Overview

In May 1993 I arrived in Amsterdam to start work at the Netherlands Design Institute, where I had been appointed its first director. Builders were already on site at the Fodor Museum, on Keizersgracht, which was to be our home so I cannot claim to have been involved in the project from the very beginning. But when I first met the architects Jan Benthem and Mels Crouwel (the same architects who take care of Schiphol Airport), our roof was off, the foundations were laid bare, and most of the internal space and infrastructure still had to be designed. A full year remained before we were due to open. Following that rather alarming first site visit, I had six years of on-the-job training in the design, commissioning, and use of a new building. During that period, we designed and built a new knowledge-based organization, too also from scratch a think-and-do tank whose objective was to reframe the way we perceive and use design. In the course of those six years, the building as a space and the relationships it supported interacted in powerful ways most of them positive, some negative. The experience taught me that a focus on space constrains the design of a workplace. The word situation better encompasses social factors.

Our building was frequently criticized for being too stiff. It isolated us from the real world and from one another. It was beautiful and a pleasure to be in but because of the way the circulation of people worked, we seldom bumped into...