Since the year 2001, the center of the Dutch municipality of Zaanstad has been gradually transformed to agree with the style of the nearby UNESCO World Heritage site the Zaanse Schans. The City Hall and Inntel Hotel reinterpret these vernacular forms, and are recent examples of this mimetic trend, within which the Cultural Cluster opens up a new chapter, designed as a cubic volume out of which the silhouette of a Zaan house is extracted in the form of voids that traverse the building creating atria and spaces with collective flexible programs.

The new volume houses the whole program required – a film house, a center for design, a pop music center, a performing and visual arts center, a music school, a library, and a local radio station –, and its perimeter adapts to the terrain’s level changes. Each one of the institutions has its own entrance designed as a Zaan house in a different color, the silhouette of which is visible on the outside at several points of the facade through a light perforated skin that wraps the volume. In this way the culture complex comes across as a single building while ensuring that each of the established cultural institutions inside keeps its own identity within the larger envelope.