Ingrid van der Heijden

Civic is an architectural firm for public buildings and places. We design libraries, bridges, cultural buildings, dikes, town halls, squares, educational and residential buildings, streets, sculptures, and stations. Civic creates generous, special architecture that survives generations. Architecture is not an autonomous discipline for Civic, but a public task. Civic looks far back and far ahead in time. They pay a lot of attention to the atmosphere of the architecture and to the development of materials and their aging process. Research plays a crucial role in their design process and we develop variants at every stage.

Civic is led by four partners and consists of ten architects. They approach the design from different scales and work for each assignment with specialist builders, thinkers, and practical experts. Civic is co-founder and member of The Cloud Collective, an international and multidisciplinary design collective.

Ingrid co-founded Civic to deepen her all-round background with specific qualities. Her work focuses on architectural form, sensoric qualities of materials and production processes. She studies the evolution of building types, materials and their context and experiment with its possibilities. She seeks a sustainable architecture that is just as interesting in 50 years as it is now: poetic pragmatism, timeless and pioneering.