New university library will be €19 million more expensive, completion is scheduled for the first quarter of 2024
The cost for the construction of the new university library on the Binnengasthuisterrein has once again gone up: the new library will cost €128 million, €19 million more than the previous budget, which had also been increased. In addition, the construction will take nine months longer than foreseen. According to the most recent planning, the new university library will be finished in early 2024.
This was announced by Jan Lintsen, the UvA's director. ‘These are significant setbacks,’ he says. ‘Of course, I would have preferred it to be different. In practice it turns out that the center of Amsterdam only allows for limited complexity.’ In other words, the whole project has turned out to be architecturally very complex: it involves renovating and rebuilding a nineteenth-century hospital in the middle of the city, surrounded by narrow canals and dilapidated quays.
The new, sustainable university library must of course meet today's requirements. In addition, the architectural state of the buildings turned out to be ‘much worse’ than expected at the start of the renovation. There is also a shortage of space on the construction market and the cost of materials is constantly rising. Thus, you automatically end up with a new price tag.
The new university library is currently being constructed in what was the second surgical clinic of the Binnengasthuis until 1981. It is intended to be the pièce de résistance of the university quarter, ‘the new heart of the UvA,’ as the institution puts it. In addition to the university library, the Faculty of Humanities will eventually be located in this area. The faculty’s new dean, Marieke de Goede, has already taken her administrative seat in the refurbished oval Theo Bosch building, right next to the university library still under construction. The final word on whether that building will remain or eventually be demolished, as the UvA wants, has not yet been spoken.
The construction of the new university library is actually a project that began in the 1990s. It was budgeted at 160 million guilders, approximately €72 million. The existing university library was in danger of outgrowing its capacity and the Humanities collection was scattered across half the city. The UvA started looking for a single location and considered all sorts of options, such as merging with the new Amsterdam Public Library (OBA). A new building for the OBA was built on the River IJ, but the UvA was not in favor of the idea. According to the UvA board at the time, it did not fit in with their strategy to build a library far away from faculty buildings: there were to be four campuses at the UvA and one of them was to be the site of the library. There were no plans for a campus to be located on the IJ, and therefore no library. Around that time - the new century had begun - the ABN Amro building on Vijzelstraat, the so-called De Bazel building, became vacant.
Alderman Duco Stadig (PvdA) bought it on behalf of the municipality for 62 million guilders and made the UvA president Sijbolt Noorda (PvdA), whom he knew well, an offer: if the UvA wanted to buy the building to house its university library, the municipality would give a discount of 25 million on the purchase price. It was widely seen as a generous offer, but it fell through. There would be no campus on the Vijzelstraat, so why have a university library? On the UvA side, the distance to the Vijzelstraat - a few hundred meters - was also considered way too far from what the UvA saw as its future place of intellectual and administrative wisdom: the site on and around the former Binnengasthuis, the area where the UvA was ‘born’ in 1632.
 0717 teksten.jpg)
Cruz y Ortiz
The fuss only really started when the UvA board came up with a plan to knock down the historic nineteenth-century hospital buildings and build a brand-new university library. The prestigious Catalonian architectural firm Cruz y Ortiz was asked to design it (see here for the design at the time). But the building would never be constructed: the entire neighborhood, several local and national heritage institutions, half the city council and many UvA employees were against the demolition of the buildings. We were talking about historic national buildings here! The UvA was totally nuts! The historic buildings should be renovated, and then the university library could easily move in.
The UvA board thought differently and wanted to go ahead with the new building. The result was a battle that lasted for years. Trench warfare involving dozens of information evenings, furious letters, countless reports, visits to heritage professionals, local residents with rooms full of incriminating evidence against the UvA, not to mention various legal proceedings, made the UvA decide exactly 10 years ago this month to retrace its steps. It retreated and withdrew its application for a new building. Everyone was happy except Cruz y Ortiz, who had drawn up the UB designs for nothing (but, of course, sent the UvA a hefty bill for years of drawing).
New architects came, this time to design the university library in the buildings where it will eventually end up and - if all goes well - open its doors in two years. Not that everything went smoothly from 2012 onwards; quite the contrary. Of course, by now the entire university library was already one and a half times as expensive as once thought, and there was still no peace with the neighborhood regarding the design of the outdoor space or the location of the bicycle cellar. Also, in 2015 there was once again a Maagdenhuis occupation.
The university president at the time, Louise Gunning, drew up a 10-point plan to accommodate the squatters. One of them was ‘to resubmit the new UB to the academic community.’ In other words, there could be renewed discussion about the usefulness and necessity of a university library on the Binnengasthuis site. Shouldn't the library be moved to the Oudemanhuispoort after all? Deliberative democracy led to two additional years of delay. But in September 2019, the first pile for the renovation, construction and substructure of the National Monuments was finally driven in.
It is now two and a half years and one corona crisis later. The renovation has progressed steadily in recent years, a new foundation was laid and the bicycle cellar was built: 1,200 square meters for 1,000 bicycles. This includes changing rooms and showers, because anyone who cycles through the pouring rain or freezing winter wind must be able to take a shower and change clothes. In a few weeks, 600 tons of steel will be delivered to erect the glass roof that will be placed over the building's former courtyard. Any other facts? There will be 300,000 books in open storage, incidentally a lot fewer than in the current university library (there are 19 kilometers of books at the Singel; at the BG site there will be 7 kilometers). Many books will go to the storage facility in Southeast (the IWO) and a smaller number will be destroyed. There will also be 23 (teaching) rooms with a thousand study places, a number that can be scaled up to 1,600 if need be. In the associated former Nursing House there will also be another 80 to 100 work stations for employees.
Meanwhile, the original budget is a distant memory: the amounts that were passed over the table grew higher and higher. In 2018, the UvA was still assuming €66 million, by 2020 this budget had risen to €85 million and in January 2021 it was expected that the price tag would be €108.8 million. So now we have arrived at €128 million. Who knows, things may get even more expensive. In any case, a European war is not helping. In a press statement, the UvA emphasizes that the cost overruns have ‘no consequences’ for education and research. The extra costs can be absorbed ‘within the total housing plan of the UvA.’ Nevertheless, the bottom of the building fund is almost in sight. ‘With the current estimates, we can still handle a small setback, but not too much more,’ Lintsen said during a tour of the building site. Nevertheless, he is pleased that in the end, the UvA opted to renovate the historic buildings in 2012. ‘In spite of everything, I’m still glad that we didn’t go with the modern design (that of Cruz y Ortiz) and opted to renovate instead.’ In two years, we will see if the file on the new UB building can finally be closed.
Translation by Brenda Arnold
