Designing with and for people in the neighbourhoods is a very important aspect of our work. Generic concepts and standard typologies are never applied directly but change according to the project’s context. Stedenbouw in an intense working process that demands a lot of communication and interaction between the client, future users and the design team. The real needs are often beyond written briefs and become apparent through discussions. Herman Hertzberger's Centraal Beheer office building can be considered as one of the first attempts to approach questions of what an office is, what an office can be, what an office should be, against the background of, in context of, evolving contemporary understandings of European society. And also as one of the first attempts to approach the question of the individual employee within the office community. Contact Us Architect Apeldoorn Email: [email protected] Phone: +31555690040 Prins Willem-Alexanderlaan 301 Apeldoorn, Gelderland, NL 7311 SW The 1.3 million LED lights in the glass wall showcase a continuously changing landscape of ‘travelling sand’, referencing a surprising phenomenon of the regional landscape. The glass wall is also lit during the day, transforming the otherwise shaded (north-facing) wall into one of the most vibrant elements of the square. Through connecting different modes of transportation in an urban space of high quality, the project contributes significantly to the sustainability of the city. Before the intervention, the site was an unruly vehicular area, unfriendly to pedestrians and an aesthetically bleak entrance to the city. Only the historic station building had some significance in the traffic congestion. De Passerel by JDWA Johan De Wachter Architects rounding up a selection of recently launched products by designers and studios, published on Dezeen Showroom. Originally built in 1686 as a royal hunting palace for King William III, the Baroque complex on the outskirts of Apeldoorn has served as a state museum since 1984, but was suffering from dated facilities and fittings and required asbestos removal. Dikkie Scipio was part of this debate together with Linda Vlassenrood, Eileen Stornebrink, Peter van Assche, Pınar Balat, Murtada Alkaabi, Erica Smeets-Klokgieters and Jurrian Arnold. The event also had Indira van ‘t Klooster (Arcam Architectuurcentrum Amsterdam) discussing new values, ownership and authorship in architecture.A mix of spaces not to be confused with the strict zoning of the functionalist city, but rather as a free mix of spaces which, as with the spaces in a non-planned city, the residents define, control are responsible for, individually and collectively, and which every resident can read and implicitly understands. A mix of public spaces, private spaces and in-between spaces office buildings previously hadn't had. Something we can do today because of contemporary understandings of the family, of the family unit, understandings that have developed a lot since the 1970s and seen the term family become much less clearly definable than it once was, if remaining every bit as important. And incentives which in the Centraal Beheer office complex were perhaps best articulated by the fact staff were encouraged, empowered, to bring in their own plants, pictures, objets d'art, whatevers, even furniture, to decorate their corner of the office as they saw fit and thereby claim it as their personal, private, individual, space. Something utterly unthinkable just a few years earlier, and something which was of central importance to Hertzberger as it meant not only that that "everyone's choice, and thereby his standpoint, is brought into the building"12 but also enabled the employees to take possession of the building, individually and collectively. After his studies at the University of Louvain in Belgium, Johan De Wachter moved to Rotterdam.The case is particularly interesting for our semester project since the systematic design strategy and the grid composition of the Apeldoorn’s building are also present in the former IPSV, our local main work material. In addition, there is much information available on the network, both of the original building and the reconversion tests, and the architect himself kindly disseminates his reflections and has explained them in detail in his recent lectures. Or perhaps better put, questions we understand today as having no single correct answer, we understand today as having no universal solution, but which much more require the development of frameworks in which to allow them to be continually approached anew. Not only did we never work in it, but we can't locate any research on the Centraal Beheer office building in use, can't locate anything which indicates any form of structured analysis was undertaken once everything was up and running.Half a century later, the building enjoys worldwide fame among architects and architecture historians. Johan De Wachter is an architect and founding partner of Woonwerk Architecten - Rotterdam. He arrived in Rotterdam after studying at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) and worked from 2000 to 2004 at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA/Rem Koolhaas) on various urban planning and architectural projects and competitions. In 2003, he founded Fün Design Consultancy, where he remained a partner until 2005.