FOK magazine #2

Featuring The world’s first WELL V2 Certified™ interior at Platinum level Interviews Rick Rijkse / Estelle Batist / Twan Steeghs / Patrick Levie Projects Edge Technologies, Amsterdam / Lianne Tio Luxury, Rotterdam / Shimano, Eindhoven / HabrakenRutten, Rotterdam / …

EXPLORING NEW FRONTIERS

In this edition of our FOKmagazine, we would like to share with you the true nature of our office and the passion that drives us. We want to provide insight into how we constantly raise the bar and aim for great achievements. We hope to surprise you with the new paths our office is taking. While work environments remain our steady basis, we are expanding our field of work towards retail, hospitality and exterior design. We have discovered that we are at our best when we are challenged to the max, when standard solu tions cannot solve the problem, when the key question needs a new answer. This is when our pioneering heart awakens and when we set out with the client to explore new frontiers. The projects highlighted in this edition will take you along all these different fields, with a special focus on the first NO OFFICE concept and WELL Certified™ interior. Exploring new frontiers also implies new adventurers and new team members who are equally passionate. We are proud to introduce you to our youngest partner, two new associate partners and our office director, and show the diversity of our team and talents. At the heart of the magazine is a special about sustain ability in which we explain that, for us, sus tain abi li ty is never the starting point but always the out come of our design process in which the user is central.

On behalf of Fokkema & Partners, we hope we succeed in inspiring you with this edition!

Diederik Fokkema Laura Atsma Marieke van Schaaijk Rick Rijkse

EDGE Technologies

First NO OFFICE concept and the world’s first WELL V2 Certified™ interior at Platinum level

Fokkema & Partners has a love for assignments that challenge them to the utmost: complex, multiple spatial problems, where the challenge consists of turning the complexities into a straightforward, clear design. One of these assignments was the accommodation of EDGE Technologies, formerly known as OVG Real Estate, a developer that revolutionises the built environment through a new generation of smart buildings while raising the bar in terms of sustainability and wellbeing. In order to ‘actively contribute to the health of people’; EDGE buildings gather and analyse data, based on which the spatial experience and energy performance are optimised, from the interior climate to the lighting, which adheres to the biorhythm. Design an office that does not look like an office; that was the seemingly impossible assignment. A space that can serve as an experimental garden for new ideas and technologies, and that is actually green as well. Moreover, EDGE – one of the first in the Netherlands to do so – wanted a WELL certification, which, among other things, means that all materials must be screened for sustainable origin and toxic components. The discussions on how a forward-thinking developer’s office could look like resulted in the desire for a warm, personal atmosphere; it had to feel like home. This desire fits EDGE’s approach to technology: it should be invisible, work intuitively and support human comfort. This led the architects to the NO OFFICE concept: a space that radically clashes with the traditional office space, but remains a great place to work. The apparent opposites of health and high-tech have been unified in an exciting

‘ As our first collaboration at Las Palmas in Rotterdam was a success, we were convinced that Fokkema & Partners could support us in developing our new office, incorporating concepts of our brand based on the integration of technology, sustainability and wellbeing. The design has resulted in the best-in-class working environment, proven by its Well Certified™ Platinum rating.’

Thomas Ummels, Chief Development Officer, EDGE Technologies