Office for Ogilvy

Photographs by Jeroen Musch, Courtesy of Studio Ramin Visch.

Photographs by Jeroen Musch, Courtesy of Studio Ramin Visch.

Words from the Designer

By definition, an advertising agency that is proud of its creativity will not want to open up premises in any 'normal' neatly raked business park. Nothing is more deadly to one's image than a boring, commercially viable, common-or-garden rented office building. Disused warehouses, canal houses, churches, the catacombs of a football stadium and old factory premises offer a 'unique' artistic bohemian environment in which publicity people can flourish anywhere in the world. Ogilvy's new premises in Amsterdam are no exception to this rule.

Since April the 180 or so personnel of Ogilvy (a branch of British advertising group, WPP) have set up office in the former factory hall of Simplex cycle manufacturers on the De Schinkel industrial terrain on the south-west corner of the A10 highway. The entire staff now occupies a single colossal open space of 115 x 50 meters. Under the high shed roofs, interior partitions and offices are noticeably absent. The only interruption in this working space (the size of a covered football field) consists of four large patios.

Photographs by Jeroen Musch, Courtesy of Studio Ramin Visch.

Photographs by Jeroen Musch, Courtesy of Studio Ramin Visch.

Photographs by Jeroen Musch, Courtesy of Studio Ramin Visch.

The initial idea for the reallocation of the former cycle factory was to split it up into commercially viable combinations of offices and manufacturing areas. Commissioned by property developer TCN Property Projects, the architectural firm of Neutelings Riedijk designed three new small office buildings to be completed this summer, to supplement the existing office wings of Simplex. On the advice of Witteveen and Visch, whom Ogilvy appointed as its architects/interior designers, the firm bought up all the factory areas of the complex in one go and had it upgraded to office space, thus giving the complex an entirely different set-up. Contrary to the original plan, the multi-occupancy building, now dubbed the 'A Factory', did not get any showrooms or stock rooms at all, but was exclusively reserved for office-type functions. To make the former factory halls of the cycle factory suitable for housing a publicity firm, architect Georg Witteveen and interior designer Ramin Visch devised a strategy of 'light urbanism'. In other words, there was to be no fixed allocation of the interior space with a permanent infrastructure of corridors and services; instead, a provisional exploration of the floor area was adopted, using detachable elements.

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