In late September 1996, during a tour (read climb) of what was then the half-finished carcass, Winy Maas of MVRDV spoke of ‘a building without an outer facade, one that is all interior’; ‘actually it’s just six folded floor areas’, ‘a building with a built-in horizon’, ‘an unbroken hilly landscape with buildings in it’ with ‘the ambience of a luxury parking garage’. Maas was absolutely convinced that the completion date – some six months ahead – would be met because ‘when the carcass is finished the building will in fact be ready’. This building, to be known as Villa VPRO, raises in no mean fashion the question of the relationship between ‘architecture’ and ‘interior design’.

Six folded floor areas

Early on in the design process Maas literally considered a building with no facade: he imagined it as a series of interiors, not shielded by facades but surrounded by hot-air screens like those at the entrance to department stores. Breathtaking though it was, this idea was defeated by technical, management and energy considerations. However, the departure-point of an interior-only building remained. This can be seen in the detailing of the exterior: instead of a glass curtain wall enveloping the whole block (a volume of 50 x 50 x 21 metres), there are now whitewood frames from floor to ceiling – as a result the floor areas and their outer edges are a dominant feature all round.

That the floors do not simply run horizontally is immediately evident at one of the corners, where a floor plane curls up towards the next storey like the fin of a manta ray; at another point a floor is folded double like a pancake, while at two further places it collapses concertina-fashion into a monumental stairwell. In this respect the Villa VPRO belongs to a long spate of projects – Koolhaas’s Kunsthal was a foretaste, but his design for the Jussieu library was arguably the most influential – which experimented with the possibility of non-horizontal floors. The MVRDV design is different not only because it has been realized but because at many places the floor areas are penetrated both horizontally and vertically by voids: patio-like blocks of ‘open air’ intrude three-dimensionally into the interior volume. Or more accurately: ‘outdoor’ space is enveloped by a quirkily shaped ‘indoors’ within the confines of a square block. It calls to mind what Le Corbusier said in 1929 of his Villa Savoye in Poissy: a pleasing balance between strictly geometrical, ‘pure’ exterior form and great freedom in the interior.

Built-in horizon

The central theme in the Villa VPRO relates to experiencing the spatial quality of the interior. This is not construed as a collection of disparate ‘places’ but rather as a flow of sculpturally shaped chunks of air. The result is a highly complex structure that can be conveyed in floor plans only with the greatest difficulty. The design cries out for cutaway axonometrics or, better still, computer animations. MVRDV themselves used computer renderings of points along an imaginary walk in the design process.
Although the clearly indicated main entrance gives the building a certain orientation, at least from the outside, once inside you immediately lose all sense of direction. There are visual axes everywhere, but because they are continually staggered horizontally, vertically or diagonally they impose little in the way of hierarchy. Only the surrounding landscape, which is constantly visible from different viewpoints (in front of you, at an angle below you, at an angle above you, behind an intervening portion of building), gives you something to go by. It is, however, only of secondary importance. These interior spaces themselves constitute a three-dimensional landscape that almost makes you forget there is an ‘outside world’. On route through the building you constantly feel disoriented: each trajectory keeps presenting new panoramas, the interior spaces – already exceedingly diverse to begin with – are continually perceived differently alone and in combination, and the relationship with ‘outside’ is ever changing. Making your way through this building, nothing is predictable, but that is its great charm. It is a labyrinth full of unexpected encounters and maximum communication.

Wandering through a hilly landscape

The promenades described below are not compulsory and they are certainly not the only routes through the building. Everywhere there are smaller passages, cross connections and hidden stairs, usually freestanding, which invite you to strike out in another direction or make a detour. In this sense this building goes several steps further than Koolhaas’s Kunsthal, which in the final analysis is configured around a single route. Winy Maas remarks that in the eyes of a developer this kind of hilly landscape is probably not that profitable, but it does produce maximum communication – and that’s what the VPRO is all about.
Whether arriving by car of on foot, the main entrance of Villa VPRO is reached from the street via a broad forecourt at ground level. All at once, the centre of this forecourt descends to a basement. It is now apparent that the entrance is in fact on the first floor, the second building level. The entrance is marked by having the floor area of the third level curl up to the fourth, generating a striking double-height internal canopy.

Car drivers – most of whom are likely to be staff – continue under this canopy into a parking garage which takes up half the second level of the building and ends where the floor flips 180? and becomes a ceiling. Somewhere in the fold at the back of the garage is a service entrance which gives access to the other half of this floor, a central hall, it transpires. From here one can descend to the basement containing studios and production areas or ascend to the floors above where there are offices for the editorial staff, administration and management. Both possibilities are choreographed by a spectacular effect squarely in the domain of interior design: a dark-light contrast on two sides. The hall itself is quite enclosed and ends on one side at the convex back wall of the garage and on the other at the glass facade overlooking the rising grassy bank in which the building is half buried. So because the hall is introverted and dark, you are almost automatically drawn to the two short sides where light enters. There you find two monumental staircases facing each other diagonally across the hall. One leads down, tapering on the way, to a partially double-height space with a glass wall nearly 50 metres long. The second staircase emerges in a wide hall which shoots up diagonally over three floors like a gigantic flight of steps with uninterrupted glass to one side and a view through the rest of the building to the other.

Back to the main entrance. Pedestrians – most of them visitors – walk under the canopy along a fluorescent zebra path and arrive, at the front of the garage, at a fully glazed entrance porch with a lift and stairs leading directly to the next floor. Your spatial sense is immediately put to the test: what at first seemed to be the ground floor but proved to be the second level now looks more like a parking basement, apparently tucked underneath the building where you want to be. So you must continue up to the third level – which is where, to your mind, the building really ‘begins’, although in fact you’re in the middle of it. This game of ‘creating spatial confusion’ continues briefly if you take the lift, which you enter on one side and leave on the other a floor higher. You then find yourself on a gently raked floor plane – the lower part of the curled floor which outside was the canopy. To enter the building you would need to turn left down the slope. However, the reception desk is on the right, so you first have to move ‘uphill’ and worm your way in between a column, a patio and a stairwell – a less than ideal situation.

If you climb the stairs to the top, you feel the concrete slab that was still the canopy a moment ago now protecting your back; on turning round, the floor on which you are standing becomes a fairly daunting slope which you can climb. First you arrive at a reception area. On entering it, you look deep into the building through patios slicing through several floors: below you are the parking garage and the staff area, to the left looms the outline of the monumental stairwell, and high above, you look through a void to the underside of a second huge stairwell, set at right angles to the first. These are penetrating views. If you turn round, you find the view outside initially blocked by the floor-that-becomes-a-slope. After climbing it – quite an effort! – you end up on a comparatively small landing in a far corner of the building, almost outside. Behind two glass facades the landscape lies at your feet, and if you look back past the slope and through a void you can still see the reception area.

Turning to the right at this point, you are standing at what is technically the beginning of the fourth level. The large stairwell with the space reducing steadily beneath it is visible straight ahead of you in the distance; immediately to your right there is another old-fashioned ‘below-stairs’ – the underbelly of the restaurant. It is reached by turning left at the landing on the corner. Like the stairwell, the fully double-height restaurant is both a place to linger and part of the circulation. Looking up past the ceiling you finally see the sky. At the halfway point as you climb up, if you gaze back past the paddy field of tables and chairs there is a marvellous view to be had outside; from here you can also access the roofscape via a grass incline outside. Uneven and overgrown as it is, this turns out to be a continuation of the rolling terrain in which the building is part buried. Walking round, you discover at your feet various crater-like patios that open up vertical sections through the deeper levels of the building, persistently pulling them into your perception of the panoramic view on all sides.

As you walk through the building, the ‘outside’ is perceptible everywhere. This ‘outside’ includes not only the surrounding landscape but more especially the outdoor space enclosed in all of the patios. Thanks to these ‘outdoor rooms’ the indoor areas, which are huge by Dutch standards – up to 2500 m2! – manage to meet the regulations governing the relation between workplaces  and outdoor space. This was in fact the only way to achieve the required floor area (10,000 m2 in total) in a compact building on a relatively small site where high-rise building was undesirable. The voids and patios also help to keep the interior space transparent: even the horizontal diagonal – a distance of over 70 metres – is sensed at all times. This is achieved in part by the virtual absence of the solid space-defining walls that dominate standard office buildings.

