ARCHELLO YOUR CONNECTION WITH ARCHITECTURE

Ingenious use of colours at a high level

The Hague is heading skywards – in building terms that is. The eye-catching office complex Prinsenhof is part of the restructuring of the Beatrixkwartier financial district, which is currently partially occupied by high-rise buildings. The Prinsentoren is a striking beacon within this development.

Three designers have created every part of the complex. Architect Kees Rijnbout at the Architectengroep designed the residential towers while Hans van Beek at Atelier Pro designed the offices and the business premises and Rob Ligtvoet at architects Kraaijvanger|Urbis designed the Prinsentoren. A red-brown brick was selected for the Prinsentoren following consultation. The designers combined these bricks with a bronze-green variant in order to enhance the depth of the design. This varying use of materials was consistently followed through in all sections of the building.

At almost one hundred metre high, the tower is constructed from an ingenious prefab concrete shell. This shell was clad in a skin of red-brown and bronze-green brickwork using an innovative system that consists of prefabricated elements. The choice was prompted by the delivery period for the Prinsentoren in which speed was of the essence.

The base of the Prinsentoren is a square floor layout that contains a service area in the middle of each floor which has been set back a little into the wall. Equidistant to the adjacent Utrechtsebaan highway, looking out onto the city, Ligtvoet’s carrés ‘cut out’ the wall: eight floors high, with a depth extending to the service area. Here the brickwork skin was given a different colour in order to accentuate these notches: bronze-green.
The bronze-green bricks create a particularly special finish. During production, the light coloured bricks are marlstone sanded.. Weathering will create a colour pallet varying from white to bronze-green in these wall sections - a wonderful contrast to the red-brown brickwork.

Large sections of the wall are prefabricated. Long steel frameworks form the base for a concrete element in which the bricks are placed. The bricks are applied in a tiled pattern. At four bricks wide and thirty bricks high, these frameworks are just as large as the windows: 900 x 1800 mm. Five concrete elements are interlinked (four vertical and one horizontal at the top) into the elements that were applied to the building as single units. The window units (three frames above each other) were placed first, followed by the brickwork panels. This innovative building method allowed construction to be executed quickly, while working at height.