Daylight decided the plan depth
No desk sits further than 7.2 metres from glass. The rule cost floor area and bought back something the yield model can't see: people upstairs at their own windows.
Work / 02Headquarters · Wilhelminapier, Rotterdam
A headquarters for three thousand people on the pier of the ocean liners — designed from the inside out, around daylight that reaches every desk before nine.
132 m36 floorsIn design2026
01 / The briefWhat the city asked
The brief.
The client is consolidating five offices into one address, and their first requirement was not floor area but morning light: shift work starts early, and the pier's east water gives a sunrise most head offices never see. The tower had to catch it without cooking its own south face.
The plan is a bar folded around the core, deeper on the north, thinner on the east, so every workfloor gets a water edge. Façade bays lean eleven degrees on the east face — enough to pull low sun deep into the plan and to give the tower its name from across the river.
Elevation studySheet 02 · Aurora Tower
132 m,
drawn.
Every VANTA sheet marks the same three lines — plinth, datum, crown. This is Aurora Tower from its own street corner, raised the way it will be built.
02 / CraftDrawn once, built 36 times
The details that carry it.
The forum hangs at the datum
The conference floors sit halfway up, expressed as a two-storey glass cut. Visitors go straight there by shuttle lift — the workfloors stay quiet above and below.
A quay café instead of a lobby
The ground floor gives most of itself to the pier: the reception is one desk, the café is forty tables. The building signs in with its plinth, not its atrium.
Wilhelminapier, Rotterdam — 132 m above the street.
Helix HQ