Ecca collection

ThyssenKrupp Headquarter Essen

ThyssenKrupp’s decision to relocate its operations from 15 different sites across the Ruhr region to a former industrial site at Essen, where the company was founded, has resulted in an award-winning collection of strikingly modern buildings amid a newly created green and peaceful urban district boasting its own micro-climate.

Images courtesy of C. Richters / AACMA / JSWD

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Barco Headquarters

Barco, a global provider of audiovisual solutions, has just opened its new headquarters in Kortrijk (Belgium) which will bring the company’s 1,250 Belgian employees into one location. At the centre of the 230,000 square metre site is ‘The Circle’, a landmark new building which provides a direct link between head office staff, R&D, production, and Barco’s international customer base.

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ROC Carolus School

The first impression of the ROC Carolus building is deceptive, and deliberately so. Passers-by and visitors see a ‘crazy’ building, a fractured and playful facade, with irregularly polygonal windows breaking up the variety of shades of grey in the prepainted metal cladding that floats above a glazed ground floor. This cladding in turn has ‘fault lines’ along it, as if the whole could shatter in an instant. It takes a moment to realise that this is disguising the fact that the building in fact consists of relatively regular blocks joined by glazing. The overall assembly is largely rectilinear, but with one end curving to a point like the prow of a ship. Far from this being an example of unexplained exuberance, careful consideration has gone into making the facade, like the rest of the building, hard working and affordable.

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