The EDGE in AMsterdam

What It’s Like to Arrive at the EDGE

A day at the Edge starts before you get there. The building’s smartphone app — developed with Deloitte — checks your schedule in the morning and begins preparing for you. When you drive into the garage, a camera reads your license plate, matches it against the employment database, and raises the gate. The overhead lights — sensor-equipped LEDs — brighten as you approach your parking space and dim as you walk away.

This is not a gimmick (albeit maybe a little Big Brother creepy). It is the building managing its own energy use in real time, one small decision at a time.

Inside, there are no assigned desks. Not for anyone. The 2,500 Deloitte employees who work in the Edge share approximately 1,000 workspaces — a model called hot desking, built on the Dutch philosophy of het nieuwe werken, or “the new way of working.” The idea is that fixed locations and fixed routines produce fixed thinking. Move people around, break the pattern, and something more useful might happen.

The app finds you a desk based on your schedule for the day. Sitting desk, standing desk, work booth, concentration room, meeting room, balcony seat — it knows what you have coming up and assigns accordingly. Lockers serve as home base: find one with a green light, tap your badge, and it’s yours. Employees are encouraged not to keep the same locker across multiple days, for the same reason they don’t have the same desk.

What the Building Is Actually Doing

The atrium is where most of this becomes visible. It runs the full height of the building, and the shape of the Edge — from outside, it looks like a standard glass office block with a triangular wedge sliced cleanly off one corner — is designed specifically to flood that atrium with daylight from the south. Every workspace in the building sits within 7 meters (23 feet) of a window. On a gray Dutch morning, the interior reads as genuinely luminous rather than lit.

The atrium does more than carry light. Mesh panels between each floor allow stale office air to spill into the open space, rise naturally, and be expelled through the roof. The system creates a loop of passive ventilation that keeps the interior feeling more like the outdoors than a climate-controlled box. Slight heat variations and air currents move through the space in ways that a sealed building cannot replicate.

Underneath all of this, the energy systems are doing something that took genuine engineering to achieve. In summer, the building pumps warm water more than 400 feet down into the aquifer beneath the site, where it sits insulated until winter. When temperatures drop, the stored water is retrieved and used for heating. EDGE Technologies describes this as the most efficient aquifer thermal energy storage system in the world. Whether or not that claim holds indefinitely, the result is measurable: the Edge uses 70% less electricity than a comparable office building.

The southern wall is a checkerboard of solar panels and windows — 6,000 square meters of panels in total, across the roof and facades. The panels provide energy and simultaneously reduce solar radiation entering the building, which reduces the cooling load. Thick load-bearing concrete moderates temperature fluctuations. Deeply recessed windows eliminate the need for blinds even in direct sunlight. The building was only able to claim net energy-positive status after EDGE installed additional panels on the rooftops of neighboring university buildings — a detail worth knowing, and one the building’s own documentation does not hide.

28,000 Sensors and a Dashboard

The Edge contains 28,000 sensors. They track occupancy, temperature, humidity, light levels, and energy use across the entire building in real time. The data feeds into a central dashboard that gives facilities teams a live view of how the building and its occupants are interacting. On days when fewer people are expected, entire sections can be shut down — heating, cooling, lighting, and cleaning suspended until needed. Nothing runs on assumption. No cleaning crews are vacuuming meeting rooms that haven’t been used that day. 

The hot drink machines remember how you take your coffee, or tea. Flatscreens throughout the building sync wirelessly with any phone or laptop. Every desk has a built-in wireless charger. If you want to order groceries, the app can handle that too: request a dinner recipe during the day, and a bag of fresh ingredients will be waiting when you leave.

PLP Architecture, the firm that designed the building, framed the central question of the project this way: “What is the role of architecture when the workplace is permeated by layers of technology that fundamentally alter the way that we interact with our environment?” Their answer was a building that makes informal collaboration visible, creates multiple distinct working atmospheres, and treats flexibility — physical and digital — as the organizing principle rather than an afterthought.

There are also bee nests on the roof. The building’s ambitions, it turns out, extend to local pollinators.