Dusty gang. At first glance it seems like a livestock, sandy floor, bright light, the cattle might just leave. Or a concert hall before the start: ready ribbons ready, crush barriers in position. The plenary room of the House of Representatives in the parliament building on the Binnenhof has been stripped. The pale, mint -green carpet is gone. The blue seats transferred to the Bezuidenhoutseweg a little further in The Hague, where parliament is home to the renovation of the Binnenhof.
The room is empty, since 2021. There are people who have seen the room in the meantime: the builders, project leaders, Splinter Chabot (for the NPO series Meanwhile at the Hofvijver). But for most people the room has disappeared until further order.
The Binnenhofbouwplaats opened for a while on Saturday. It was the day of construction. It is for the rest of Bouwend Nederland on June 21, but The Hague is ahead because of the upcoming NATO summit. Visitors walked under supervision through buildings of the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Ministry of General Affairs.
If you look up in the Trêveszaal, you will see the ceiling painting from 1698 by Theodoor van der Schuer, a painter in The Hague who mainly worked with ceilings and chimneys.
Photo Bart Maat
The Trêveszaal from 1697 was the fixed meeting room of the Council of Ministers. In contrast to the meeting room of the House of Representatives, it is a room where visitors are rare. Just where people were on Saturday, there was a long table. If the table were still there, it would reach outside the frame of the photo. At the center of the long side of the table, the prime minister sat, with his face to the windows. Around him: the ministers. And around it again: painted portraits of stadholders.
Those portraits are out of the room. That happened before, around 1880, when the Binnenhof also underwent a major renovation, the Central Government Real Estate Agency discovered. Now the paintings are in depots, until they can return
Some information is stuck on the pilasters in the old room of the Lower House (or are we now speaking of ‘previous old room’?). The room was in use until 1992, there had been green benches that were still facing each other, as in the British House of Commons, instead of in a semicircle.
The visitors see a photo of what it was like shortly before the current renovation. Large carpet, with thirty colored blocks. Large light fixtures that helped the space in modern times.
Visitors in the corridors around the plenary room, in the new building on the Binnenhof from 1992.
Photos Bart Maat
The purpose of architect Pi de Bruijn, the man who designed the parliament building that was taken into use at the Binnenhof in 1992, was that it had to be a bit transparent. From outside, he had come up with, people had to be able to look inside, so the corridors in Tuuren, see who discussed what, with whom.
In the coming years, the conversations in the corridors will still be about wiring, insulation, installations, ventilation. But this renovation will also be finite.
