The Box

It is hard to imagine the Dutch landscape today without the presence of box-like structures. Many of these boxes serve as distribution centres: hundreds of metres of blind, grey, concrete and sandwich panel façades that proliferate rapidly, representing the physical manifestation of increasing online sales. These buildings are the product of a logistical process driven by efficiency and standardization; there is no demand for spatial quality, materiality or atmosphere. As a result, the landscape often feels disconnected from the people who inhabit it.

There is potential for quality in the existing characteristics of the box: its generic appearance allows the box to be anything at all, its pragmatic industrial design reveals a unique beauty and its scale gives it an monumental presence. The starting point is the aim to repurpose these vast, colossal buildings, rejecting the popular break-down-and-build-up mindset. Instead, we start from a tabula scripta – a used slate. By looking at a specific distribution centre through the ‘powers of ten’, the process links up different scale levels and relates to the built environment as we understand it. At the smallest scale, the landscape’s history becomes legible, revealing its hidden richness. In its current form, the box appears to be a solid mass, but it actually serves as a shell surrounding a large open space. When the roof is removed, the space opens upward and the walls protect the interior, creating a vast walled space: a garden. This garden is both an inner world and an outer world, part of the architectural mindset. The box becomes a garden by analogy with the classical garden. Its industrial properties parallel the properties of the classical garden, including symmetry and the presence of an axial system. Clear main and side axes divide the box into distinct garden zones, shaped by the tectonic elements left behind by the distribution centre. Mannerism prevails, a style rooted in classical principles yet characterised by unique interpretations of these rules. The tightly woven interior world contrasts sharply with the rigid boundaries of the walls, which sit like a frame in the surrounding landscape. The box becomes a garden to be explored, rather than traversed. The aesthetics of the box are not overlooked or obscured, but celebrated.