The Van Gorp company, located along the canal in Ravels, had divisions in road construction, concrete products, and granito flooring. As the offices were no longer adequate, in 1965 Jansen and Schiltz were asked to design a new office building on the other side of the road to Turnhout ex novo In the first building permit application of 1966, we see that the two upper floors are contained within two concrete U-shapes. They rest on four columns, which become more visible in the lower, fully glazed level. To the right stands the single-story block of the concierge residence with the obligatory patio. In the facade, the sides of the U refer to a road with a marking in the middle, a nod to the company’s core business. The side facades are kept free for the office windows. The second and third building permit applications from 1968 and early 1969 continue with this scheme. A floor has been added, the stairs are placed transversely instead of lengthwise, and the concierge residence has been positioned behind the office building. The foundations for the four heavy columns had already been poured when a fourth plan was developed. By abandoning the road image in the facade and increasing the number of columns from four to twelve, a structure could be realized that better fits around the functions and saved considerable concrete.
Below and in the plinth, which is 1 m above ground level, are the technical spaces, archive, and dining room. The building itself is easily readable. The offices on the first, second, and third floors are arranged in two blocks symmetrically around the central stairwell. In the front and rear facades, they are enclosed by blind walls in white-painted brick. The stairwell, together with the ground floor, forms the third block. This block is entirely glass and is set back from the other blocks so that ten columns stand outside on the ground floor. The middle columns in the side facades are also free-standing on the first floors, as the glass wall is also set back here, creating terraces. The width of these columns increases with each lower floor because that section bears more weight. The floor height of the offices, however, increases towards the top. There are two reasons for this: not only functional, because the management offices are located on the top floor, but also aesthetic, to compensate for the foreshortening of perspective. The middle building block contains the elevator at the back and a landing staircase in front. Jansen and Schiltz repeated the staircase from the ground floor to the upper floor by rotating it 180° around its center point. This way, visitor circulation is separated from staff circulation.
In the ceilings, the cassettes of the concrete construction are left visible. The architects proposed having polyester molds made for the formwork. After removing the formwork from the floor slab of the first floor, everything could be reused for the formwork of the upper slabs. The cassettes simultaneously form the grid of the building, with a unit of 50 cm by 151.5 cm. The latter measurement is the length of a fluorescent tube, including the fixture.
References to rational periods in art history are easily found. The plinth, symmetry, and perspective adjustments reference Greek antiquity, and the cassettes refer to Roman antiquity. The staircase from the ground floor to the upper floor can be found in a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, and the expression of the side facades closely aligns with Italian rationalism from the beginning of the previous century, as in the Casa del Fascio by Giuseppe Terragni in Como. These references are post factum and most likely not intended as such by the architects, but they do demonstrate the intellectual richness of this refined rational building. During a renovation in 2002, when the terraces were incorporated into the volume, this was lost.
‘Architecture in the Golden Sixties – The Turnhout School, Lannoo Campus, 2012’.
