An unprecedented area of floor office space is vacant. Today’s challenge is to work out how to reutilize these buildings.
The Government Service for Land and Water Management (DLG)
The DLG occupies premises on Sint Jacobsstraat in Utrecht. The existing building (9,300 m2 ) is located on the edge of Utrecht’s centre.
The DLG has adopted the principles of the New Workstyle. This management philosophy has implied changes both for the organization and for its staff. The New Workstyle can only succeed, in our opinion, if the working environment is a single, continuous space without obstacles, where people can see and find one another and where they can intuitively find their way to the right places to work in, all in a fluid manner. We reinforce this concept by the patchwork pattern of the floor covering, which unites the whole workfloor independently of the office configuration. The result is what we call a “workLANDSCAPE”.
The workLANDSCAPE
The workLANDSCAPE concept accords with the New Workstyle by providing a sustainable, flexible office space configuration.The workLANDSCAPE follows a patchwork model which allows for varying extents of preservation or absorption of existing layouts, materials and infrastructure. The structural components, the fire/smoke compartmentalization and the emergency routing remain unchanged. Similarly, server rooms, printer rooms and other installation-dependent spaces such as kitchens etc. are retained. The interior space is nonetheless continuous from outer wall to outer wall, allowing daylight to penetrate deep into the building. Corridors are eliminated, although some of the individual office rooms are retained. The former corridors are reutilized as working space, thereby greatly improving the net/gross floor area ratio.
The workLANDSCAPE offers a varied, warm, stimulating concept with a combination of open and private spaces. It presents a pleasant, less sterile, appearance compared to the rather desolate emptiness that may result from application of the New Workstyle in combination with clean desk policies. The open space meanders over the floor, yielding diagonal lines of sight from facade to facade. The open plan area is organized into individual work locations which may be used in a linked configuration. Multiple floor-colour zones, made up of carpet tiles, underline the flexibility of the patchwork concept: future changes are never inimical to the concept.
