A Eulogy to the PC Hoofthuis Part 1: Why we need freaks of nature

The PC Hoofthuis is not a conventionally attractive building. A modernist contraption glued on the old world Spuistraat, this UvA library and faculty smells like a beautiful uncanny accident. It has certainly become dead weight to the UvA, however. With the new university library opening next September, its ugly little brother is being phased out of use. The PCH library will be the first part of the building to go, closing its doors on the 16th of June. The whole building will most likely be sold after, although the UvA has most likely not found a buyer yet. With the end in sight for our dear PCH, I felt a proper eulogy was deserved. 

This article is the first of a two-part series that attempts to do justice to the building and the conversations it has with visitors. The first volume will aim to convince you that the PCH is irreplaceable. The second will investigate what it’s being replaced with, and the UvA’s plans to sell the building. The bottom line: no matter your (probably vehement) position on the PCH, you don’t have to love the building to conclude that it should stay.

Those repelled by our beloved PC see in it an unfamiliar face. The building tests you like a lab rat: entrances are only found through the least convenient routes, not every door is an exit, not every elevator leads to every floor. If you want to learn the building, you have to unlearn what you think you know about it. The odd distribution of space is a scandal amongst overworked students, who would rather seek the comfort of the predictable and open study spaces of REC or Science Park than risk wandering through this labyrinth. In a social atmosphere that is atomized and immediate, however, its weirdness is its greatest strength. Very few buildings are designed to manipulate you into slowing down. Let me explain.

The odd distribution of space is a scandal amongst overworked students, who would rather seek the comfort of the predictable and open study spaces of REC or Science Park than risk wandering through this labyrinth.

Just like its siblings, the PC Hoofthuis is built on particular assumptions about humans, their needs, and how they act when jumbled together in a semi-public space. To Renè Boer, these elements are the “script” every building writes, the normative assumptions crawling under its foundations. If the city is a battleground of scripts, every building is waging a constant, silent war with its neighbors over the rival worlds they are built for. For the PC Hoofthuis, this world is defined by our interrelation and mutual acknowledgement as members of a shared social group. While not designed as a community space, architect Theo Bosch carves the building with micro elements that borrow your gaze and lend it to strangers: you peer inside towards the classrooms, where the half-windows expose the lecture halls to passerbys. You also peer outside towards the city, where the windows at ground level confront pedestrians on the adjacent street. This anti-architecture, defined by the spontaneous tightening and loosening of space, demands that you find comfort in the discomfort of conviviality. The PCH sneaks all of these ideas into its frame.

In this shedding city, such a building becomes more than just an architectural social experiment. It is also a middle finger to the perfect city that the UvA and (its) businesses are manufacturing. Going back to Boer, the more buildings are written with similar scripts, the stronger their influence becomes. This is important because the PCH is not the only weird building in this city that’s being lost.

Picturing contemporary Amsterdam, René Boer talks of a smoothening city, an urban environment metamorphosed by business interests. If every dimension of human life is a potential market, then every aspect of the city must look friendly enough to attract investment. This commercial rationale deforms the city’s facade, fostering architectural beauty standards that fetishize the smooth, clean, predictable, precise, inoffensive, obvious, profitable and controlled. We can look to campuses built after the UvA’s partial privatization as specimens: they hypermaximize the functional and aesthetic value of every spatial inch; every corner is polished and controlled. The script they write is one in which buildings have no responsibility to nudge people out of their comfort zones or remind them subconsciously that they share space with other humans. The more the UvA’s spaces start to look like office spaces, the more its students will start to feel like office workers, chained to their comfortable little cubicles. This trend at the UvA is a microcosm of the city’s ongoing neoliberal adolescence. 

With the visual homogenization of streets that were once architecturally biodiverse, we also see the homogenization of acceptable lifestyles. The range of who is allowed in a specific area and what they are allowed to do becomes slimmer and more suffocating. The city becomes a bubble of bubbles in which wandering, creating, and breathing without the intention to spend money (or make money) become unthinkable anomalies. This is the city that buildings like the PC Hoofthuis are designed to unstitch. These are structures that confuse the corporate world: hard to digest and tricky to wrap our heads around. They were meant for a more public and more curious city than the one we have right now. This is why the UvA believes the PCH can be scrapped: buildings unsubmissive to the smooth neoliberal style feel uncomfortable and blasphemous. Because they butt heads with the world the UvA is creating, in which its pupils are consumers and the city is the product. 

Despite the love I feel in my bones for this concrete mess, the PCH will soon be gone. But its spirit will endure as a protest against the city’s discoloration. Against the expectation that space must be immediately understood and categorized. Against the polished, experience-oriented Zuidasization of Amsterdam. Against the pressure to label and control time, space and every corner of our lives.