The project
The building is located in the middle of a major regional traffic junction; on the edge of an industrial district, a shopping zone and a recreational area. It is a densification of an environment previously characterised purely by infrastructure: the intersection of neighbourhood roads at two roundabouts, the bridge, the lock and the kink in the straight line of the canal.
"The outpost of the Remy industrial estate came to mind, and the obvious way it configures the landscape and marks industrial and recreational activities. Similarly, we wanted to give the building a bold and sleek look. We split the programme into smaller elements and then stacked them on four floors. Since the technical rooms do not need daylight, we were able to accentuate the mass of the building with large and continuous surfaces of masonry. Due to their orientation, proportion and size, the protruding windows offer selected views of the surroundings.
While with the building's exterior we wanted to emphasise its presence as a tectonic object, we chose a very different strategy for the interior. Here, absence should be palpably present. The interior design is based on a limited number of components, not to cover the office space with uniform upholstery, but to characterise each space with a specific combination of these elements.
The fragmentation and subsequent stacking of the programme had reduced the size of the rooms to an almost domestic scale. The building not only provides the infrastructure of an office space, but is also occupied by the attributes and textures of domesticity. It is inhabited by expectations. Domesticity is set up as a scene."
