The future is now, and its name is The Edge, an office building in Zuidas, Amsterdam’s business district. Designed by Ron Bakker, founder of PLP Architecture, and developed by OVG Real Estate for Deloitte, it has an atrium that acts as the building’s heart and is covered with solar panels that produce more energy than they consume.
It has 15 floors facing to the North, allowing natural light to reach most of the corners of the building. In addition to that, The Edge stores rainwater in cisterns, using it for the toilets and the irrigation of plants and gardens. Reason enough to have the highest sustainability score ever awarded by British rating agency BREEAM: 98.4 percent! This agency gave to the building the prestigious Award for Offices New Construction in 2016, and it also won the public vote.
The activity of The Edge, completed in 2015, is monitored 24/7, then analyzed, and according to that, the whole activity of the building is organized. In The Edge there are not fixed workspaces, no one has a desk, it’s the building itself that reacts to the needs of its workers and tells them, via app, where they will work better each day depending on what they have to do: meetings, phone calls, write…
The building knows your schedule and your daily routines and needs from the very beginning of your day. The app, developed by Deloitte, connects with The Edge when employees wake up in the morning and switch on their mobiles phones. From that point on, the building is aware of what they need and what they have to do. It knows where they live, recognize their cars bikes and assign to them a place at the parking. Then start looking for the perfect work location for that day. The workers can use the interface to regulate the temperature, the height of the chair or the lighting. The app keeps alls this information to modify the space according to the worker’s preferences.
The philosohpy behind The Edge is called New Way of Working (het nieuwe werken, in Dutch) and its goal is to encourage new relationships and an efficient use of space. Therefore, it needed an ambitious building with new standards for office design. Always with the idea of creating an inspiring business environment.
Do you want to see The Edge with your own eyes? Check the video below:
