Bunkertreppe

The Benedensas site is part of the West Brabant Water Line, a Dutch defensive inundation line, and the submerged inlet point shown here is also part of the Atlantic Wall that German forces built during the Second World War. The Bunkertreppe project places a viewpoint directly on top of a wartime German bunker, allowing visitors to look out over the Volkerak, the Dintelse and Heense buntings and the wider waterside landscape. The structure is built from laminated Accoya wood, a modified timber chosen for durability in the exposed waterside setting, and it sits on the bunker roof as a minimal, almost deferral intervention rather than an added monument. Designed by RO&AO and completed in April 2016, with Benensas bv as client, Ro Koster, Ad Kil, Martin van Overveld and Chris Bakens on the design team, GJM Bouwadviseurs of Bergen op Zoom as structural engineer and photography by Katja Efftingh, the project turns a former military obstruction into a civic lookout. The stair and viewing platform expose the visitor to the same wide prospect the bunker was built to watch, converting an instrument of war into a device for contemplative landscape reading. The Accoya wood wraps the concrete bunker in a warm, living skin, and the slender stair geometry reads as a contemporary gesture placed on the heavy wartime mass, so that history and present-day use are held in one composition. Project details are limited in the source material.