Architecture News Plus (ANP) – Architecture and Design Magazine

Langerak Office

This is a project by Cepezed Architects and it is located at Utrecht, Netherlands. There are six images for Langerak Office.

: © Fas Keuzenkamp

Project images

Designer's statement

Commercial premises on a corner parcel for a supplier of transport wheels. In a straightforward manner, the construction has been given an exceptionally distinctive allure.

The storage area is accommodated in a simple, two-storey closed box with a skin of black-coated steel profile plating. However, this is concealed behind an austere horizontally partitioned façade screen installed on the street sides at some distance from the building itself. This screen follows the exact edge of the parcel. The space between the box and the screen is covered over and closed off with glass walls. It serves as a showroom and reception area. The offices are accommodated here against the wall of the box.

The screen façade of stainless-steel sandwich panels with frameless glued-in glass strips is mounted on columns with supporting brackets. The first floor is accessible via a gallery above the offices with, on either side, a staircase to the showroom. The gallery has a glass floor and is covered with a roof containing strip windows.

Where the box containing the workplace and the warehouse ends, the screen façade continues on and is equipped with a sliding entrance gate in the same material as the screen itself. Due to its rounded corner, the building does not have a front or back, but is one long continuous whole with a powerful and imposing allure.

The jury of the Dutch National Steel Prize praised the austere aesthetics, the sophisticated layout and functionality, the transparency, and the setting of the business estate. The press, too, was enthusiastic. With this design, cepezed has proven that little is needed to give a boring building a genuine countenance, was the assessment. The specialist magazine Bouw wrote: ‘The round form gives it infinity and beauty that one seldom sees on business estates.’

Location: Krommewetering 131, Utrecht, Netherlands
Client: Langerak Wielen
Gfa: 3,295 m2
Realization: 2001
Photography: Fas Keuzenkamp