A luxury parking garage

In Villa VPRO nothing conceals the structure of the building. MVRDV are resolute in their assumption that concrete will remain in sight everywhere: ”Real’ materials (stone, glass, wood) take the place of ‘standard office’ materials (prefab ceilings and partitions).’1) You walk on concrete floors, amid concrete columns with diagonal steel shoring between them here and there, under concrete ceilings. The limits of the interior space are marked only by whitewood full-height vertical frames: there are no bands between windows. With an almost Berlagian honesty, the construction and materials used remain the visual basis for everything else that happens in the building. This is made possible by the ‘floor’. As can be seen from outside, it is extra thick: a sandwich measuring 72 cm consisting of a structural subfloor cast in situ, an anhydrite deck and in between a hollow space for services. Everything that would normally stand on top of the floor or hang beneath it, concealed by a prefab ceiling, is here tucked away. Above your head you see what seem naturally smooth, monumental surfaces of bare concrete exhibiting subtle patterns made by the seams left by the formwork panels (sometimes applied in three dimensions) and the detectors of the sprinkler system inserted on site into the soft concrete – what a pity not to show those! Similarly, the anhydrite floors are rhythmically defined by floor sockets for power and data communication and the grilles of the climate control system. The overall effect is indeed slightly reminiscent of a parking garage, though one that has been meticulously finished.

In most buildings the structural skeleton, which often has an intriguing appearance and ambience, is fully covered and packaged, and thus silenced, as it were, emasculated. The building must then be further articulated spatially and made ‘habitable’. This is generally the task of the interior design, applied as a subsequent layer above the architecture and the structure. The assembling of such infill kits can be a time-consuming affair.

After a relatively long period (1993-1996) of ‘colonizing – clearing – conquering’ (Winy Maas), the finishing phase could be kept brief because the ‘architecture of the interior’ had largely taken over the task of the traditional ‘interior design’. Functional zoning and further subdivision are already in place before a single partition is put up. Using purely architectural means, the whole space is moulded into a series of disparate ‘places’ which as regards dimensions, position in the building and relation to others (both physically and visually) are carefully geared to the functions they are to accommodate. Spatial differentiation of each such ‘place’ is further underlined by an array of attendant vantage points and views, acoustic perceptions (each place will sound different) and finally the furnishings and other finishing materials. The result – and this was part of the plan from the outset – is an amalgam of the most diverse workplace typologies.

In this the VPRO building differs fundamentally from earlier ‘open’ office buildings such as Hertzberger’s headquarters for Centraal Beheer in Apeldoorn. As so often with structuralist schemes, the latter involved repeating uniform elements. This approach may have been appropriate for a major insurance company at the time, when in the pre-computer era a great many routine tasks had to be performed daily, but for an organization like the VPRO, with a wide range of activities often carried out by die-hard iconoclasts, something different was required. Is there in fact such a thing as the VPRO? For VPRO TV’s Hanneke Groenteman it consists of discrete villas peopled with individuals: ‘Atoms floating separately, with no connection. It’s super-individualistic. To me ‘VPRO’ means the ladies who work in the administration and the canteen.’2) Seen this way the VPRO is clearly a prototypical example of the more up-to-date ideas on management.3)

The issue of course is how to furnish the robust concrete building so that the atmosphere of a parking garage cedes to that of ‘villas for the activities of people’ – of the VPRO variety, that is. Besides the wish to leave as much as possible of the building in view, a second theme was the rejection of overly slick design in favour of a more informal ambience. A few examples will illustrate this point.

