The Blurring Zone at Amsterdam’s Zuidas forms a 125-metre-long public interior at the heart of a mixed-use ensemble, where 56.000m² of living, working, leisure and hospitality converge within a single building. Multiple entrances from offices and residences intersect with a food court, lobby and cinema complex, creating one continuous, publicly accessible ground floor without partitions. This allows users to move freely between functions and experience the space as an indoor extension of the city.

Rather than approaching the assignment as an interior, we treated it as an urban plan, taking cues from Berlage’s Plan Zuid. Lanes, streets, green pockets and sightlines organise the space, enabling the various programmes to function as buildings around an indoor square. Sculptural stairs connect the first three floors and improve logistics between overlapping user flows, while offering shifting perspectives across the atrium. The undulating ceiling, shaped by the cinema volumes above, adds spatial rhythm and orientation across the full length of the space.

Together with integrated planting and a warm material palette, these elements create a permeable transition between city and building, supporting encounter and interaction without compromising navigability, comfort or human scale.