Onoffice magazine

“We have known each other for a very long time and worked on many projects together,” says Joost Ector, partner at Ector Hoogstad, about his latest client, Rotterdam engineering firm IMd. So it must have felt a little like business as usual when IMd asked the practice to design its new office. In a way it was almost the repaying a favour – the engineers had acted as consultants for Ector Hoogstad’s own office revamp, and, impressed with the results,…

A dramatic curtain wall sweeps through a cavernous atrium, its layered strips of timber evoking the strata of the earth’s crust. Carved out by Dutch architects Group A, it’s a reference to the work of their client, BP: this 9,000sq m office in The Netherlands pulls together previously disparate elements of the company into one gargantuan HQ. Despite hitting the headlines for an oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico and a subsequent tongue-lashing from President Obama, BP is expanding.…

Nestled in a patch of parkland in Groningen, the Netherlands, sits a new office building that has been touted as one of the greenest in Europe. It’s certainly one of the most flamboyant. The 92m-tall tower, designed for the city’s Education Executive Agency and Tax Office, has the sort of aerodynamic expression generally reserved for pavilions, museums or modern churches – not sensible offices built during straightened times. The structure’s undulating curves, accented by horizontal fins flowing across the facade,…