Reception area

According to the other two-thirds of MVRDV, Nathalie de Vries and Jacob van Rijs,4) the reception area is the most explicitly designed zone in the entire building. The attributes of the state-of-the-art electronic welcome protrude from the glass wall next to the front door on the second level: a bell, an identity card reader, a keyboard for entry codes and a synoptic panel. All these, together with the letter box and a fire alarm, are mounted on a kind of hi-tech hat stand behind the glass wall. Inside, the parking ‘cellar’ remains visible on all sides. Softening the ambience here, which can only be described as impersonal, is a ‘smoking lounge’, the first of a cluthc of annual art projects in a similarly all-glass if much smaller space between the stairs and the lift. Here the artist Gerald van der Kaap has placed a comfy chair, a choice of snacks and an Internet terminal – the home base of an imaginary caretaker.

A broad wooden handrail set in the middle of the staircase yet angled slightly to the right in relation to the axis, leads you to the third level and up to a concrete catwalk several metres long sprouting from the vaulted floor at this point; this ultimately turns out to be the reception desk. Originally it was to have been an antique table, but this idea proved untenable when it became clear how much communication and security equipment it would have to contain. The concrete table top is covered in leather at the work spaces; amid prism-like neon light fittings just below the ceiling, an elegant antique chandelier dangles from an upper void which doubles the height of the hall. Behind the reception desk, giving protection from the backlight of the external facade, stands a large, austere, lone monolith, storage space for the viewers’ service department. Set more centrally and flanked by patio-voids with grand views is a waiting area: here there will indeed be a large antique table – once one has been located – with a motley assortment of old-fashioned chairs. Above it, TV monitors look down from the ceiling: this is a broadcasting organization, after all.
The entrance sets the tone for the whole interior: some furnishings are custom-made, others purely functional and straight out of the catalogue, with here and there a design highlight and the occasional olde-worlde atmospheric touches. The ambience is more than a little chaotic, though relaxed and informal. Yet these are all only accessories: the leading role is reserved for the ‘architecture of the interior’, and hence for the space itself.

Office stations

To give one example: On the fourth level there is a sequence of spaces which get steadily less-tall below the large stairwell – these promise adventure and have a familiar cosiness, the perfect spot for the editors of VPRO children’s programmes. As everywhere else, the ‘architecture of the interior’ lays down a particular basic ambience which is then borne out by the furnishings and additional finishing. Loose carpets litter the office section, some Persian and some in a variety of plain colours. This gives an informal atmosphere for a start. The work spaces themselves are all different: standard furniture combines with newly designed tables with an unobtrusive, non-trendy look. The same is true of the lighting: light from the specially designed neon fittings, which throughout the building hang free in a grid under the ceilings, is supplemented with classic anglepoise desk lamps. There has been no economizing on chairs: these are luxurious and comfortable. Individual comfort is increased by the fact that the windows can be opened; you are not at the mercy of the central climate control system. A grid of floor sockets for power and data communication makes it possible to put tables in any position desired. Storage space is rendered ‘invisible’ as far as possible, with filing cabinets wrapped round columns. Additional storage – as much as required per cluster – is grouped to form partitions that can also serve to deaden the acoustics. MVRDV’s proposal for the interior stoically assumes that further initiatives will be taken by the staff themselves; it refers to ‘orchestrated chaos’. It is expected that the concrete of the floors and ceilings will provide a sufficiently sturdy grid for such intiatives while being pleasantly softened by such. Might this become the locale for a new children’s programme called ‘Under the Stairs’?

Soundproof cells

As with many offices designed accorded to the ‘cocon’ (communication + concentration) idea,5) there is little compartmentalization at Villa VPRO: 70 to 80 percent of the work area is open. But there are obviously times when you want to withdraw to concentrate on a task. In other recent Dutch examples, such ‘cockpits’ have been designed as glass mini-rooms – soundproof cells that are still visually part of the main space but take a chunk out of it practically.6) At Villa VPRO the approach is fundamentally different. If you want to withdraw, you go to one of the work tables by the glass facades throughout the building. You then draw shut behind you a semi-circular, concertina-like partition coated in imitation leather. This creates a semi-circular cubicle with a diameter of 2.4 metres. There you can be alone with your work for as long as is needed, with no view except outside (either the landscape or a patio-room); all contact with your colleagues is visually and acoustically broken. It is immediately clear to them that you don’t wish to be disturbed; on the outside the concertina partition is an impenetrable black. When the partition is drawn back, the soundproof cell is once more part of the overall space. This is an unobtrusive, down-to-earth solution where nothing is fixed and nothing overemphasized.

