Inside KAAN

Rotterdam, as a city, never really excited me. 

The simultaneous merging of bike lanes, footpaths, and roads require a heightened awareness when roaming around the city. This makes observing the surrounding quirky, experimental architecture puncturing the skyline difficult. 

Rotterdam was heavily bombed in the Second World War, leaving it as a blank sheet for architects at the time. Koolhaas described Rotterdam at the time as a city freed by its own destruction. History no longer resisted intervention. The city, an experiment for architects and urban planners, still toyed with today. 

We were visiting Rotterdam for the architectural office open day as part of their annual Architecture festival. Looking for Kaan Architects, Google Maps directed us to an Art Nouveau-type building, modest in its exterior appearance. The building boasted post-modernist traits through weathered concrete motifs. Its entry way clad in a polished marble, and slightly raised off the pavement.

The scorching heat of the Dutch summer sun was immediately met with a rush of cold air upon entering the building. The coolness transcended with the travertine marble floor and wall finishes. Steel barriers with thick glass doors were left open for us to walk through. The entryway felt extremely corporate. The central green diamond marble vein in one of the interior walls was quite the financial aesthetic giveaway. Upon entering the lift, each silver button had an office name near it, ending with financiën. We pushed the reflective steel button under ‘Kaan Architecten’, located on the buildings upper floors, and made our way up.

We meandered through a corridor space and walked towards their offices. We were greeted through an open double height double walnut door, framing the internal part of the office. The rhythmic structural columns left exposed with coarse concrete, yet taking the formwork of shuttering, led the eye throughout the length of the space. The textured concrete columns alluded to large-scale models of the Marina City high-rise complex in Chicago. When running my hands through this flutted concrete, the coarse, coral-like aggregate felt cold. No aggregate protruded outwards. The columns seemed to be the only rough finish in the office. The glass walls, aperture frames, desks, door handles, wooden floors were polished. It was only after walking through the building that I realised the entire back wall was mirrored, creating the illusion of grandeur. 

The space felt extremely corporate, elegant in its high-end finishes, captured through staged traces of everyday office life. All desks portrayed an orchestrated chaos. Perfectly aligned A0 plans were stretched over a desk with a handful of markers carefully placed irregularly atop the thick paper. Other desks where void of any productive clutter remanences. 

The columns met the polished, herringbone walnut floor. A large spread of matte black office furniture laid atop the dark walnut floor, spread out across the open plan. De Rotterdam and the iconic Erasmus Bridge were framed in the between the columns as one walked through the space. What a sense of privilege, I thought. 

This firm tackled large, serious projects, as evidenced by scattered, highly detailed models portraying their work at different scales. They maintained and enforced a certain style, prevailing discipline, and precise way of working in their architecture, one could feel it. 

Part of the open floor plan was quartered off with large floor-to-ceiling frosted glass panels. A glass pane, comprised of glass shelves, was held in place with iron rods pinned at the edges. The bottom most shelf was just slightly raised off the ground. I wonder how or if the floor beneath it was cleaned. Clean, almost clinical models were placed on the shelves. The afternoon light reflected religiously on the models, showcasing the differing smooth model materials, unveiling their translucent qualities. Curved wooden cubes as skyrises, purple resin blocks as massing, shiny mirrored spheres representing a form of auditorium, magnetic dust around nails as trees. The architectural representation was incredible. 

The seriousness of the space and their architectural image was only broken by comical design elements. These included a small twenty-by-twenty centimetre translucent yellow sink on a large seven-meter conference table, a cycling machine placed near the director's boardroom, showing no signs of use, and a four- meter wide pivot door leading to a small storage room. Walking into what appeared to be a Directors office/ board room, a painting hung high on the travertine clad walls. The painting, which appeared to be a silkscreen of sorts, read; 

“I AM THE MOST HUMBLE PERSON,

IN THE WORLD”. 

The sans-serif font indeed complemented the humility of the text. The glass pane that covered the print reflected distant Dutch high-rises. 

Walking back to the exit, a group of people were gathered around the reception desks, adjacent to the thick walnut door entryway. Two employees, perched behind their iMac stations, were answering questions and collecting portfolios from individuals seeking to work in the office space. The portfolios where stacked on a very thin, brushed steel shelf on the reception countertop.  Their outfits, I thought, could have alluded and complemented their portfolio. From the little I overheard, the presumed interns turned receptionists answered politely, brushing off any questions on the visitors potential employment to work in the firm. 

“Thank you for taking an interest in Kaan”, one of the receptionists said, as she collected a portfolio and smiled at us walking past the door. 

Outside, the city resumed.

The office remained intact behind us, complete and unavailable.
We walked on.