Prefab parking garage in a dune

The Noordelijk Havenhoofd in Scheveningen is currently undergoing a spectacular makeover. Several years ago, the impressive Inntel Hotels The Hague Marina Beach already arose on the pier head. As an extension to this, an extensive program is being realized in phases with 65,000 m2 of commercial buildings for the fish-processing industry, a new boathouse for the KNRM (Royal Dutch Rescue Service), catering facilities and a parking garage with 840 parking spaces. Most unusual is that the 250-meter-long parking garage will become part of a new dune landscape. A nice challenging job for Continental Car Parks: instead of its usual light construction systems for parking garages, a heavy concrete structure was needed here to carry the sand of the dune landscape in particular.

"In October of this year, the parking garage will be completely finished," says Jeroen Drenth, director of Continental Car Parks. "The parking facility will then be ready for use immediately. A large part of the roof will be covered by a dune, and the other part will have beach tents. Those are heavy loads for a parking structure. Our usual modular systems such as Parkdeck and Hoeschdeck do not have the load-bearing capacity for this. Nevertheless, based on our knowledge of parking systems, and an excellent price-quality ratio, we were chosen by client VolkerWessels Vastgoed to build the parking garage. For this we sought the cooperation of a concrete company with whom we have done more projects. They collaborated on the detailing and supplied the precast beams. For the assembly we hired Mammoet, also a regular partner of ours."

To build the parking garage, the existing dune was first excavated. Then the parking garage was built on the foundations using prefabricated walls, intermediate columns, prestressed beams for the roof and hollow-core slabs for the storey floors. Drenth: "The roof is heavily loaded, with the dune carrying even more load than the hospitality pavilions. That is why we used special bridge girders with extra reinforcement steel for the roof, after which they were poured with concrete. To protect against salt water, additional coverage was applied to the reinforcement. This parking lot shell includes elevator shafts for the garage elevators that we build and the freight elevators for the beach pavilions that VolkerWessels provides. These wooden pavilions will soon be connected to the parking garage so they don't blow away." 

The parking garage will have an entrance on the boulevard, about halfway down. The 250-meter-long building has three parking levels, each forming its own compartment. The (mechanical) ventilation is from north to south and has chimneys that come at a healthy distance from the beach pavilions.  

For Continental Car Parks, the heavy concrete garage on the North Pier Head is an exercise that deviates from its highly modular portfolio, but one that has turned out well. Drenth: "Variety is always nice, just like putting something different to eat on the table. For example, the heavy elements allowed us to keep working almost all the time, despite the seaside location. That would have been different with steel plate concrete floors. Furthermore, it is an above-ground project and there is no groundwater pressure and uplift, and that makes it manageable for us. It was largely a matter of dry stacking and paying close attention to safety and quality. I can trust that to our experienced project team. The logistics also went smoothly, despite the fear of the notorious traffic jams to the beach. In any case, I am very pleased with this project, which is also going so well because of the good partners we work with. That was also one of the reasons for stepping into this adventure."