Bunker Tower | Powerhouse Company

Reviving the Bunker

Hugh Maaskant’s Bunker is a Brutalist classic: a horizontal concrete composition of bold lines, rugged materials, and massive volumes. In recent years, however, it had fallen into disrepair, and only narrowly escaped demolition. Together with developers RED Company and Being Development, Powerhouse Company won the 2016 competition set by the University of Eindhoven to decide the Bunker’s future. By adding the residential tower, the winning design generates the extra value needed to fund the painstaking restoration of the original building. Adding the tower also allowed underground parking, enabling the transformation of the existing parking lot into a public park surrounding the complex.

The complex restoration work and challenging new construction project were both handled by Van Wijnen contractors. The Bunker Tower is set in a new park landscape designed by DELVA Landscape Architecture & Urbanism. With its green surroundings and unique residential opportunities, the Bunker brings a new impetus to the whole area and Eindhoven as a whole, as it joins several new architectural landmarks in the city.

Iconic architecture

The designer of the original Bunker building, Hugh Maaskant, was one of the Netherlands’ most famous and prolific 20th-century architects. His buildings, bold architectural statements that reflect the optimism of the postwar period, shifted from a Modernist to a Brutalist idiom during his career. Designed in 1969, the monolithic student union building for the new Technical University Eindhoven falls into the latter category.

Quickly nicknamed ‘De Bunker’, the building became an important social hub for students and the wider community. With its sloping walls, simple geometry, pronounced asymmetry, and primary colors, the building marks an important stage in postwar Dutch architecture.

A bold solution

Powerhouse Company’s design daringly unites the new residential tower with the original structure, by adopting the language and materiality of the old Bunker. Rather than resorting to traditional solutions of designing ‘around’ monuments – with either a strict separation or a strong contrast between old and new – Powerhouse has made the new tower a bold and imaginative continuation of Maaskant’s architectural style.

The tower tapers as it rises, echoing the Bunker’s sloping walls. Its asymmetrical and stepped form again channels Maaskant’s design and presents varying perspectives from different parts of the city. In three distinct sections, the tower lifts Maaskant’s design language into new territory, twisting dynamically and becoming progressively lighter and more open as it rises. The greater expanses of glass at the top of the tower symbolize the reopening of the previously boarded-up building to the city and provide wonderful views for the new residents.