Reclaimed from the encroaching sea, polders create a distinctive patchwork across the low-lying land of the Netherlands. In the north, a new campus was under construction and it needed a central office building. The brief called for a low carbon design that attracts and retains talent, promotes their health and wellbeing, enables phased expansion and is firmly rooted in the region. Interiors should renounce the vanilla.

 

Like children’s building blocks, a modular ‘plug and play’ approach allows volumes to be added as the campus grows. Influenced by Louis Kahn’s ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces, alternating fat and thin blocks stagger creating open sided courtyards between. Drawing air into the workspaces from these courtyards and expelling it through rooftop chimneys, natural stack ventilation improves energy efficiency cutting the carbon footprint.

 

Glazed curtain walling floods the broader ‘served’ wings with daylight. Fibre cement cladding on the narrower ‘servant’ blocks extends inside, drawing the eye out to the landscape beyond. At the entrance, these panels fold up forming a canopy supported by supersized corten steel letters doubling as signage.

 

This aperture leads to a circulation spine connecting all the building blocks. Its vibrant blue quartz terrazzo floor evokes a waterway. Sculptural polished plaster pods in off white and dark grey punctuate the ‘served’ spaces. Reinforcing the polder metaphor, bold graphics applied to the walls overlap onto the ceiling, almost like graffiti. This patchwork pattern reappears on bespoke carpets in video conference suites and more subtly in a porcelain floor which extends from canteen to courtyard.