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Centraal Beheer

Commercial and Office Buildings

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Centraal Beheer's office building in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, was designed by the architect Herman Hertzberger for the Dutch insurance company of the same name and completed in 1972. The building is a landmark of architectural structuralism, built as a dense cluster of nearly identical concrete cell-like units, each about the size of a small room, arranged around internal streets and interlocked so that no two neighboring cells look directly into one another. Hertzberger designed the cells to be filled in and personalized by the employees who worked in them, a concept he called participation, so that the building's interior appearance depended on its occupants rather than being fixed by the architect. The design prioritized flexible, adaptable interiors and shared internal space over an ornamented exterior, and it became one of the most widely cited examples of Dutch structuralist office architecture.

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Herman Hertzbergers 1972 office complex in Apeldoorn, the canonical building of Dutch Structuralism.

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