Last year I visited Giunti Labs (now renamed to Exact learning) and I was blown away by their location and office building. It’s a beautiful place and a beautiful building. See my blog for more details.
Since December I work for easygenerator and though our location can’t compete with theirs, our office is something different. We, together with our sister companies of the ISM group, are located in one of the buildings of a former coffee and tobacco factory, named ‘De van Nellefabriek’ (van Nelle being the old brand name, fabriek is Dutch for factory).
The factory consists out of several buildings. In the picture above you see the ‘street’ with buildings on the left and right. The curved building is the building where the management use to reside, that’s now the office of ISM. It has been design and build in the late 1920’s. It’s now an industrial monument and is listed on the Unesco monument list. In the other buildings all kind of other companies are located, and there is a conference and event space.
This is the street view of our building. In the left part of the first floor we have our workspace, the right curved part has separate old offices we now use as conference rooms. I find it a privilege to work here, it is very different from any other office I have ever worked in. But I think it’s really beautiful. I like the straight and bended lines of our building and the glass, concrete and steel its made of.
This is a view from the second floor (where the conference rooms are located, into the big working area. This picture has been taken a few years ago, now the complete space is occupied with desks. It is a great space and everybody has his workplace here, from the highest manager to the most junior intern. Sometimes its a bit noisy but it has great advantages. My desk is just passed the big red ball, hanging from the ceiling. I do admit that I sometimes miss my old room I had at Stoas and the privacy it gave me. But if you want to make a call or want to have a private meeting, you can go into the basement where there are all kinds of sound proof booths.
All in all it’s by far the greatest building I have ever worked in.
The Learning 2019 conference
I have been to a ton of learning conferences but this will be my first time at #learning2019. I’m looking forward to it and I’m planning to report on all interesting sessions via this blog.
