Utilitarian yet ornamented
Patterned brick and stone detail on a tower for storing water.
Tijs Teulings — CC BY 2.0 · Michielverbeek — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Steven Lek — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Steven Lek — CC BY-SA 4.0
An early twentieth-century water tower in northern The Hague near the dune belt, designed by the architect Roelof Kuipers. The building is an example of how utilitarian structures were treated in that period: the tower's function is storing water to generate pressure, but it was built as though it were representative architecture — patterned brick, stone detailing and a distinctive roof, rather than a concrete box. The prevailing belief was that public works represent the city to its inhabitants and therefore deserve design. Its location has an engineering reason. The dunes north of The Hague are not only scenery but the region's natural water reservoir. Rain filters down through the sand, is naturally purified and collects beneath it, and this system has supplied The Hague with its water since the nineteenth century. The towers were built near the dunes because the water was there. The building is protected as a monument, is not entered, and is seen from outside.
Patterned brick and stone detail on a tower for storing water.
Rain filters through the sand and gathers beneath — The Hague's water.
The belief then was that utilities deserve design, not only function.
Northern The Hague, near the dunes
Raw water is pumped into shallow ponds on top of the dunes and seeps slowly through the sand layers. The sand acts as both a physical and a biological filter: it traps particles, while bacteria in its upper layers break down organic matter. The passage takes weeks or months, after which the water is collected in wells and given a final treatment. The system is old, used in the Netherlands since the nineteenth century, and remains fundamental today.
The Meijendel and Westduinen reserves are open dune landscapes with walking and cycling paths, holding foxes and deer that are genuinely seen at first light. The route from the city to the beach through the dunes is about half an hour by bicycle and is among The Hague's finest. The sand is mobile and the paths are marked — stay on them, because the plants that hold the dunes together are fragile.
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