The small rooms for those who require permanent seclusion – scriptwriters, programme makers, personnel managers – are given more resolute shape. These members of staff have workplaces in discrete ‘boxes’ floating in space below the ceilings, like barns in the hilly landscape. The furnishings are the same as those of the open office areas. Their exteriors exploit ‘the simplest materials with mega-expression’.7) The material application is based not on considerations of content or symbolism but on practical requirements and the desire to show throughout the building the widest possible range in visually attractive combinations. The detailing of the ‘boxes’ is always carefully handled, but in a such way as to make clear that in principle these barns occupy a given place only temporarily. They are like mobile furnishing units in the interior of the building-as-totality.

‘Off-line’ cells and studios

On the upper floors, where the programmes for radio and TV are thought up and readied for broadcasting, openness and direct communication are of the essence. In the studios where the programmes are actually produced, on the other hand, any background noise would only disturb. The ‘architecture of the interior’ packed thirteen ‘off-line’ cubicles, each of 16 m2 for two people at a time where TV programmes can be edited, plus a row of standard clothes lockers, into a narrow labyrinth on the lowest level of the building with a row of small radio studios alongside. The message here, clearly, is concentration.
The edit cells have no appearance or view: they are 100 percent introverted. Here nothing must distract from the video to be edited. Their insides are white; those of the radio studios are much more outspoken. Everywhere in Hilversum studio interiors look the same: they have to be soundproof and to achieve this they use standard acoustic panelling. MVRDV refused to conform on this count and on the basis of the norms for sound absorption and reflection developed abstract models that could be separately finished for each studio. One has smooth, padded walls with lights in the buttons. A guest speaker may find himself in a cell lined entirely with coconut mats saying ‘WELCOME’. In these cells ‘interior design’ and not an ‘architecture of the interior’ calls the tune.

Fireplace

The most unusual feature for an office building is undoubtedly the huge fireplace, with logs burning in it. It is the focal point of a lounge on the first level, modelled on the hall in an English country house. The fireplace is part of a stone-clad wall. In front of it lies a hearth rug (most probably leopard- or tigerskin) and comfortable leather Morris chairs. It will be truly complete when the dogs are there; some members of staff are used to bringing their canine companions to work with them.
The floor of the surrounding wood is invited in by the glass facade, imbuing the space with a beautiful greenish light. Yet the atmosphere is not merely arcadian. The stone cladding of the fireplace weds with the concrete of the curved back wall of the parking garage immediately above it. There, car headlights sweep along the lounge walls through a window opening. Through large voids, activity in the rest of the building intrudes into the idyll round the fireplace. The space can be easily reached from the central staff area down a diagonal staircase. This staircase can also serve as seating during celebrations and parties, as happened during the festivities to mark the topping out; then the catering trestles were arranged round the fireplace. This dignified yet homely living room for a Villa VPRO doubling as manor house would seem a perfect location for the traditional evening-long TV chats with ‘Summer Guests’.

The whole building is awash with such distinctive spaces which – unlike a ‘less is more’ prescription – can be used in more ways than one and may well generate or become the setting for new programmes, just as the VPRO has used its villas in the past. This building underpins those things that could be anticipated and provokes others than have yet to come. From villas to the Villa is really just a small step.

6. For example the headquarters of Interpolis in Tilburg (architect Abe Bonnema, interior design Nel Verschuuren of Kho Liang Ie Assoc.) and the Government Buildings Agency offices on Kennemerplein in Haarlem (architect Rudy Uytenhaak). See ‘Het kantoor is overal, electronificatie van de werkplek’, de Architect, theme issue 63, October 1996. For an interview with Rudy Uytenhaak see Paul van Deelen, ‘Op zoek naar het nieuwe kantoor’, in Bouw 52, no. 4, pp. …