Click HERE for the General Project Page

Richard Meier's Safety Squared

A white giant in the modern Spui district of The Hague, Richard Meier's gigantic complex soars 12 storeys high in his characteristic style - austerely geometric, quadratic and brilliantly white.

Completed in 1995, the atrium offers enough space for the City Hall and central library of the city of The Hague. The semi-circular library forms the centre of the ensemble, with two side wings stretching away on either side housing the city council offices. Facing each other conically, they follow the asymmetrical contours of the land, flanking a spectacular courtyard. This atrium is a public square, a meeting place and a venue for numerous events from fashion shows to operas. Freestanding lifts carry both visitors and employees from the plaza below to the uppermost office levels. White, filigree bridges link the wings from the second floor upwards.

Its great height marks the building out, giving it its charm as the cultural centre of the city. But the safety of the bridges at up to 42 metres in height left something to be desired and so, in 2003, the city decided to invest in safety. The challenge: the austere geometry and design of the architecture would suffer no new structural element. After the project was advertised throughout Europe, Thomas Ferwagner's net inventors at Officium provided the solution. Together with the engineers from the company Carl Stahl, Officium developed an innovative system. The system is a mesh of stainless steel cables in square grids, therefore staying true to the architectural language of Richard Meier.

The basic building grid was proportionally transposed to the cable system. Carl Stahl, specialist for stainless steel cables and nets, assembled the specially prepared cables on site to create the net. Each cable was put into exactly the right position, first vertically, then horizontally. This was facilitated by the fact that each cable was marked during production to ensure that subsequent combination, with a specially developed network junction point, was accurate to a tenth of a millimetre.

A new type of connection technology was developed and implemented in Richard Meier's building according to the strictest requirements for structure and support. In total, the technicians erected approximately 250,000 cable junction points. Not once on the entire 5,000 sq. m. net, made of 70 km of stainless steel cable, was a right angle ignored. The team of architects, manufacturers, and metal and scaffolding specialists can vouch for that. An impressive achievement by this European joint venture involving German and Dutch companies. With this protective net, both inhabitants of and visitors to the city have a new treasure, which has become a part of the building as if it had been there right from the start.

 
 

Client: Gemeente Den Haag
Project: Protective steel net, City Hall, The Hague
Architect: Richard Meier, New York
Idea, planning of the net: Carl Stahl GmbH, Süssen Officium Design Engineering, Stuttgart
Stainless steel cables, construction: Carl Stahl GmbH, Süssen
Steel construction: Schlosserei Wolfgang Sautter, Filderstadt
Photos: Hans-Georg Esch, Hennef/Sieg