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.
Facts
Building Type
Building Type (category) Classification
Standing Status Connections
Has Building Type
Entity-backed identity for the building-type enum value this building already carries, resolved to an architecture concept by an explicit value-to-entity map (phase 3 bucket conversion, docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md). The building-type fact itself stays on the building unchanged.
In Style
Herman Hertzbergers 1972 office complex in Apeldoorn, the canonical building of Dutch Structuralism.
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Centraal Beheer, Wikipedia
Opening paragraph
located in Apeldoorn, Netherlands.
- Wikipedia "Centraal Beheer" intro (read live, w-fk-arch-rel2-0927c, R-K)
Entity description and the lead of the Wikipedia article
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.
View the SourceReader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.