Impressive (ceramic) facade 

A facade with over 14,000 ceramic tiles adorns the new Booking.com headquarters on Oosterdokseiland. A true work of art from the minds of Sorba, who incidentally even guaranteed the complete facade sealing including HSB elements, facades with French balconies, prefabricated balconies with glass balustrade, aluminum eaves and so on for the adjacent residential building.

"Engineering and realizing non-standard projects, that's what we like doing best," begins Lotte Koggel, project manager at Sorba. "We always come up with an appropriate solution. The new Booking.com headquarters with adjacent residential building is a great example. Above all, it is not standard. That's why we have been involved in the design from the beginning and why we keep a finger on the production side, to make sure that it is executed as we thought it up beforehand. And in the meantime, we can safely conclude that we have succeeded in doing just that. It is a wonderfully beautiful building, also in a striking location."

Most impressive still is the ceramic facade. Sorba clad the horizontal strips and exterior ceiling of the huge overhang with nearly 3,000 m2 of ceramic tiles. "Because of the many sloping lines, quite a challenge to get that right," Koggel knows. "By far most of the tiles were custom-made. They were suspended in the exterior ceiling in a special back construction and, for absolute safety, mechanically secured with a cable. For the eaves, we used aluminum flashing." 

Sorba also realized the facade of the 41 apartments in the adjacent building. "For this we delivered timber frame elements, as well as the facades with French balcony and the prefabricated balconies with glass balustrade. For the finishing touch, the whole thing was finished with approximately 800 m2 of Alpolic panels. All in all, an extensive project for us. It was not only technically challenging, but also required the necessary attention in terms of planning and logistics given the limited space and many parties working simultaneously. But the result is worth it."