ROC Friese Poort

The new building of the Friese Poort regional education centre for healthcare centres arounds an atrium that links the educational teams, affording a sense of order and openness, with each team having its own area, creating a familiar teaching environment that provides students with their own home ground where they can feel safe and among friends. The atrium acts as a core where people can meet and which connects the various floors in a few smooth movements. It is a positive and welcoming centre that invites and unites, stimulates and activates, where you can feel at home and find a place of your own. Next to the central core, each team has its own territory, a safe and secure inner sanctum. The semi-stepped floors on either side of the atrium enable the teams to keep eye contact, creating a visual link and facilitating ‘crossing over’.

The atrium also establishes the link between the outside world and the inside of the building, between educational facilities and the campus embedded in the slopes of the grassy hills. The building displays a unique face of its own, the nature of the education itself, welcoming, connecting, tender as well as powerful.