Groningen Forum
Groningen, if you haven’t had the pleasure to visit it yet, is a delightful university city in the very north of the Netherlands. It was founded almost a thousand years ago and like so many Dutch towns and cities, has maintained an architecturally and culturally rich historic core. It largely survived bombing in WW2 and until recently was still dominated by the towers of its main church and city hall, below which, for all its long history, the town’s other buildings had remained, creating a clear urban hierarchy that respected both those twin institutions and the cultural heritage of the city. That was, until ‘The Forum’ was dropped into the middle of this gem a couple of years ago.
While I accept that, as a major new civic building, The Forum has a right to assert itself within the spatial order of the city, both its scale and worst of all, its banal mindless shape-making, make it a brutal insertion within this most sensitive of contexts. It is an act of sheer arrogance and little more than an expression of the astonishing ego of its architects, who it appears are happy to trash one of Europe’s most attractive minor cities, simply to establish their own global brand and grab as many pages of architectural magazine coverage as possible.
As you would expect, the architects of this shocker are rich on verbiage – “The building is designed as a single clear volume to express the desire for synergy, to strengthen the shared ambition to combine different facilities into one new compound” – it is “NOT a library, NOT a museum, NOT a cinema, but a new type of public space where the traditional borders between these institutes will dissolve” and unsurprisingly, it “aspires to be a platform for interaction and debate.” Why do our schools of architecture continually fail to instil the basics of design sensibility but excel in producing students who constantly spew out this drivel? Perhaps universities should re-categorize architecture as a Language subject?
It’s all very well for European architects to dump this stuff on clients in the Middle and Far East in some form of latter-day architectural colonialism, but this is in their own historic back yard. Unfortunately, the Netherlands, of all the European countries, has proved to be particularly receptive to this kind of meaningless lumpen shape and pattern-making. It is almost as if its a reaction to the Calvinist integrity of the generation of Hertzberger and Van Eyck. Led by Rem Koolhas, they have charmed city council after city council into financing this ‘Krazy with a K’ junk. My only hope is that as it is all so desperately and superficially fashionable, a new and less damaging style will soon emerge, but sadly, this will still leave poor Groningen with The Forum.
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John Stewart 