We make the walk
through the office
feel like a walk
in the park
At Benthem Crouwel Architects we believe in the power of discovery. The kind of creativity we all had when we were young: the ability to play, imagine and stumble into answers we did not know we were looking for.
Discovering new solutions
We want to give our team the best resources to use these skills, a place without restrictions where ideas can hatch, grow, and develop into real, practical and innovative solutions to be applied in our work. A safe place to fail, because nothing great ever comes to life without the process of making mistakes and starting all over, maybe even more than once. It is one of the foundations of our practice.
Benthem Crouwel LAB: an innovative playground
To provide this creative space within our studio, we started The LAB, an initiative where outside the scope of our ongoing projects, people have the complete freedom to reconsider cliché’s and paradigms and be truly inventive. Collaborating with professionals from other fields and disciplines they develop a prototype or product that eventually can be applied in our work. The LAB gives us the opportunity to showcase the innovation and variation that define our work, and to foster demonstrate our unique ability to come up with clever and surprising solutions that improve people’s lives.
Creativity is letting go of all preconceived notions of how it ‘should’ be done.
Beyond architecture
Innovative, unexpected solutions help us go ‘beyond architecture’ and beyond the technical and constructional aspects of a building. It gives a building meaning and purpose and determines how people will experience it – simply put, if they will enjoy using it. To achieve this you need to get inside the head of the client and future users. Which solutions are the best fit for the assignment? How can we design a space where people feel at home, a space that matches the goals and ideals of both client and users?
It's how we work
Inventiveness and creativity are about seeing possibilities, experimenting, and positive energy. A very optimistic state of mind where you dare to dream of something bigger than yourself, letting go of pre-conceptions and judgments. I have personally never lost the ability to live in my imagination. Combining various knowledge and experiences you already have with new discoveries, and applying this to the challenge before you – this is my creative drive as a designer. By bringing this way of thinking to our projects we can help our clients to think outside the box, a very rewarding process. It’s a smart, proactive attitude that leads to the cutting edge designs that surprise you: the architecture Benthem Crouwel is famous for.
