Architectural firm Zoetmulder designed a child center in Houten and chose sustainable materialization. The wooden facades with the arched windows immediately catch the eye. Soon the outdoor space will be equipped with play areas, a vegetable garden and wadis.
The new building houses a day care center and a public elementary school. The child center has just been inaugurated and the first reactions are enthusiastic. About the special facade, Elise Zoetmulder says: "Wood is a very beautiful product to work with, both in terms of physical properties and perception. The floor plan of the building is virtually square. So it's very compact. If you would execute this in stone or concrete, it would become a cold and austere whole.
With facades made of wood, which are also arched at the top, the appearance is friendly. The vertical breaks in the facade reinforce this, and the wooden turrets - each facade has one - also provide a playful effect. The Velduil really has a face of its own because of the use of wood."
Timberampels
"To determine which type of wood it would eventually be, we requested quite a few wood samples, put them side by side and compared them," says colleague Anton Zoetmulder. "We looked at both cost and aesthetics. We really liked the thermally modified fraké wood, and when it turned out that the supplier also had poplar and spruce in the same range, we decided to go for that. In the end, it became a combination of fraké and spruce.
Photo: Thomas van Belzen
The client was also enthusiastic, because of the appearance but also because a thermally modified type of wood is not or hardly susceptible to wood rot and therefore requires little maintenance. The cladding is fraké and is dark in color. The vertical beams along the gables, and the turrets are pine; light colored and somewhat knotty."
Quality guaranteed
The 'thermal modification' treatment is done to destroy the cell structure in the wood. This removes the breeding ground for fungi and insects and the chances of wood rot are almost zero. Thermally modifying wood - steaming - also makes the wood dimensionally stable and very light. Spruce is by nature a very soft wood and untreated not suitable for outdoor use. Because of the modification process, spruce is a high-quality product and therefore can be used in exterior walls.
The facade cladding at De Velduil children's center is open so it can ventilate. "The facades are separate from the insulation and the inner leaf so the air can get through properly," explains Elise Zoetmulder. "This way the wood ages more beautifully and the quality is guaranteed for a very long time, up to 50 years. An additional advantage is that it created more depth so we could very easily incorporate nesting boxes for bats and certain types of birds. We were also able to integrate the blinds for the arched windows into that gap."
Educational
A wide plinth runs along the bottom of the wooden facades. The plinth is made of concrete that incorporates (parts of) bricks from the old school. "So not biobased," says Anton Zoetmulder, "but reuse with a nod to the past.
There is also another aspect to this: at the top of the plinth, small gutters have been made near the windows. Water remains in them when it rains, and when the sun shines, the water evaporates and provides additional passive cooling. Although it is not possible to calculate exactly how high that yield is; it certainly has an effect. Moreover, the principle is interesting from an educational point of view; children can learn something from it. The same goes for the wadis, the nesting boxes and so on. All facets that you can pay attention to in a class."
Fire certification
Because of De Velduil's open facade cladding, it took some doing to get proper fire certification. Anton Zoetmulder: "With a closed facade, it's purely about the outside and the calculation is relatively simple. With the open facade cladding realized in this project, very specific calculations had to be made for the spaces between the boards, and the space between the inner leaf, the insulation and the facade cladding.
Photo: Thomas van Belzen
The vertical beams along the facades consist of multiple parts and are thus laminated. This presented an additional challenge in terms of certification because the fire rating of laminated wood is different from that of non-glued wood. So additional reporting was required to obtain the fire certificate. Additional fire breaks were also made on the inside of the timber frame. There were really some more steps involved, and in the implementation phase it was quite exciting. In the end, it all worked out."
Positioning on the plot
Bureau Zoetmulder aimed to design an energy-neutral building. "That starts with reducing the energy demand," states Anton Zoetmulder. "A well-insulated building stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The child center is compactly built and has limited space on the roof. With the solar panels installed there and the boosted insulation value of the facades, floors, window frames, we came out just right."
Photo: Thomas van Belzen
Elise Zoetmulder adds, "The child center has a compact, almost square, floor plan and is positioned on the lot so that not the facades but the corners face south-west-north-east. Thus, there is no facade that catches all the sun, or no sun, all day. This results in a low heat/cold loss in the façade, and that has a positive effect on both the well-being of the building's occupants and the energy bill. There are a number of mature trees on the south side and that too helps keep the children's center cool. All in all, this is a very successful project that we are proud of."
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