Neutelings Riedijk wins IDMC The Hague
8 December 2010
The International Dance and Music Center competition in The Hague has been won by Neutelings Riedijk Architects from Rotterdam. The other finalists were Zaha Hadid Architects (London) and Rau Architects (Amsterdam). dUCKS scéno joined the team of Neutelings Riedijk in the second round of the competition.
The IDMC will become the new home for the National Dance Theater (NDT), the Residentie Orchestra (RO) and the Royal Conservatory (KC). A fourth entity, called Gastprogrammering, will organize additional cultural and commercial activities in the building.
The design includes a 1 100-seat dance and opera theater, a 1 500-seat concert hall, a 500-seat ensemble hall and a 350-seat theater. The stages of the latter two are positioned back-to-back under the cupola of the building. The two halls can be interconnected to create a very large space that can be used for performances, expositions, festivities, et cetera. The jury had specific praise for this solution, calling it a discovery.
dUCKS worked with the architects and the future users to help find a way to translate the goals of the program into an optimized building scheme. The discussions centered on the need for private professional and educational space on one side, and openness and public performance on the other. The users expressed the desire to use each other’s facilities to create and present work alone or together, and in ways that would extend their artistic potential.
The presented design offers a very simple and manageable building that allows the organizations to set the public/private boundaries where they need them. Shared use of the performance spaces is made possible by placing them, together with their immediate support areas, in the core of the building, making their circulation quasi-independent of the public/private boundaries.
Mutual and collaborative uses of the theater and concert spaces are catalyzed by extending the typologies of the smaller two. Their complementary value is increased as they are not simply scaled-down versions of the dance opera and concert hall. As a result, each of the halls becomes more attractive to all users.
The possibilities that come with combining the two performance spaces under the cupola into one large open space makes the building interesting for many, extending the reach to other (arts) organizations and, hopefully, new audiences. The cupola can thus become the designed “found space,” suitable for performances of many types and kinds, but also for large-scale expositions, pop concerts, et cetera.
