'the new situation continues to please everyone'

CC NL in Amersfoort Vathorst is a depot for art objects and heritage. Storage takes place in dark, low-humidity conditions at a stable temperature, while related functions such as restoration, packing and administration have been given pleasant workspaces. We spoke with director Wim Hoeben - just before his retirement - about the unorthodox solution we proposed and about daily life at CC NL.
 

How are you? Do you see your job differently now that retirement is near? 
"It feels like closing off what we've built. I've been involved with the new building from the very first moment. It's no longer new, we received the keys six years ago, and yet new things still happen regularly."

CC NL houses the collections of the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands Open Air Museum, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and Paleis Het Loo. How is the collaboration going? 
"The four collections used to be spread across fourteen locations. We moved from that messy situation to a single clear building. The new situation continues to please everyone. Merging the collections was an adventure. It took some getting used to that we're allowed to handle each other's objects, that felt counterintuitive. But the evaluation we commissioned last year showed that the collaboration only has advantages."

At CC NL, cepezed proposed the sustainable 'tea cosy principle'. That was new to you too. 
"At the time, we explicitly wanted a sustainable building, and according to the evaluation that requirement has been met very well. We accept that the temperature fluctuates somewhat, but not in sudden swings. We manage humidity, and the absolute humidity here is remarkably stable. That's fundamentally different from a traditional depot. It's still a bit strange that the depot feels properly cold in winter and properly warm in summer. 'Is this really working?' you wonder. The graphs show it is."

Does this interest other depots, as far as you know? 
"The climate principle is one of the reasons we receive so many visitors. Other depots are looking for sustainable systems. Our solution intrigues people because the importance of a constant temperature has been drilled into everyone. It means something that we're doing this, as Rijksmuseum and Cultural Heritage Agency."

How did you experience working with cepezed? 
"The points we raised were reflected in the design. The first contacts were immediately very good. I found it wonderful to experience that we understood each other straight away, and that you see your operational processes reflected in the sequence of spaces. By reasoning from the work itself, the layout becomes very logical."

Does the building feel your own to you and your colleagues? 
"You can tell that people enjoy working here. The head-neck-body principle you introduced is well understood. The head contains the offices, with plenty of glass. The neck sits in between and houses the spaces for packing and unpacking objects, for example, and for acclimatising or photographing them. There are also rooms where visitors can study objects, we're an accessible institution. The body is a box without windows, that's the actual depot. The grounds around the building are green, which the people who work here really appreciate."

The exterior reveals little. Can you give an idea of what happens inside? 
"We have 350 lorries a year at our door, plenty goes on. Even during our move, which took a year, something remarkable happened. The seventeenth-century painting View of Amersfoort from the Amersfoort town hall urgently needed restoration, but at four and a half metres in length it didn't fit in the local museum. It was restored here instead, which meant CC NL was immediately embraced by the city council. A funny story involves our pest treatment rooms, which is how colleagues find us. Kunsthal Kade, also from Amersfoort, was looking for a very large freezer for an art installation featuring a cubic metre of Surinamese soil. The soil was dug up in Suriname, placed on a pallet and flown from Schiphol to us, where it was deep-frozen for 48 hours."

Do you still think about cepezed sometimes? 
"I'm glad you also provided interior advice, because with four parties the interior could easily turn into an endless discussion. It created unity, choices are aligned, which allows the architecture to come into its own. I feel responsible for the building. It was so lovely when we moved in, I want that to be respected and I do my utmost to prevent twee little additions." 

→ read more about the CC NL project