Coloured Matters
Registration Center Ter Apel
64 hearing-rooms, 4 corridors and two waiting-rooms.
Refugees from all over the world started their application for immigration here; a very uncertain process in which the identity of the applier had to be confirmed and approved of in order to get into the next phase of obtaining a status as refugee.
Project Details
Title Coloured Matters
Skills Interior design
Location Registration Center
City Ter Apel
Date 2001
Hearing Rooms
The sixty-four hearing rooms were divided into a neutral side where the official is seated. The other half of the room is brightly coloured and supplemented with three objects, differently displayed in each room.
About the building
This registration centre was where asylum seekers applying for a residence permit for the Netherlands were first interviewed. The centre combined an existing building containing the management department with a new portion where the asylum seekers could live for several days and where the hearings and investigations were held.
The two are linked by a tapering corridor. The new part has a square plan with four internal courtyards. Despite the necessary security precautions and strategies of separation, the interior steers clear of an atmosphere of incarceration through its well-groomed finish and the daylight entering through roof lights. In tune with the Dutch change of policy on refugees the building now serves as a departure centre.
Architectural office: Geurst & Schulze
Waiting Rooms
Sixty-four photographs
Sixty-four photographs, portraits made of the rooms, hang in the two waiting-rooms were the refugees spend for days waiting in uncertainty of their future.
