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Architects: Onix
Text description provided by the architects. The office for the Child Welfare Council is a part of a new complex of government buildings in Lelystad, Netherlands. It manifests itself as a monolithic trunk of wood. Two dynamic routes link all the important rooms (waiting room/reception area, conference rooms, library, canteen, atrium). The direction of these routes is exhibited on the exterior as bark that has been peeled off.
The ‘wooden landscape’, as these routes are called, is the part of the interior that has been designed and determined. But there is also a ‘free zone’, an area where the user has a free hand. This area displays many industrial elements: concrete walls and ceiling, industrial polyurethane floor, and floating climate islands.
Most of the furniture in the reception area ‘grows’ out of the wooden landscape and is thus no addition, but rather a part of the whole. This was the most important starting point for the design of the Child Welfare Council office – to make a totally integrated design where the exterior and the interior are one, where the building is a single entity.
