MVRDV’s New Office Space in Rotterdam

3 August, 2016

To accommodate an ever-expanding team in its headquarters in Rotterdam, architecture firm MVRDV has relocated into its new office space in the city center. The new site is located within a post-war, warehouse-like building and facilitates enriched and vibrant spaces to 140 employees — representing their DNA and focusing on ingraining a social aspect in the workplace.

The Building:

The 2,400 square meter of the Architecture firm house builds on the progress made in their previous offices, learning from how the team inhabits and works and from there, translating these into a new, more accommodating and productive spaces.

‘The expanding MVRDV family needed a new house; so this is exactly what we tried to capture. Everything that the home requires, a living room, a dining room, a sofa for the whole house to sit together,’ explains the co-founder Jacob van Rijs. ‘This was also a chance to capture how we work and function as an office, then tailor-make new spaces that would boost our working methods and output; efficient spaces that enhance the collaborative ways in which we work.’

Capturing the typology of a house, the large family room becomes the centerpiece for social interaction with three oversized elements of the home, the couch, dinner table and vegetation chandelier – a large tribune with a drop-down projection screen for lectures, office presentations or football; the long lunch table, at which the whole office gathers together daily; and a huge, split, flowerpot, which states the firm’s ‘welcome team’.

The atelier for the project teams takes up the main bulk of the central space and is filled with light and designed a quiet area. A glazed wall, covered in doodles and working diagrams, separates the atelier from the living room stretching right across the center three – out of five – main arches. Opposite this, like a section through a dolls-house, are the bold, multi-colored meeting rooms. Each has its own theme and specific furniture for different ways of meeting; the drawing room with whiteboard magnet walls for workshops, the presentation room in dark blue for larger formal meetings, the lounge with low chairs for conversations in private, the brown and intimate library room and the game room for playing or informal meetings at the table-tennis table. And of course, several other special monochrome rooms.

‘For us, it also makes a lot of sense to be part of het industriegebouw as a building and a community, now we share a work space that could allow for future, flexible growth and collaboration within the building, just as was the design intent of the original architect.’ by Jacob van Rijs