Facilities Management Unit & the Technical Rooms
The Facilities Management Unit, or FMU, was part of the Registry’s General Services Section and in charge of the Tribunal’s main building on Churchillplein 1 in The Hague. It also managed the two other buildings that the Tribunal occupied when it was at its largest – the Admin building and the Beach building. The Admin building was a few hundred metres from the main building and the Beach building was located by the Scheveningen beach in The Hague. Both were ordinary office buildings and quite unlike the architecturally significant main building. The Tribunal had left these buildings several years before this project was photographed.
Most staff members were in contact with the FMU when they checked out keys to their offices, desks and bookcases or when they had building-related problems. For instance, the air-conditioning occasionally did not function optimally and needed to be adjusted on particularly hot or cold days. But the FMU was involved in many, many more aspects of the building’s operation, including constructing and redesigning the courtrooms and the cafeteria, raising and removing walls to reshape office areas and moving furniture and equipment when staff members changed offices.
The majority of the areas shown in these photos have never been photographed before and have almost certainly never been seen by most of the many staff members who served at the Tribunal. Yet many were accessible from literally across the corridor from many of their offices.
