Grote Koppel, Amersfoort, The Netherlands

London-based architecture studio FAT celebrated the Dutch city's 750th anniversary with a project that, according to one of the partners, could be defined a "birthday cake for Darth Vader".

If a 50th anniversary is gold and 75th diamond, it appears that in Holland an appropriate 750th anniversary gift is a giant wedding-cake-building. London-based architecture studio FAT was commissioned to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the founding of the Dutch city of Amsersfoot by a local developer and responded with what one of the partners has described as a 'birthday cake for Darth Vader'.

Creating a dramatic diversion on the end of a row of a 19th century terrace and looking over the River Eem, the three-storey building –two floors of restaurant and offices on top - marks an important site in the port city. It is adjacent to a railway line, one of the many circular canals that make up the infrastructure of the city and its ancient medieval gateway. Each these contextual elements are not merely acknowledged but merged and melded into the building's physicality.

The façade, seemingly plastic, is cast in modular concrete panels. Each of these panels, whether dripping in ornamental tendrils or topped with miniature roof gables emerge from a desire to graphically manifest the history of Grote Koppel. The language, according to the architects is a kind of mannerist futurism.

The division of the building into three clear layers responds more naturally to the warehouses and townhouses that make up this provincial Dutch city. The white ground and first floor of the restaurant is open at ground level and capped with a dark grey second floor of the offices. Windows are seemingly randomly crossed with diagonals - casting into concrete something like ad hoc wooden bars - as though the building were derelict or abandoned. Their ornamental frames sprawl and melt into the walls.
Internally, the building has a grand ceremonial quality created by the theatrically designed staircases and the complex inter-relationship between the central atrium and the balconies/viewing points that overlook it. The cast concrete stair continues the idea of the shotgun marriage of brutalism and mannerism.
The building fits snugly into Fat's ouvre of eyebrow raising and yet comfortingly conformist designs. The use of pre-cast concrete and gables is a development from the Sint Lucas (2006), while the enthusiasm of a language of symbols and semiotics pervades throughout their work.

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