Uniper Stadcentrale Den Haag

When electricity was still a mysterious novelty in 1906, municipal architect Adam Schadee designed Den Haag’s first power plant to look reassuringly palatial, complete with refined brick detailing that whispered ‘trust us’ to a public still wary of this invisible force. The gambit worked: the plant powered the city’s brand-new electric trams and has been humming along ever since, making it the Netherlands’ oldest continuously operating power station. Its coal-burning days are long behind it, but the building still supplies heat to thousands of Hague homes.

For nine years, starting in 2013, the plant’s long-idle turbine hall moonlighted as a cultural venue, hosting art installations and performances in a space one visitor called a “steel cathedral.” That chapter closed in January 2022, when the city declined to renew funding and Uniper reclaimed the hall for its own use. The building, it turns out, has never had much patience for retirement: whatever isn’t generating power gets put back to work eventually, one way or another.