Caruso St John's Veemgebouw building is reviewed in the Architects Journal's Climate Crisis issue. Rob Wilson explores the project's respectful and flexible retrofit of the listed 1940s warehouse, part of the former Philips factory complex. The building now provides a mix of housing above a range of public and commercial spaces.
Photo © Filip Dujardin.
Related news
Marco Biagi explores the approach of international practices to decommissioned industrial buildings. Citing a range of recently completed projects, including Caruso St John's Veemgebouw, he discusses the rise of adaptive reuse. Biagi explains through our urgent environmental crisis, the reuse of industrial plants and depots is more necessary than ever, offering a new challenging creative outlet for contemporary architects.
Construction has completed on Caruso St John's redevelopment of the Veemgebouw, a former Philips factory building on Strijp S in Eindhoven. The monumental industrial site in the Brainport region of the city is now the centre of a lively urban environment.
The design repurposed the existing floors to create a varied mixed-use structure; including workspaces on the upper floors, a car-park and a food-hall on the ground floor. The project also included the addition of 38 rooftop studios and maisonettes.
The mast has been craned into place on top of the Veemgebouw. The design features integrated LED lighting, continuing the local tradition for night time illuminations across the city's skyline. It echoes the mast that stood on top of the building in its previous incarnation as a factory for the Philips electrical company.
The landscape and interiors of Caruso St John's Veemgebouw Strijp S are now taking shape. The top floor of new construction contains 40 apartments, arranged around a landscaped courtyard, with external facades of curving brickwork that form a new dramatic top to the building.
Caruso St John has won a RIBA International Award for its ‘innovative and joyful’ conversion of the Veemgebouw in Eindhoven, which has transformed the 1940s Philips electrical company warehouse into a modern mixed-use urban building.
In conversation
Florian Zierer
Berlin International University of Applied Sciences
Berlin, Germany
8th October 2024
Florian Zierer will be in conversation at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences on 8th October 2024, introducing the practice's recent projects with existing buildings.
Lecture
Reuse, Recycle
Lessons in Sustainable Architecture
Eindhoven, The Netherlands
10th February 2022
Peter St John is taking part in TU Eindhoven's lecture series, Lessons in Sustainable Architecture. His talk, Reuse, Recycle will discuss the practice's renovation projects with a focus on their sustainability and design process.
Hospitalfield features in the third issue of Alder, a publication documenting Scotland's modern architecture, produced by the office of Mary Arnold-Forster.
Rowan Moore includes the new studio building at Hospitalfield features in his top five projects of 2024, calling it "a playful, expressive structure in which fun is had, in the tradition of Arts and Crafts architecture, with eaves, gutters, cladding and other basics of building".
Caruso St John are guest editors of Baumeister's annual curated issue. The issue is conceived as a reader, presenting a series of texts that have influenced the practice's recent thinking, including writing by Material Cultures, Grace Ndiritu, Barbara Buser, and David Holmgren.
St Pancras Campus is reviewed in the December issue of the Architects Journal. Rob Wilson visits the building with Peter St John and Rod Heyes and discusses its position in the emerging cityscape between the railway land of King Cross and the Victorian terraces of Camden Town.
This second volume in Caruso St John’s Collected Works is published this month by MACK. The publication traces an interlacing set of themes through the practice’s work over the first twelve years of the twenty-first century. Its unique approach to history is revealed as a rejection of the myth of relentless novelty in favour of an understanding of the past as present and an interest in working with the existing. The influences of Milan, Chicago, and Rome on understandings of the city are explored, as well as the use of ornament and the place of Switzerland in shaping the practice’s evolving trajectory. Throughout these contexts, collaborations with contemporary artists including Thomas Demand and Damien Hirst continue to shape the practice's relations to the materiality and drama of space.