Amsterdam Court House (NACH) will be home to the Amsterdam Court
In the future, the building designed by KAAN architects should ensure an optimal and professional functioning of the judiciary.
Transparent and open where possible, safe and discreet where necessary, NACH will accommodate 1,200 employees and numerous visitors in the future. With a floor area of 47,250 m², divided over 11 floors, and a very sleek facade, the building radiates authority.
The basement and lower floors are mainly built with concrete walls combined with steel floor beams, and the amount of steel limited to 1,800 tons. The upper six floors have an all-steel structure which consists of 3,300 tons of steel and 22,500 m² of steel deck floors. Steel also played an important role in the facade. The load-bearing façade columns, which are in fact outside of the insulation shell, are covered with steel façade caps. The grid refines upwards with the addition of false columns and horizontal caps. About 700 tons of steel plates were used for the entire façade construction.
The engineering of this complex project took about two years. Extensive use was made of the possibilities which BIM has to offer. Clashes with reinforcement bars in the many complex steel-concrete connections were always detected well in advance, and it also proved to be an indispensable tool in the coordination of more than 13,000 floor beam openings for installation use.
The sleek façade construction also required strict tolerances to be imposed on the columns. For this reason, connections were designed to align the columns even after the concrete floor was hardened. BIM was frequently used to identify the interfaces with other parties, such as the glass supplier, in a timely manner.
