Robert Zandvliet, 2006

Location: Lyceum Ypenburg, Laan van Deelen 5, The Hague

The new building of the Lyceum Ypenburg (formerly Atlas College) was designed by DP6 and provides a huge amount of lockers for the students, spread over all floors. They are placed in the walls separating the classrooms from the galleries along the void and can be clearly seen from the entire building. Artist Robert Zandvliet was asked to create a striking design for these locker walls. Zandvliet enjoys national and international acclaim as a painter; this was the first time he had been asked for such a commission.

Zandvliet designed a graphic pattern of broad black and white stripes that lay across the grid of the locker walls and were milled into the surface of the doors. The precise course of the lanes varies from segment to segment, sometimes crossing only a diagonal while elsewhere there is a sinuous junction of interwoven stripes. Where the walls can be seen over several floors, the lanes continue from bottom to top. The strength of Zandvliet's design, however, is that the pattern fixes itself on your retina, as it were, so that you experience the individual parts - even if you don't have the overview - as connecting the building.