Van Laere HQ
The project site lies a stone’s throw away from the existing headquarters and warehouses of Van Laere NV — a reputable general building contractor. In a new business park we propose 3300 square metres of state of the art offices distributed over three floors. The new building integrates the client’s administration departments with meeting spaces and facilities to interact with customers and business relations.
Taking its inspiration from Belgium’s traditional city mansions of the 19th and early 20th century, we think of this office building as a generous and representative house geared towards receiving and welcoming people. A simple column and beam structural grid forms a uniform underlay, setting the stage for an open office landscape while facilitating easy partitioning into separate departments or enclosed rooms. Plan layouts can be flexibly adapted depending on programmatic evolutions and changing needs.
A floating volume
The building sits on a concrete slab, detailed with a cantilevering thin edge so as to detach it from the landscape — the asphalt of the car park seemingly continues underneath it. At two opposing corners the slab folds up, becoming wall and ceiling to an outdoor bicycle storage near the entrance and a terrace for employees at the other corner.
The floating nature of the building accentuates its freestanding, omni-directional quality as an object within the landscape. Carefully planned greenery shields the building from the adjacent highway and directs visitors towards the entrance, preserving the privacy of the terrace in the process. Surface car parking spots are set among larger trees and feature pervious paving to increase water infiltration and reduce the heat island effect.
The lightness of the building is further articulated in the facade treatment. The rectangular volume is clad in a patchwork of expanded metal screens, their number determined by the orientation of the respective facades — the more exposed southern facade features a more dense application of screens than the northern facade. This translucent layer gives the building volume a softer silhouette, blending its outline into the landscape and the sky beyond.
The steel sun-shading screens are offset from the glass curtainwall behind, leaving space for external maintenance platforms (with steel grating floors) around the whole perimeter of the building. Both the vertical steel components of the sun-shading system and the aluminium structure of the curtainwall are executed in the same dark green colour. This colour is carried through into the interior, where it is applied to all the steelwork elements such as balustrades, stairs etc.
Besides the two corner cutouts, the uniformity of the facade is only interrupted at ground level by a big concrete wall behind which technical spaces are located. The entrance is next to it, with a generous concrete bench marking the access point to the visitor.
Grid flexibility
The structural system relies on a base module of beams and columns assembled into two-dimensional portal frames, such as can be found in typical industrial building construction. Instead of being applied in a linear repetitive fashion like in warehouse structures, here they are used in the two directions of the grid — with four portal frames crystallising into a cruciform column at each grid point. These sturdy and expressive column shapes structure the space in a way that other column types would not, articulating the rectangular bays within the open space and forming natural anchor points for dividing walls where partitions are required.
The flexibility of the gridded column and beam structure allows layouts to be easily adapted and subdivided according to the needs of the moment. This plays into the client’s plans to sublet part of the building to other tenants.
Within the grid layout a central core accommodates bathrooms, technical services and vertical circulation. This core provides lateral stability to the column and beam structure, avoiding the need for any further cross-bracing.
The modular structural setup of the building makes it easy during the design process to delete the floor slab of a bay to create a void. This introduces a richer spatial experience and increases communication between different floors — also physically through the addition of a generous steel staircase.
Material Clarity
The structural system of the building is composed of glued laminated timber (glulam) beams and columns which support concrete floor slabs. The use of wood contributes to the sustainable credentials of the building, while also providing texture and character to the interiors.
The restrained but diversified application of materials and finishes makes the structure into a kind of sample board of the range of professional building services Van Laere NV provides. There is the in-situ fair-faced concrete of the central core, the laminated timber columns and beams, the steel of the external sun-shading system combined with the glass and aluminium curtain wall… As such the building becomes a showcase and calling card for the client’s construction expertise.
