Back in 1999, he had far grander plans for the site around those containers and the sports centre, including the car park. Commissioned by the St Servatius housing association, he designed a campus that would have been the envy of many a Dutch university town: a tall building, surrounded by water, with a 63-metre tower backed by a shell-like structure. It would have been big enough to house a state-of-the-art sports centre, five hundred student rooms and studios, and 22 flats. The standout feature: the copper cladding of the buildings. It would’ve been a spectacular sight, but critics were quick to point out that copper mining is environmentally harmful and, worse still, often ethically questionable. The Calatrava campus had a projected price tag of around €165 million, with completion planned for 2004.
One million
But the project would never see the light of day. What followed was five years of negotiations and discussions about who would pay for what. In December 2004, UM, the municipality of Maastricht and the Province of Limburg agreed that each would contribute one million to the project, with Servatius footing the rest of the bill. The university would also lease out some 30,000 square metres of land. The old sports centre was to be demolished in 2005, with the first students moving to the campus in 2007.
Again, everything turned out differently. Ground wasn’t broken until October 2008. A few months later, in March 2009 – around the time of the global financial crisis – Servatius was revealed to be in deep financial trouble. In June, work on the copper campus was halted. For a while, there was still hope, but by autumn the government stepped in and it became increasingly clear that the housing association could not cover the costs, which had ballooned from €165 to €235 million. Deep in the red, Servatius narrowly escaped bankruptcy.
Serious miscalculations
“Copper campus scrapped; sports centre to go ahead” read the headline in Observant in November 2009. The university vice-president at the time, André Postema, expressed astonishment at Servatius’ “serious miscalculations”, telling Limburg media that UM “had repeatedly raised concerns, everything was taking ages, and Calatrava was a controversial choice of architect – the man makes trouble wherever he goes, and all his projects end up costing far more than expected.” Calatrava’s firm bristled at the criticism and threatened legal action, though it never came to that.
The long-promised sports centre, much anticipated by the UM community, finally opened its doors on 12 April 2016, boasting a fitness room, a climbing wall, squash courts, a spinning studio, smaller and larger sports halls, a Sports Café and even study spaces. As student and staff numbers continuing to rise, the centre has already too grown small, leaving sports clubs with waiting lists. A solution has yet to be found. Time to call Calatrava again?