Centraal Beheer When I first got assigned the Centraal Beheer for this project I thought, an insurance building, what could be so special about this building? After getting over the whole don’t judge a book by its cover thing and doing some research; I found the Centraal Beheer to be a unique building with diverse characteristics. A building that has brought about many commentary angles, professional and proletarian, and has had structural influences not only by employees by what was happening in cultures surrounding the Netherlands. The Architects consider the Centraal Beheer to be extremely geometric with no meaning for compassion. The only good human thing about Hertzberger’s building is that the photos taken have the people smiling in them showing people are happy with the outcome of the architecture. Providing the budget Hertzberger had to design a large office building, the repetitive cubes in their own design werenot the problem, nor the phony pictures of people. The main concern, the Architects say, is that the Centraal Beheer is just a space, there is no environment in the architecture, and the project was never finished. Herzberger has not only created a bleak work environment but has tried to create a city within a single structure or business. The design of the insurance company could have been a response to many cultural aspects. The one that caught my attention was the politically disorganized West Germany, starting in the year 1968 with the emergency laws and continued to 1977. There were certain radical groups that used terrorist tactics to try to control the government. In October of 1977 one radical group, the Red Army Faction, captured a powerful industrialist and held for ransom for over a month. (New German Critique, pp. 158) In response to this beginning of a revolution the government applied strict control on the media, emergency laws, and even banned rights. Most buildings were restructured, censoring information that created free...