Collection

Droogdok Jan Blanken

  • Date 1988 (unrealised)
  • Address Hellevoetsluis (Netherlands)

Vandenhove’s participation in the Hellevoetsluis Museum competition not only confirms the firm’s international ambitions but, above all, following the major exhibition at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, marks its first steps in the Netherlands – a country with which it would maintain a special relationship for many years to come.

In 1987, the Town of Hellevoetsluis launched a call for proposals to transform the former shipyard into a tourist hub. The small town, once a strategic port for the Dutch navy, still boasts much of its fortifications, but above all the first dry dock built in the Netherlands in 1806 by Jan Blanken.

Charles Vandenhove will first immerse himself in the site’s history and base his project on the building that once housed the dry dock pump. Demolished in the 1960s, this industrial structure in the neoclassical style would profoundly inspire the Liège-based architect, who would draw on a design vocabulary he had learnt to master. Towards the quay and around the ‘Timmerdok’, Vandenhove envisages six symmetrically designed buildings intended to house the museum’s facilities as well as various services such as a restaurant. In the centre, on either side of the dry dock, two small pavilions serve as a shelter and a café respectively.

Vandenhove, however, intended to go beyond the narrow scope of the museum project and proposed to create residential accommodation on the site. To enclose the historic site, he proposed constructing a semi-circular apartment block, flanked by two smaller residential blocks. The architect goes even further by proposing to build residential blocks of varying sizes all around the lake. Vandenhove’s project was ultimately not selected, and it would be some time before the practice successfully embarked on its ‘Dutch adventure’.

  • Description of the collection

    Competition documents, correspondence, site plan, photographs, sketches.
  • Volumetry 1 archive box (0.12 m)
  • Bibliography

    DEITERS, Patricia, Charles Vandenhove, een culturele en premoderne architectuur, Rotterdam, Nederlands Architectuur Instituut, 1990
  • AUTHOR AND DATE OF THE ENTRY Sébastien Charlier, 2022