Frankemaheerd
Amsterdam
Netherlands, 2018

Frankemaheerd in Amsterdam Zuidoost was built between 1975 and 1981 as the headquarters of the KBB Group, the company behind De Bijenkorf and HEMA, among others. Designed by OD 205, with Jacques Choisy as project architect, the complex was not conceived as a single enclosed structure, but as a series of interconnected clusters, covering a total area of approximately 40,000 square metres.

It was precisely this design that gave the building a distinctive place in Dutch office architecture: large in scale, yet articulated in a way that remained legible on a smaller scale, with modular units, prefabricated columns positioned outside the façade, gardens between the clusters, and a strong connection to the layered urban planning of the Bijlmer. Publications on the building therefore explicitly associate it with structuralist thinking, in which growth, interconnectedness and differentiation take precedence over the autonomous architectural object.

Frankemaheerd later found a second life as the setting for the Dutch television series Toren C. The building already seemed to embody something of an office world that was at once functional, absurd and slightly out of time. Its flexible floor plans allowed different worlds to be staged within it, while the complex itself remained a relic of an optimistic period in the development of Amsterdam Zuidoost. In 2017, Frankemaheerd was demolished to make way for the new ING headquarters.

The video work Frankemaheerd examines not only the demolition of a building, but also the disappearance of a particular architectural philosophy. What is dismantled is more than concrete alone: an entire way of organising space, of thinking about work, scale and collectivity, gradually fades from view.