Onoffice magazine

It is not every day a client shows their architect pictures from Star Wars and asks for something similar. Likely to excite sci-fi nerds to the point of spontaneous combustion, briefs like this are – to borrow from the George Lucas lexicon – as rare as a house-trained Wookie. The client in question was the suitably cosmic Decos Technology Group, a Dutch company that specialises in high-tech digital storage, tracking and IT. In 2007, Decos pitted MVRDV, Meyer & van…

You could say that using cardboard for the interior of a European financial services institution befits the times. It’s a bold move by Sander Architecten, the Amsterdam firm responsible for the interiors of the new headquarters of Rabobank in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Cylindrical meeting pavilions made of the material now sit in the company’s 6,000sq m communal “square”, which forms the hub of a new 25-storey building by Urbis Architects. But instead of sending a message of impermanence, the cardboard…

You’d expect to find one of the world’s largest and most successful Italian fashion houses ensconced securely at the epicentre of Italian fashion in Milan. But Diesel is one firm that likes to do things differently. It has found a new home some 200 miles away, in the countryside to the east of Lake Garda and just south of the Alps. This might be surprising, but then Diesel has never done things by the rulebook. The founder of the global…