The New Red Bull Headquarters in Amsterdam has been designed by Sid Lee Architecture. It is situated north of the port in a charming location that provides a fine reflection of the company culture and its involvement in art and sport. The project involved redeveloping an obsolete shipbuilding environment, facing a crane and an old disused Russian submarine.
"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 was to combine the almost brutal simplicity of an industrial building with Red Bull’s philosophy. 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 triangle-shaped 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 that Sid Lee Architecture offers, nothing is clearly set; all is a matter of perception.
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