Pi de Bruijn

Pi de Bruijn: Cutting a Street Through Parliament

The Statenpassage runs a hundred metres long and rises twenty-four metres, a glazed gallery threaded between the medieval and nineteenth-century fabric of the Binnenhof in The Hague. It is where Dutch members of parliament, journalists and lobbyists collide on their way between offices and the chamber, and it is the single most consequential piece of architecture Pi de Bruijn has built. He began designing it in 1981. It opened in 1991. He is still, decades later, involved in what happens to it.

Losser

De Bruijn was born on 28 August 1942 in Losser, a village in Overijssel hard against the German border — about as far from the political centre of the Netherlands as the country allows. He completed his studies in architecture at the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology in 1967.

Southwark and the Housing Service

His first job was abroad and in the public sector: the Architects Department of the London County Council, working in Southwark. Post-war London's municipal architecture office was one of the great training grounds in Europe, a place where young designers built social housing at enormous scale and learned that architecture was fundamentally a public undertaking. He returned to Amsterdam and joined the municipal Housing Service, the Dienst Volkshuisvesting.

Only in 1978 did he go into independent practice, as a partner in Oyevaar Van Gool De Bruijn Architecten BNA. He was thirty-six, and he had spent his entire professional life to that point working for city governments. It is the formative fact of his career; his subsequent work has consistently treated buildings as instruments of urban policy rather than as objects.

The Binnenhof

In 1980 the Dutch state issued a multiple assignment for the extension of the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of parliament. De Bruijn began designing in 1981.

The problem was one of the hardest in European architecture: how to insert a modern legislature into the Binnenhof, a dense, sacred, historically layered government quarter in the middle of The Hague. His solution refused the obvious move of building a separate palace. Instead he cut the Statenpassage through the block — a public gallery between existing structures — placed the new parliamentary chamber at the Hofplaats, and marked the corner with Lange Poten with an office tower. The complex runs to 21,000 square metres and 118,859 cubic metres, and it cost, in later reckoning, some 91 million euros. Its palette is deliberately contemporary against the historic setting: a great deal of natural stone, gleaming steel and glass.

The Price

It was not achieved without loss, and honesty requires recording it. Making room for the Statenpassage entrance meant demolishing the Hoge Raad building of 1929–31 by Gustav Cornelis Bremer at het Plein, together with a corner structure at Hofplaats and Lange Poten. Bremer was a serious architect and his Supreme Court building was a serious work. De Bruijn's parliament was purchased partly with someone else's building.

De Architekten Cie.

In 1988 de Bruijn founded de Architekten Cie. in Amsterdam together with Frits van Dongen, Carel Weeber and Jan Dirk Peereboom Voller, and has remained a partner ever since. The firm became one of the most influential in the Netherlands. He served as professor at TU Delft from 1993 to 1998.

The same year he took the chair at Delft, he won second prize in the international competition to redesign the Reichstag in Berlin — the commission that eventually went to Norman Foster. Coming second in the most symbolically loaded architectural contest of the post-Cold War decade, having already built the Dutch parliament, established him internationally as a specialist in the architecture of democratic assembly.

Supervisor of Cities

Much of his later work has not been building design at all. He acted as supervisor and town planner for the development of the Zuidas, the enormous new business district on Amsterdam's southern axis. He served as urban planner for the redesign of Roombeek in Enschede, the neighbourhood destroyed by the fireworks disaster — a reconstruction that had to accommodate grief, insurance, dispersed former residents and a shattered street plan simultaneously.

He has been made an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau, and the King of Spain awarded him La Cruz de Oficial.

Why Pi Is Called a Genius

The specific ability at stake here is not formal invention. De Bruijn's buildings are not stylistically startling; the Tweede Kamer extension is a competent contemporary complex in stone, steel and glass that no one would identify by its silhouette. What he possesses to an unusual degree is something harder to photograph: the capacity to solve institutional problems spatially.

Consider what the parliament commission actually demanded. A legislature has functions that are simultaneously ceremonial, bureaucratic, journalistic and public. It sits in a historic quarter that cannot be cleared. Its users are the most scrutinised people in the country. De Bruijn's answer — run a public street through the middle of it — reorganised how Dutch politics physically works. Members and press meet in the Statenpassage because he built a place where they must. That is a designer thinking about political behaviour, not elevations.

The same faculty explains his second career as supervisor at the Zuidas and planner at Roombeek: he is repeatedly handed the situations where architecture must arbitrate between institutions, and he is trusted with them. His whole formation, from the London County Council to the Amsterdam Housing Service, produced a designer whose native unit is the city rather than the building.

The counter-case is straightforward. There is no de Bruijn manifesto, no theory, no identifiable style, and no single building that art historians point to as a masterpiece. His most famous work required demolishing a good building by a better-regarded predecessor. He came second at the Reichstag, not first. His honours are national civil decorations rather than the Pritzker. He is, on the evidence, an exceptionally intelligent professional operating at the highest level of public commission — which is a rarer thing than genius but perhaps not the same thing.

Legacy

The peculiar test of de Bruijn's parliament is that it is still being argued over, and he is still in the room. His own extension has entered the long renovation of the Binnenhof, and his firm has returned to design a new central public entrance to the chamber he built forty years ago — the unusual position of an architect asked to revise his own middle-aged work rather than watch someone else do it. Meanwhile the Zuidas has become the Netherlands' financial centre and Roombeek has been rebuilt as a functioning neighbourhood. His legacy is not a set of images. It is a set of places that work.

Achievements

• Trained at Delft University of Technology