Montreal (Canada)-based firm Sid Lee Architecture , sharing with us their amazing interactive and deconstructive interior design for Amsterdam Red Bull Headquarters.
Red Bull Amsterdam Unveils Its New Headquarters
Chosen over two other firms, Sid Lee Architecture and Sid Lee’s Amsterdam atelier were mandated to create the new Red Bull Amsterdam headquarters. The company agreed to settle in the North side of Amsterdam’s port area, in a site evocative of both an artistic street culture and the intensity of extreme sports. The project landed in an old heritage shipbuilding factory, facing a timeless crane and an old disused Russian submarine.
Architecture to suit a philosophy
“To design the inner space, we aimed at retrieving Red Bull’s philosophy, dividing spaces according to their use and spirit, to suggest the idea of the two opposed and complementary hemispheres of the human mind, reason versus intuition, arts versus the industry, dark versus light, the rise of the angel versus the mention of the beast”, says Jean Pelland, lead design Architect and Senior Partner at Sid Lee Architecture.
Inside the shipbuilding factory, with its three adjacent bays, the architects focused on expressing the dichotomy of space, shifting from public spaces to private ones, from black to white and from white to black.
Our goal in this endeavour was to combine the almost brutal simplicity of an industrial built with Red Bull’s mystical invitation to perform. The interior architecture with its multiple layers of meaning conveys this dual personality, reminding the user of mountain cliffs one moment and skate board ramps the next. These triangleshaped piles, as if ripped off the body of a ship, build up semi-open spaces that can be viewed from below, as niches, or from above, as bridges and mezzanines spanning across space. In the architecture we offer, nothing is clearly set; all is a matter of perception.
Credits
Client : Red Bull Netherlands
Acrhitectural Design: Sid Lee Architecture
Visual Identity and Graphics: Sid Lee
Builders: Fiction Factory
Furniture: 2D&W
Local Architects (permits) : Kamstra Architecten BNA
General Contractor: Jora Vision B.V.
Photos: Ewout Huibers
