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The Building
The buildings in which the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport is housed were designed by the American architect Michael Graves and the Dutch architect Sjoerd Soeters. The building with the two pointed roofs, called Castalia, is by Graves, and the three lower buildings, known as Helicon, are by Soeters.
Castalia somewhat resembles a gigantic canal house. Its windows, too, are reminiscent of the 17th century. But its most eye-catching feature is its two blue roofs. Whereas Michael Graves harks back to the architecture of the Golden Age, Sjoerd Soeters alludes to The Hague’s architectural traditions. The horizontal white lines bisecting red brick house fronts are a striking architectural feature of many of the town’s neighbourhoods. They reappear in the Helicon buildings, where white transverse elements contrast with red brick.
In the 1960s, a theatre stood where the Ministry stands now. Dedicated to the arts and sciences, it provided a venue for various theatre companies and artistic happenings until it burnt down in late 1964. A high-rise office building called the Transitorium was built on the site in 1967 to house a number of government agencies.
In the early 1990s, plans were drawn up for a new neighbourhood called “de Resident”. Castalia arose on the steel and concrete skeleton of the Transitorium, and was completed in 1995. It is the second highest building in The Hague, standing at 104 metres. It is only outdone by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, which is 142 metres high.
