This research by design responds to short-sighted thinking about ‘boxification’ — the large-scale construction of box-shaped commercial buildings along major roads — in the Netherlands and focuses on alternative approaches to distribution centres. The starting point is the aim to repurpose these vast, colossal buildings, rejecting the popular break-down-and-build-up mindset. Instead, we start from a tabula scripta — a used slate.

It is hard to imagine the Dutch landscape today without the presence of box-like structures. Many of these boxes serve as distribution centres: hundreds of metres of blind, grey, concrete and sandwich panel façades that proliferate rapidly, representing the physical manifestation of increasing online sales. These buildings are the product of a logistical process driven by efficiency and standardization; there is no demand for spatial quality, materiality or atmosphere. As a result, the landscape often feels disconnected from the people who inhabit it.¹

At the same time, there is potential for quality in the existing characteristics of the box, particularly in its immense scale and purely industrial character. Its generic appearance allows the box to be anything at all, its pragmatic industrial design reveals a unique beauty, and its scale gives it an almost monumental presence. Currently, the box is often perceived as nearly nothing, just a space, but it has the capacity to be much more: a megastructure where people can find meaning. It has the potential to be a place.

By looking at a specific distribution centre at different scales — also called tiendesprongen (‘tenths of a step’) — we perceive the box in individual fragments as well as part of a larger whole that includes people.² This process links up different scale levels and relates to the built environment as we understand it. At the smallest scale, the landscape’s history becomes legible, revealing its hidden richness. In its current form, the box appears to be a solid mass, but it actually serves as a shell surrounding a large open space. When the roof is removed, the space opens upward and the walls protect the interior, creating a vast walled space: a garden. This garden is both an inner world and an outer world, part of the architectural mindset.³

The box becomes a garden by analogy with the classical garden. Its industrial properties parallel the properties of the classical garden, including symmetry and the presence of an axial system. Clear main and side axes divide the box into distinct garden zones, shaped by the tectonic elements left behind by the distribution centre. For example, the three corner buildings merge to form a country house. Mannerism prevails, a style rooted in classical principles yetcharacterised by unique interpretations of these rules. The tightly woven interior world contrasts sharply with the rigid boundaries of the walls, which sit like a frame in the surrounding landscape. The buffer space between the building and its environment is cleared of asphalt and left to nature to create a no-man’s-land.

^{1 A. Geuze, ‘Koplopers: zonder verdozing’, De Balie, Amsterdam, 19 September 2022.
2 K. Boeke, Wij in het heelal, een heelal in ons (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2021).
3 E. de Jong, M. Dominicus-van Soest, Aardse Paradijzen. De tuin in de Nederlandse kunst 15de tot 18de eeuw (Gent: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 1996)}