A small and heavily industrialized town in the Netherlands has received a renewed heart in a comprehensive but economical program. The Brink Center, which provides urban spaces and invigorates the existing fabric with new functions, co-opts the inertia of 15,000 sq m of shopping to instigate major surgery on the city plan of Hengelo. It is a small Dutch town shaped by an industrial past and post-war reconstruction near the German border, and was just a village at a crossroads until the railway came through in the nineteenth century. The slacked town center tried to focus on a market place, but by the 90’s this had been given over mostly to use as a car park.

Opportunity for revitalization came with the liberation of the site between market place and railway station due to the demolition of one of Hengelo’s largest and oldest factories. At first, the demolition made condition worse by left a gaping hole in the urban fabric, but it prompted immediate action. In 1995 a competition was held to repair and retrieve the town center, and Bolles+Wilson won it. The brief demanded that this be done mainly with commercial elements, including a large department store, shops, offices and some housing. Bolles+Wilson mixed use development on the site has contributed to its renewal.

The Brink Center is enclosed by an existing apartment block mirrored by a similarly-scaled new one, and by a new department store. At street level the composition frames an urban choreography, a routing and a tying together of the overall morphological tissue conceived as an invisible logic which determines the geometry of the individual buildings above. A different scale of urbanity to the modest post-war surrounds. The brick-mix facade gives a rich texture to the precise sculptural form of the housing.

On economic and rational principles an underground car park beneath the shops dictates the 7.8 m regular column structural grid, with diagonal walls playing off the grid to animate the architecture and relate it to its urban context. One starting point was the huge underground car park required beneath most of the site, which both provides for customers to the new shops and replaces lost parking in the reclaimed market place.

Unlike modern architects whose the works let the module dominate the forms while ignoring the edges, Bolles+Wilson have designed the Brink Center shapes against the grid, often using the diagonal in ingenious ways. The result is a contemporary architecture expression of freedom, with basement and ground so different that at first it is hard to see how they fit together. In fact the whole car-parking grid is orientated to Bolles+Wilson’s new pedestrian arcade linking the market place to the station, which lies directly above the easternmost lane of the car park. The arcade area is sheltered by an elongated projecting canopy supported on spindly slanted legs, leads from between the apartment blocks to Hengelo’s railway station, with a further block of flats marking its other end.

The department store does not disguise its function, and is expressed as a three-storey building with a cantilevered roof folding over to give it a strong presence on the corner of the two squares. The sloping roof of the department store recalls through its semi-industrial character the factory around which Hengelo developed. This huge aluminium roof is a 50 cm architectural wrapping of the neutral space of shopping. A folding down of the tectonic skin produces deep beams supporting extensive comer overhangs.

To give some sense of vertical focus to the double square and make it visible from afar, Bolles+Wilson have added a 44 m white pre-cast concrete panels tower with LED clock at the top and a video pavilion projecting electronic billboards at the bottom to be used as an information and display point. This digital clock-tower is standing exactly on the intersection of the two squares. The project provides a distinctive landmark for this important central area of the town. Bolles+Wilson have undoubtedly given Hengelo a much stronger sense of place, and the development has worked commercially, even to the extent of engaging visitors out of other areas to the town. The Brink Center sits well with what was there before, and the character of the 60’s block has even been enhanced by its new context.

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