Office Building in Belgium by Rohm

Located in a park-like setting, an advertising agency's office building in Roeselare, Belgium, consists of a compact concrete volume and opens to the outdoors through extensive glazing. 

In its placement of the building, the Belgian architectural studio Rohm largely ignored the neighbourhood of commercial, industrial and residential buildings, interpreting the plot instead as an introverted summer garden within an existing brickwork wall. Parking spaces in the north-western area mark the start of a winding path that leads to the main entrance.  

Open office landscape

The individual functions are distributed over three storeys. The ground floor has meeting rooms, a photo studio and a small canteen embedded in an open-plan office landscape that can be subdivided by curtains set in a circular arrangement. Three concrete cores provide for additional spatial zoning and contain the WCs, a two-flight staircase, the coat rack, a storage area and so on. 

Circle geometries

The circle geometry of the freely connectible areas is encountered again elsewhere – as at the main entrance, formed as a round opening fronted by a forecourt and featuring a sliding steel sculpture to the side. Inside the building a circular atrium cut into the concrete ceiling links the ground floor with the office areas of the two higher storeys. Post and beam facades in aluminium and glass open the interior to the northwest and southeast sides of the garden and are shaded by adjacent trees. The other two sides of the buildings have practically no openings to reduce the heat load in summer. 

Colour nuances

Walls in exposed concrete in the interior form a low-key backdrop for the mainly white furniture, such as built-in cabinets and desks. In an expression of playful brutalism, the architects nevertheless came up with precise design details characterised by nuances of colour and expressive surfaces. 

A circular curtain separates the canteen and the photo studio. © Johnny Umans

Precise creative accents

Yellow accent colours are thus to be found throughout the building, from the inside of the curtains to the circular rugs, the cabinet fittings and the light switches. The bar in the canteen is topped by a terrazzo slab, while flower boxes placed at the round ceiling openings by the architects introduce a touch of garden into the building.