Outdoor Center Roermond | PEÑA architecture

Until recently the Dutch city centers were the stage for a shopping audience, but the last couple of years shops have been grouping together and moving more and more off-centre to develop themselves into compact shopping islands in the periphery. After developing Betty Blue-Roermond in 2008, NIO architecten is asked to design Outdoor Center-Roermond. Betty Blue a shopping machine, waiting for visitors, as ambiguous it is in relation to its shape and color, it is sometimes straight and other times round, from the one side purple and from the other side blue. Outdoor Center is a new shopping machine, an antithesis for Betty Blue, from the one side green and from the other side orange/gold. Both buildings ready for the arrival of hundreds of thousands of visitors and their cars, ready to host and not being interested in anything else but to treat their guests to that one, exclusive experience. Even the choice for a directionless system of patterns of 8,10 by 8,10 meters did not result in a neutral building, but in a design in which it is exactly the deviations and exceptions which become visible.