Centraal Beheer Office Building

Hertzberger described the brief as building a village rather than an office, and the result behaves like one. A single unit — a square concrete-block tower with a floor slab in it and daylight down two sides — is repeated fifty-six times and offset so that the gaps between towers become streets, squares and bridges rather than corridors. The concrete blocks are left raw and the fittings deliberately unfinished, on the argument that a workplace should be completed by the people in it; staff brought in plants, lamps, carpets and bicycles, and photographs from the 1970s show an office that looks squatted rather than furnished. Critics called the facades graceless, which they are: the building has no elevation to speak of, only the ends of the same unit repeated. Centraal Beheer left in 2013; the building is now a national monument being converted to housing.