Town Hall Quarter
Town Hall Quarter
Town Hall Quarter
The New Way of Working and 'The New Waiting'
One central point for Deventer
The Municipality of Deventer set flexibility, cooperation and interaction as important principles for the interior; it also wanted to be an example in the field of sustainable construction and had the ambition to build a building with a BREEAM score excellent. With the Town Hall Quarter, the municipality also wanted to bring the entire organization together in one location in the historic center of the city, and also create a central meeting point. Public spaces are therefore designed in such a way that they can also be used for exhibitions, debates and symposia.
The New Way of Working
The municipality wanted to make use of the principles of 'The New Work' in its new office and therefore opted for a flexible layout with activity-related workplaces. Employees can work so flexibly: you choose your place based on your needs at the time. In addition, we provided a lot of variation by working with zones. There is a “living room” for every sixty workplaces, close to the main route through the building; here you hang up your coat, drink coffee, chat with your colleagues over the weekend and eat cake when someone has a birthday. There are also places where you can sit to read a text, meet colleagues or have a meeting.
Dynamics and peace in our interior
Further away from the main route, the workplace is becoming increasingly quieter — from a lively place where you still occasionally talk to a colleague, to quiet places at the ends of the building. This transition from dynamism to rest comes about naturally, as it were, because of the way we have arranged the interior: for example, we have placed free-standing spaces in the workplace, containing enclosed concentration areas and meeting places; dividing the floors in this way also makes it quieter in between.
Remarkable meeting places for orientation
To ensure that people can easily orient themselves in the complex, we have used a different, striking design in certain places, the so-called “golden eggs”, which form recognizable meeting places. The furniture here includes facilities such as power points and is flexibly adaptable. Following the historic buildings, the use of color refers to pigments from the 17th century, such as ultramarine, indigo, umber, kraplak and lead tin yellow.
The New Waiting
For the public hall, atelier PRO developed the concept 'The New Waiting'. We used business furniture alongside a more soft interior with quiet areas, so people can choose how they want to wait and what they want to do while they wait — work on their laptops, sit with others, or read a book in silence. The layout of the public hall is therefore activity-related, just like 'The New Way of Working'; visibility, overview and a clear waiting time indication are therefore very important. The interior design thus supports business operations and the desired - high - service level of the Municipality of Deventer.
A work of art for and by Deventer: the 'Fingerprint'
For the public hall, we were looking for an integrated work of art that relates to the function of the town hall. For this purpose, visual artist Loes ten Anscher made aluminum frames from the fingerprints of hundreds of Deventeners; their thumb, finger or even toe has thus been immortalized and hangs in the new building. A total of 2300 residents of the city were invited to hand over their fingerprints. A clay fingerprint was made of all scans. These clay patterns went to a foundry, where they were made into sand molds. Finally, liquid aluminum was cast into the mold and, after cooling, the framework was ready. For example, the Deventer City Hall Quarter has a work of art that is not only for, but also by, Deventer.
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