For the Workforce and Tenants – and Citizens

Can a building be healthy? Or sick? The answer, literally, is no, yet healthy remains the latest buzzword in the architectural world, after sustainable was overused and stretched beyond meaning. While a building cannot be “healthy” per se, it can promote health and well-being — or hinder them as the term “sick building syndrome” suggests. Aiming for a healthy work environment is not only a nice gesture; should it reduce sick leave, it would offer real economic benefits, too.

The new headquarters for online travel company Booking.com, designed by Ben van Berkel and UNStudio for a site at the tip of Oosterdokseiland (Eastern Docks Island) just outside Amsterdam’s main “Centraal” railway station, demonstrates the benefits — and limitations — of such an approach. One Booking.com employee described the headquarters as feeling like “half airport and half resort hotel” — very suitable for a travel company. Despite the proximity to rail, metro, tram, bus, and ferries, the building has 2,500 bike parking spots — as one would expect in The Netherlands.

At first blush, the building works well. It is not in a suburban office park by the highway, like all too many headquarters of the company's hi-tech, Silicon Valley peers, but rather is just five minutes away from the country’s largest train station. The building contains a residential wing with apartments that fit in well, architecturally. Demanding a corporate headquarters be a mixed-use building was a smart demand from the City of Amsterdam toward the prevention of dead office clusters.

The first sight for visitors stepping inside is lush greenery across terraces and on walls. While what looks green need not be “green” in an ecological sense, the vegetation helps create a shaded, visually appealing atmosphere where the air is filtered naturally and noises are absorbed. Crisscrossing the expansive atrium is a well-designed bridge clad in oak, matching the floors and the wide stairs at the entrance. The glass walls facing the atrium are set an angles to each other; the absence of parallel walls is advantageous acoustically and helps disguise the true size of the building.

There has been a lot of talk about tech companies' efforts at attracting and retaining spoiled “digital natives” known to seek a better work-life balance. At-desk massages, free candy bars and pizzas, and of course ping-pong tables and comfy sofas everywhere make some modern offices look like lounges (best-case scenario) or furniture warehouses (worst-case). Booking.com spoils its employees more simply, with just the choice of several hip “canteens” in different parts of the building. 

Ben van Berkel, probably the most commercially successful Dutch architect of his generation, says his firm, UNStudio, designed this building for the “citizens and tenants as much as for the workforce.” Factors he identified in the design serving to improve mental well-being (and earn a BREEAM Excellent Certification) include: good air circulation, ecological treatment of water, ample daylight despite the deep floor plan, easy movement, thermal comfort, good acoustics and appealing materials.

The travel company was founded in 1996 in Amsterdam, across which 6,000 of its employees had been spread. Now, for the first time, they all work in the same building. “Talent is key” and “people are the only thing we have” are the mantras of the now US-owned travel platform, so establishing a new “philosophy for the future of work” as van Berkel calls it, makes perfect sense. For him, “indoor environments are at least as important as the environment” for “mental, physical, and social health.” But how is that achieved, measured? The BREEAM certificate gives some indication. 

“The company’s product is related to inner cities” says van Berkel, so giving the inner-city building an “urban gesture” — on the exterior and on the inside — was his goal. For the interiors, architects Barbara Dujardin and Michiel Hofman matched van Berkel’s ambitions and conceived the design as a city, inviting designers for individual areas across its eleven floors; the “diversity of characteristics spread over the building,” van Berkel says. Although many designers were involved (CBRE design, i29, Linehouse, Studio Modijefsky), the result does not look not disjointed. Hofman Dujardin ensured consistency and aimed for a diverse “home for employees.” There are four desks for every ten employees, but people still know which “home base” they will go to find a desk if necessary. “In the spirit of Booking.com,” the breakout areas are “destinations” that invite staff “to have a micro-holiday,” as Hofman and Dujardin put it. 

The new headquarters is the last new building at Oosterdok (Eastern Dock), a former wet dock that forms a deep port closed off from the tidal IJ. The site was previously occupied by the main post office, known as the Post CS-gebouw (Ben Merkelbach), which was demolished in 2005. The urban plan by Erick van Egeraat shapes the neighborhood: The Central Public Library (Jo Coenen) and the Conservatorium (Frits van Dongen) are two municipal heavyweights completed in 2007. Ten years earlier, Renzo Piano’s NEMO Science Museum opened across the channel on top of IJ-tunnel.

Knocking down a brutalist building that was only 50 years old to make room for sustainable new construction is a contradiction, of course. There are other points where the building does not add up to healthy and sustainable: It is a concrete building; it offers escalators as an alternative to stairs; and has no operable windows. The elevated rail line behind the building prohibits operable windows on that northern side, but neither can the offices draw supposedly good air from the atrium. Instead, UNStudio opted for a hospital-like mechanical ventilation system that brings in fresh from the roof, draws it down to the lowest floor, and sends it up into the building with high pressure. The goals and means of a healthy and a sustainable building need not contradict each other — but often they do. 

Aesthetically, the Booking.com Headquarters is Ben van Berkels least fashionable building — potentially great news for its longevity. While van Berkel’s earlier designs bordered on the hip and chic, this more angular building has glass facades with elegant black ceramic cladding, but no blobby, car-like, “concave convex” nonsense. I don’t want to have just “one style,” says van Berkel, who sees himself as being outside of the Dutch mainstream and the Rotterdam circle. He did not study in Delft, but in London. He learned from his early infrastructure projects such as the Erasmus bridge to design “flows” and an “architecture that guides you.” Here, it was the reflections of and on the water and the rippling effect on the surfaces that inspired the triangular cutoff of the windows. The diagonal geometry is picked up by the Y-shaped steel columns that shift 90 degrees from floor to floor. Wayfinding is intuitive, even in case of an evacuation with beautifully glazed fire stairs.

The travel industry is being watched closely because of CO2 emissions, and places like Amsterdam suffer from overtourism. To wit, the "Amsterdam has a choice" petition led the City Council to set a maximum number of visitors per year. The new Booking.com Headquarters tries to calm critics down — through its architecture and its mix of uses for citizens, tenants, and the workforce in the heart of Amsterdam.