Alkmaar Office By Proof of The Sum

To physically bring together its employees, the Netherlands’ Alkmaar City Municipality engaged design firm Proof of the Sum to fit 600 civil servants into a space that could only fit 200 workstations.

The key to accomplishing this goal was letting employees and managers decide for themselves how, where and with whom they work. This meant that departments no longer had their own territories. “In a time of digitalisation, remote working and proactive visibility close to the residents, the employees needed a central and attractive base,” says Roy Pype, the firm’s founder.

But the challenge, he admits, was to create a single place for 600 people while allowing room for the individual with privacy and concentration in mind. This tension informed the design concept where the team made it light, breaking through its clay layers in order to create two large mezzanines and thus form links between the floors.

“We wanted to have the employees make use of the entire space throughout their workday,” says Pype. “That means they can start their day on the third floor, in the network café and service centre, and move around for meetings – even the locker area is designed as an informal consultation space. And for those in need of quiet time, the adjacent floors have rooms devised to host concentrated work and small teams.”