The best projects are the ones with the most ambitious and careful clients.
This campus is home to an investment company, while most of its buildings and space is dedicated to education. The site houses a primary school, a central building with book store and lecture space as the hart of the offices ( interior design by AIM ) a adult education building with a variety of functions: work shop, class rooms, teacher facilities, a large library, a small enclosed theater and a chamber music hall. ( all designed by AIM )
The pillars of the design are simple: use the space to its fullest, and bring out the best of the building in regard to views and light. We also felt that with such a cultural company policy the building should not feel like an investor company’s office, but as open cultural interaction environment. What that was we created through our design.
First we zoned the plan, placing the auditorium as the heart of the company. This allows staff to join in on a public talk, of use the space for talks for company events. This hart of the company has a wooden shell that is the warm background for people to meet.
On another scale we zoned the offices, putting the open desk area at the window, then create a meeting zone with standing tables for more informal or dynamic work talks, the partner desks enjoy the privacy of the wall side.
Materialization has been used to set the office away from the notion to be an office: so to avoid white walls and carpets that usually characterize investment offices.
Our choice has been to offer a concrete like structure with exposed ceilings, a terrazzo floors and wooden room devisions. Not opting for ceilings has offered the extra height that we have emphasized with the rhythm of custom made up-lights.
We have kept this same principle of exposed ceilings all the way through the project, in gallery spaces, teaching spaces, book store, chamber hall. That way the building remains a unity and is in a way’ non-decorational: an interior that does not seek to reveal the building but seeks to show it in its essence.
The other components in the interior are wood and mono-colored spaces.
Highlights are the library the black box theater and the chamber hall.
The library is a sequence of rooms formed by bookcases. It is an extremely formal arrangement, yet in that lies its freedom.
The recessed light domes emphasize the centre of the reading rooms. A library where the study is really in between the books!
The blackbox is a round modest size free standing building in the enclosed garden of the campus. The organization has been kept as simple as possible. A spiral shaped shell regulates the space by creating a screen to the entrance and guiding people into the rear of the space, while the white shell also offers a super wide screen multimedia experience.
The other outlier is the chamber hall. Developed with ..... as the acoustic engineer this space is designed to merge the practical, by opening this space up to the school. In the normal times as a lecture room, the acoustic, with many designated reflection and absorbing area's, including a series of heavy ceiling domes to diffuse the sound, and finally aesthetic, with the warmth of the wood and the rhythm of the paneling offering a serious, yet versatile space.
Finally this campus ( designed by ben wood ) is a very culturally receptive education space where business knowledge and vision are interwoven in a rare blend.