MVRDV has announced the completion of their Van Boven Architecten co-designed Gymnasium Beekvliet renovation project in the Netherlands.

The alma mater of both Winy Maas and Theobert van Boven was once the nation’s leading catholic seminary and was later used as an internment camp for political prisoners of the occupying Nazi regime during Worl War II before being modernized into a new grammar school in the early 1970s.

“I went to school at Beekvliet myself, as did one of my children, and my wife is also a teacher there. These connections strongly motivate me to design a unique and special building that does justice to the school’s rich history,” van Boven said in a preview last year.

Located in the village of Sint-Michielsgestel near Eindhoven, the school now features a unifying new auditorium addition at the center of the school that’s meant to improve circulation. An existing classroom building and plaza area were also renovated. Ian Kirkpatrick, a Canadian artist known for his mythologically-inspired sculptural work, was also included with the commission of a colorful mural design wrapping the façade of the auditorium that provides an inspiring final flourish to the project for students and their teachers.

The design extends the existing roofline of the old building down to the ground level, creating a reconfigured new entryway at the same location and creating space for enhanced educational activities, including more arts facilities, a stage, and a full-service working kitchen. By deferring to a “swooping” form in the addition of the auditorium, the firms say their intervention serves as an “eye-catching” new focal point that directs attention to the campus. 

Kirkpatrick’s artwork is said also to be inspired by the memories of former students of the over 200-year-old school. Overall, the project serves to add a new “cosmopolitan perspective” to the rural community. 

The commission was announced in 2016 and follows the 2019 Roskilde Festival Folk High School collaboration with Cobe in Denmark. 

Mass said: “Being allowed to renovate your old school is of course a huge honor. Theobert, Gijs, and I did wonder how we could do it in such a way that the grammar school would respond to the contemporary context as well as the past. Ian's paintings help enormously with that. I love that memories of students past and present are represented in his murals. Actually, there is a piece of everyone in the village in this building. It really is a reflection of the whole of Sint-Michielsgestel and its surroundings. Everything comes together in a ‘compass’ in the ceiling of the new entrance hall that points to where the stories come from in the surrounding area.”

MVRDV has also completed work on its new The Canyon mixed-use project in San Francisco recently and finished construction on a demountable office project titled Matrix ONE outside of Amsterdam earlier in the summer.