Hydrapier

By Editorial Staff - 11 January 2010

Following an international competition, Asymptote has built the HydraPier, a municipal pavilion acknowledging and celebrating the fast growing city of Haarlemmermeer in the Netherlands. Haarlemmermeer is located adjacent to Schipol international airport. The HydraPier has been built to promote this city as a vital and growing new urban center.
In contrast to the frequent sight overhead of large body airplanes arriving and leaving Schipol airport and the endless streams of highway commuters, the HydraPier is sited within an artificially manufactured pastoral landscape. For much of the nineteenth century, this region lay beneath five meters of seawater and was reclaimed as land 150 years ago.
The nineteenth-century engineered dams and pumping stations are still in existence today and are potent symbols of Holland's tenuous relation to the surrounding sea. The HydraPier is an architecture articulating the struggle between land and water, nature and technological artifice.
The HydraPier is a powerful architectural gesture on the shore of the Haarlemmermeer lake, boasting an entrance bridge that allows visitors to enter through two cascading water-walls. There is an enclosed multimedia exhibition space surrounded by a large deck projecting out into the lake.
The architecture of the pavilion itself consists of two large span inclined, metallic surfaces, on one side deformed to incorporate an impressive interior volume and at the other end an inverse deformation in the canopy accommodating an exterior pool above the entrance area.
The planes become an architectural landscape that act in concert with natural and technological conditions that articulate this building's context.