Benthem Crouwel Lab

The office Benthem Crouwel Architects operate from is discovered midway along the railway line from Amsterdam Central Station to Schiphol Plaza, below the approach route of lane 22-04, in a business park off the A10 orbital road. These are spacious premises, with a concrete construction common to industrial buildings of the seventies; using the simplest architectural means and a welter of state-of-the-art technology they have been primed to receive an architects’ studio. On the ground floor are workshops, a restaurant, archives and a garage. The studio itself, the meeting rooms and computer bays are on the first floor ranged around a roof garden. A long entrance hall entirely clad in zinc-coated steel panelling thrusts its way through the building. In this hall, used for holding exhibitions, giving talks and making presentations, is a central stair stitching all the Lab’s spaces together. The interior of the studio is an open area of scattered ‘work-islands’, thus reflecting the structure of the practice, where the work is done in flexible project teams.