Balancing social space with privacy and focus, Ramboll's new office in Berlin offers a variety of environments for employees to choose from when innovating and creating.

PLY atelier completed a minimal industrial space for the Ramboll offices in Berlin, Germany.

The two independent floors, which are connected via the staircases, made it possible to create two levels that offer space for both communal and concentrated work, as well as space for a wide variety of workshops and events.

On the first floor, a workspace with bookable and flexible workstations, zones for concentrated work and meeting rooms distributed across the floor plan as well as telephone booths in various sizes were created. In the entrance area of the main staircase, there is a flexbench with freely movable table tops and a group work table. Both are separated from each other by a high shelf, but are in visual relation to each other due to the material of the shelf, open expanded metal.

Adjacent to the first floor is a terrace that connects the workspace area with the future canteen on the ground floor. In the future, the terrace will be used by Ramboll as well as by the other guests in the canteen.

A large communicative area with arena, kitchen counter, dining tables and lounge was created as a transition to the terrace.

The meeting rooms and telephone booths distributed across the floor plan are housed in four large cubes, of which the two middle cubes are detached from the canopy ceiling and stand freely in the room. These two cubes are completely enclosed from the outside with expanded metal. The wall structure below the expanded metal is acoustically effective. The total of four cubes in the central area and two rooms attached to the façade divide the entire space into work areas of different sizes. Along the facades with the large windows, smaller and larger zones for different work areas were created in the open space: CAD workstations, 4-person and 6-person benches, quiet workstations with additional acoustically effective enclosures and flexible workstations.

A large room in the façade area offers an additional six quiet workstations. In this room, acoustically effective material was installed in the wall and ceiling areas as well as in the area of the workstations themselves, which are thus also visually separated from each other.

Cloakroom lockers, lockers and storage space are either integrated into the space-creating elements (e.g. shelves in niches of the central cubes) or attached to the space elements as additional structures

On the ground floor, with direct access from the outside, there is the moving reception area, various seating areas, two large kitchen counters, flexible workstations, large and small meeting rooms and the large, flexibly separable workshop area.

The ground floor area has direct access to the main staircase to the other floors and the adjoining canteen, as well as three direct entrances from the outside – thus providing a close connection to the neighbourhood on the Wilhelmhallen site.

In the transition to the workshop areas, a section of the ground floor has been converted into office space for the Henning Larsen architectural office, which belongs to the Ramboll company. Accordingly, the ground floor is a flexible meeting place for creative exchange and collaboration between the various markets.

Design: PLY atelier

Photography: Anne Deppe

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