COURTHOUSE AMSTERDAM

The current Courthouse in Amsterdam is located in a prominent place along the A10 on the ‘Zuid-as’. The old building will be demolished and replaced by a new building. SevilPeach is asked as an interior designer to be part of the consortium of VolkerWessels where Hootsmans architecture  together with Felix Claus are responsible for the architecture. The competition is set up as a DBFMO project for the new Amsterdam Courthouse. Our competitors were Jean Nouvelle, SOM, OMA and Kees Kaan architects. We finished this competition on the second place, with the note that the interior part (responsibility SevilPeach) of our consortium has scored better than the winner.

The SevilPeach team has particularly played an important design role and responsibility for the transition floor and the office floors. The layout of the office floor plans are, besides the fixed elements such as elevators, structure, emergency stairs and shafts, created and design by SevilPeach.
The transition floor is the connection between the public area with the courtrooms below and the office floors above. It is placed as one big horizontal floor in between these two different program typologies and users. This floor is divided into a number of zones where specific functions such as conferencing, meeting and workplaces, coffee bar and restaurant - each with its own quality and appearance - are designed. All rooms are equipped with a rich variety of multifunctional seats that can be used in a variety of meeting- and working places, and places to have lunch or a coffee. The two areas on the east and west side of the terrace garden are the work lobbies. Here you can work quietly in a room with a comfortable size in scale and a wide variety of workplaces. The wooden stairs to the office floors emerge inviting from behind the high dense wall of the meeting room. The furniture consists mainly of custom-made elements for more concentrated work places combined with a number of larger worktables. On the walking routes booths are placed forming an acoustic shield for the area behind. At the heart of the work lobby is a soft seating configuration arranged in the form of an upright sitting bench, with a number of seats around it. This gives a pleasant change, which improves the overall appearance of this area. We organize the extensive offices program on four floors; around the roof garden. The floors are interconnected and connected to the transition floor by stairs and voids. This creates not only horizontal links between various working places, but also vertical and diagonal visual connections. The organization of the office floors is built into zones; a dynamic strip on the inside as traffic area, a multi-functional specific central zone, and flexible area dedicated to the workstations along the outer facade. In the middle zone, strategically at the meeting points, interfaces are created with voids, staircases and double height private meeting rooms. These interfaces vary per office floor and provide great spatial dynamics and diversity. The meeting points (interfaces) are clearly recognizable as the heart of a work area where colleagues meet, conspicuous by the spaciousness, the special light and the both vertical, horizontal and diagonal sightlines. On the south side a large void was added as a spatial element in the central zone to experience the relationship between the offices. This void, combined with the sculptural staircase acts as a clear marker on the four floors.  The meeting workspaces are comfortable, colourful and softly designed. Here pleasant spaces in the size of large living rooms appear, in combination with strategically placed solid walls with there special windows, to allow and emphasise dynamic views and light. The wooden frames of the windows in combination with the white walls give this area a unique character to match the history of courts. The wooden frames are designed by analogy, and give a warm accent to the more neutral light interior. The frames are flush with the wall on the corridor sides, while in the rooms themselves stabbing inside like an inverted bay window. This is further reinforced by occasionally integrating a high bank into the windows so interior design and architecture come together.          

  Competition New Courthouse Amsterdam
  Client: Central Goverment Real Estate Agency
  Consortium: Volker Wessels Integraal
  Architect: Hootsmans architectuurbureau & Felix Claus  
Interior Architect: SevilPeach Architecture & Design (Sevil Peach & Gary Turnbull)
  Project architect interior: Marlies Boterman
  Project team: Bryony Philips, Alex Sutton, Verdiana Tassi, Maud Tisserant

Area: 70.000 m2
  Start design & build proces: Januari 2015
  Handed in: Februari 2016