05/​07/​2018 – ANI­MAL HOS­PI­TAL THE HAGUE IS SYM­PHONY IN WOOD

“FARO designed a ani­mal hos­pi­tal as a sym­phony in wood. Inland larch adorns the south­ern facades in vari­ety, black wood makes the outer shell robust “. This intro­duc­tion adorns an arti­cle in the June issue of Hout­blad. Direc­tor of the Hague Ani­mal Hos­pi­tal and Ambu­lance Ser­vice Pieter Smit knows exactly why he chose FARO.

For peo­ple and animals

“Arci­tect Jur­gen van der Ploeg came to see us imme­di­ately. He saw that cats like to sit in the sun, they now have an outer cage on the south. Sick cats, how­ever, like to look up the dark; the quar­an­tine rooms are on the north “. Stress reduc­tion is essen­tial for sick ani­mals, so each hous­ing had to be tai­lored to the spe­cific ani­mal. And many facil­i­ties are hospital-​grade.

The vision of FARO is: “If you do not build for peo­ple, for whom?” FARO had to take into account ani­mals and peo­ple in this assign­ment. To take the neigh­bors into account, the dogs were given a sep­a­rate room to pre­vent noise from bark­ing. The back sides are also black so that it is not too notice­able. The front is warm brown.

Beau­ti­full

The build­ing is beat­i­full to look at. The asym­met­ri­cal sad­dle roof comes to the fore at the façade. The wooden columns sup­port the over­hang, cre­at­ing a shel­tered out­door area. The bridge is a show­piece of the tra­di­tional build­ing. Both the handrails and the bridge deck are made of round wood.

Van der Stap explains that the FARO team selected thou­sands of trees from an inland dou­glas stem. It then dried for a few years and was then sawn into a jewel of the Ani­mal Hospital.

Ideals

Wouter van der Stap and mod­eller Jesse Kat super­vised the con­struc­tion. Wouter: “You will never get larch out­side frames in the house build­ing, even if they are pro­tected by an over­hang like this. Here the client did not only rely on guar­an­tees, but he also let him­self be guided by his ideals. He was look­ing for the best pos­si­ble pos­si­ble with us. Then you do not want hard­wood, which grows rel­a­tively slowly and has to travel far. Larch is rel­a­tively inex­pen­sive, grows at light­ning speed and comes close up “.

The black façade cladding con­sists partly of black wood Tonosho, for which FSC-​douglas shelves were burned accord­ing to a Japan­ese use. Another part is black dyed dou­glas. It is pre­cisely this com­bi­na­tion that pro­vides beauty and a reduc­tion in costs. FARO has set up an attrac­tive build­ing in col­lab­o­ra­tion with its part­ners. A build­ing that takes into account ani­mals and peo­ple, with a brown-​black coat!

Click HERE to read the arti­cle in Houtblad