea of urban scavenging in the Netherlands and pushes the materials he finds towards the sculptural: industrial milk cartons, sinks, and polycarbonate windmill blades are all part of his palette. His structures are as expressive, rough, and complex as PTSA’s are reserved and modest. He works in the tradition of assemblage and collage, while PTSA favors a mainstream mode of minimalist modernism. Both approaches have their own aesthetic, with Jongert’s being easier to like and PTSA’s asking for your more careful attention; perhaps they are buildings like dogs and like cats respectively.
Whatever the case, expert analysis Biopartners 5 saved 65% of the energy it would have taken to construct such a building in the regular manner without exceeding its budget, and the architects expect it to reach the highest standards of energy efficiency (which, in the Netherlands, are quite high) in its daily use. That alone is an achievement that achieves plaudits. The fact that it is a very good building only affirms for me that architecture of hunting and scavenging is a tactic we should be pursuing much more in the making of all our buildings.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: Handshake Urbanism | the MONA | Elon Musk's Space X | AMAA | DIGSAU | Art Biennales | B+ | William Morris's Red House | Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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