Red Bull Amsterdam by Sid Lee Architecture

Faceted metal plates surround cave-like rooms and a winding mezzanine at the new Amsterdam headquarters for drinks brand Red Bull.

Designed by Sid Lee Architecture of Montreal and Amsterdam, the offices occupy a former shipbuilding factory beside a harbour in the north of the city.

Roof gables define three bays inside the offices, one of which houses the string of metal and plywood meeting areas that incorporate a DJ booth and a recording studio.

These include a resting room lit by neon lights named The Crash Room and a canteen named The Dive.

Offices and workstations decorated with brand graphics fill the remaining two bays, but have a perforated metal meeting room at their centre.

In the toilet, mosaic walls illustrate religious characters DJing and performing karaoke.

We've also featured headquarters for brands including Facebook, Skype and Google on Dezeen - see all our stories about office interiors here.

Photography is by Ewout Huiber.

Here's some more text from Sid Lee Architecture:

Red Bull Amsterdam Unveils Its New Headquarters

Chosen over two other firms, Sid Lee Architecture and Sid Lee’s Amsterdam atelier were mandated to create the new Red Bull Amsterdam headquarters.

The company agreed to settle in the North side of Amsterdam’s port area, in a site evocative of both an artistic street culture and the intensity of extreme sports.

The project landed in an old heritage shipbuilding factory, facing a timeless crane and an old disused Russian submarine.

Architecture to suit a philosophy

“To design the inner space, we aimed at retrieving Red Bull’s philosophy, dividing spaces according to their use and spirit, to suggest the idea of the two opposed and complementary hemispheres of the human mind, reason versus intuition, arts versus the industry, dark versus light, the rise of the angel versus the mention of the beast”, says Jean Pelland, lead design Architect and Senior Partner at Sid Lee Architecture.

Inside the shipbuilding factory, with its three adjacent bays, the architects focused on expressing the dichotomy of space, shifting from public spaces to private ones, from black to white and from white to black.

Our goal in this endeavour was to combine the almost brutal simplicity of an industrial built with Red Bull’s mystical invitation to perform.

The interior architecture with its multiple layers of meaning conveys this dual personality, reminding the user of mountain cliffs one moment and skate board ramps the next.

These triangle-shaped piles, as if ripped off the body of a ship, build up semi-open spaces that can be viewed from below, as niches, or from above, as bridges and mezzanines spanning across space.