Going Dutch: inside Booking.com’s ground-breaking Amsterdam campus

Booking.com’s much-anticipated HQ has arrived in Amsterdam, bringing all 6,500 of the travel tech giant’s employees together in the same building for the first time in more than a decade. And at over 65,000 sq m, this state-of-the-art, neck- craning campus is no mean feat.

Located on the historic waterfront at Oosterdokseiland, or Eastern Dock Island, the impressive new structure reflects the industrial nature of the harbour, with a detailed glass façade reflecting the surrounding water and generous sky. Contrasting with the imposing nature of the architecture, inside the interior design is warm and lively – the building broken down to a human scale through an abundance of natural materials, diverse zoning and layers of greenery.

“While the individual interior spaces enjoy a truly international flavour that reflects Booking.com’s core business, we wanted the overall concept for the building to serve as a reflection of Amsterdam – its location and the Dutch travel company’s homebase since its inception,” comments UNStudio’s Ben  van Berkel, who led the architecture and spatial planning of the building. “The architecture combines the robust qualities and the industrial history of the harbour, while the interior is designed to characterise the vibrancy of Amsterdam’s central neighbourhoods.”

On entering, a huge atrium offers views up a dramatic staircase flanked by a green corridor of plants and digital screens, encouraging visitors to traverse the light- filled space and second floor. Throughout the building breakout workspaces are divided into 28 themes based on holiday destinations. Guests and employees can step away from their desks to collaborate in New York City, brainstorm in Panama, or have a coffee break in the Amazon, allowing for the traditional workspaces on each floor to remain relatively quiet for more focused work.

Each breakout area consists of a similar set of configurations that support working requirements – a pantry, high table, lounge tables, nooks, an open stand- up meeting space and closed meeting rooms. With this in mind, the diversity throughout the different destinations is achieved by a variety of finishes, materials and furniture elements. To create continuity throughout the project despite the various design voices involved, HofmanDujardin created a masterplan for the entire building, looking at each space individually and creating key words and mood boards – working with Booking.com to select different design studios to take on different spaces. Additional studios were tasked with designing so- called ‘layers’ to tie everything together, from planting selected by Makers of Sustainable Spaces (MOSS), to inclusive wayfinding by Bureau Mijksenaar, and colourful floor coverings by Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings.

“The biggest challenge was to ensure that the diversity wouldn’t turn into chaos,” comments Wopereis. “By sticking to the clear starting points of the masterplan, which ensured a certain harmony between the different areas, we tried to keep control. One can see the work of different designers coming together [from the atriums], and for us that was an exciting moment.”

Along with the breakout zones, ‘connector’ spaces on each floor offer important respite from computer screens and support collaboration. Local studio Studio Modijefsky has designed some of the more interesting of these versatile areas, transforming what might have been plain meeting rooms close to staircases into a dynamic ‘playground’ that offers employees the chance to switch off their minds and move their bodies instead. “These aren’t gyms: fun is the goal here,” notes Studio Modijefsky’s Rhea Stroink. “By filling the connectors with unusual but enticing tools for movement, play and interaction, employees are just a hop, skip and a jump from a positive and physical mind state.”

Studio Modijefsky was also tasked with one of the three on-site restaurants, the fifth floor ‘Five Islands’, which has been designed as five joined but individually themed zones (or ‘islands’). Each island zone incorporates different elements such as flooring, lighting, partitions, colours, textures and materials to create unique environments that seamlessly flow into one another, thanks to a natural stone floor that acts as the ‘sea’.

Within a city that prides itself on being one of the most sustainable cities in the world, thanks to its green transportation and infrastructure goals, an eco-conscious thread runs through the Booking.com building. MOSS developed a visionary green masterplan for the campus, featuring thousands of plants and several trees, a botanical staircase, a seven- storey green wall, vibrant rooftop gardens complete with insect hotels, and vertical farming facilities in the restaurants that help to provide healthy dining experiences (no poffertjes here) that are majority plant- based.

Constructed to BREEAM Excellent standard, sustainable materials have been used throughout the interiors, with HofmanDujardin taking on the challenge to reuse existing furniture from the previous Booking.com offices, while sticking to the initial mood boards. 832 solar panels adorn the roof, and cutting-edge ground-coupled heat exchanger technology is used for heating and cooling the building.

In such a vast space, rich with detail and experiences, the real power of this project is not only the creative diversity, but also the collaborative design journey that happened along the way – the makings of a new standard practice for the industry?