#kollhoff

Kollhoff towers over The Hague. Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Justice Administration Building.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs is built of red brick, and the Ministry of Justice is covered with light granite. The towers are also called “JuBi-Gebouw”, Ju for Justitie and Bi for Binnenlandse.

The green skyscraper on the right is called “De Kroon” and was designed by Rapp + Rapp architects. At 131 m, it is slightly smaller than Kollhoff's two towers and was completed in 2011.

Two skyscrapers by Hans Kollhoff, a German architect and professor, were completed in 2012. A German architectural studio won the competition for new ministries in The Hague. Kollhoff is a representative of postmodern architecture and new classicism, as well as a hero of New Urbanism.

A pair of towers rises from the volume opening onto the promenade called Turfmarkt with the cour d'honneur cum garden. The ministry towers, with 36 floors and a height of 150 meters, stand out from the urban background with pilaster facades made of brick (for the Ministry of Interior) and granite (for the Ministry of Justice). The grey-green granite cladding of the base is made of four-centimeter-thick sandblasted slabs. These slabs are attached to the load-bearing wall with conventional stainless-steel anchors, with thermal insulation in between. In the corners of the ground floor, thicker L-shaped slabs supported by steel consoles were used.

This effectively emphasizes the expression of stability, which is also the intention of the hammered plinth. The rather flat facade of the first two floors with wide openings faces the street and connects to the ground with a curved profile, ending with a delicate course of strings. Shop windows are framed with brass-colored aluminium profiles. The second through fourth floor facades are topped by a tall main cornice that highlights the building's granite base and the shared ministries' functions. Here, the same casement windows that lie between the piers in the towers above serve as separate openings. Double windows allow natural, manually regulated ventilation throughout the building. The prefabricated facades of the towers are connected by pilasters which, covered with the same polished green granite as the base, break the upper edge of the wall and end in a crown. The connections between the elements disappear behind the overlapping panels, becoming invisible when viewed from the front.

The steeply sloping atrium, cut into the volume, has a main glazed front that overlooks the garden with revolving doors and brass-colored aluminium profiles. The garden is surrounded by a granite bench protruding from the building's plinth. This bench supports a fence made of decorative square posts and curved rectangular steel profiles coated in light anthracite. The tips are lacquered in gold.