Latent Capacity
Activating the Multi-Tenant Office Building as an Urban Resource
S. Schuit (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
O. Klijn – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
R.S. Guis – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
This research asks how the multi-tenant office building, a common but overlooked typology in Dutch business parks, can generate urban vitality within a mixed-use environment by drawing on its own structural and spatial qualities. Through literature review, case study analysis and design research grounded in Brand's shearing layers, Brooker and Stone's reuse strategies, and Gehl's and Sennett's accounts of vitality, the study identifies four typological constants: an overdimensioned structure, a generic floor plan, peripheral circulation and collective infrastructure. Applied to an office building in Rotterdam's Noord-West business park, the design reorganises the existing office blocks for housing and adds a cross-laminated timber residential volume above the concrete hall, which becomes a mixed public space linked to the street through a redesigned plinth and passage. The result demonstrates that working with, rather than replacing, the building's own logic produces vitality and offers principles transferable to a wider class of underused buildings.