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This coworking space is the most elegant office I’ve ever seen

BY Jesus Diaz1 minute read

This is the new office by coworking space company Fosbury & Sons in Brussels, Belgium. If it looks like the most perfect and elegant modernist working space you have ever seen, that’s because it very well could be exactly that.

The Office Boitsfort, the company’s second coworking space, is perfect for two reasons.

[Photo: © Jeroen Verrecht]
First: It’s inside a masterpiece of modernist architecture, the former headquarters for cement company CBR in Brussels. Designed by Belgian-Polish architect Constantin Brodzki–who is 94 now and worked on Oscar Niemeyer’s United Nations headquarters in New York City–this 1970 building is made of 756 prefab convex oval concrete modules that frame large windows, filling the Office Boitsfort with light (or as much as it can be under the gray Brussels sky).

Second: Fosbury & Sons’s founders Stijn Geeraets and Maarten Van Gool loved the building and wanted to make its interior a natural, seamless extension of the architecture.

For that they hired interior design firm Going East, which organized the 75,350-square-feet space into “suites” (private office space) and “ateliers” (shared private office spaces) that can accommodate 600 people working for up to 250 different companies. These spaces are distributed across seven of the building’s nine floors.

Going East also designed a lobby with a bar. On the eighth floor, there is a restaurant and another bar called Giorgio with panoramic views of the forest that surrounds the building. The top bar can be rented by coworking space members and non-members for events.

[Photo: © Jeroen Verrecht]

As for the decor: Every element, from tables to chairs to lights, seems to have been there forever. As if Brodzki himself had originally put them there to be in perfect symbiosis with the building he created.

Interestingly, Brodzki told Wallpaper that he wasn’t very enthusiastic when he got news that the building was going to be renovated. But it’s hard to imagine he’d be disappointed with what Fosbury & Sons did with the place. It could only be better if if it were made entirely out of Belgian waffles.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jesus Diaz is a screenwriter and producer whose latest work includes the mini-documentary series Control Z: The Future to Undo, the futurist daily Novaceno, and the book The Secrets of Lego House. More


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