Instinct before form

Instinctual Group was founded in 2004 in Rotterdam by Anouk Verhaegen, an architect who had spent eight years designing offshore accommodation modules and flood-defence pumping stations, and Henrik Aalstad, a Norwegian structural engineer who had spent twelve years on subsea structures and pressure vessels.

They met on a flood-defence competition, lost it, and started a practice in a borrowed drawing office above a ship-repair yard on the Maas.

The name is Anouk’s: a building should know its site the way an animal knows its weather, by instinct. The first building was the Harlingen Market Hall (2008), a covered market with a café and a roof terrace on a tidal harbour quay. Architecture and engineering have shared one table ever since: about ninety of the 420 people are engineers.

We work for governments and public agencies, research institutions and universities, infrastructure operators, corporations and private clients.

Many of our clients prefer not to be named; where that is the case we describe them by sector. Some projects are not published at our clients’ request.

A building on an extreme site has to be frugal: every litre of fuel and every tonne of material is carried there.

We design for low operational energy first, measure embodied carbon on every project from stage one, and publish the performance data from our completed stations.