Life through a lens.

A furniture firm's headquarters in the wide Dutch countryside echoes the abstract surroundings and expresses through form and materials its industrial purpose.

The furniture firm, Lensvelt, was founded about 20 years ago by the father of the present owner, Hans Lensvelt. From the beginning it specialized, like a tailor, in a bespoke service manufacturing architects' furniture designs for particular buildings. So for example Lensvelt worked with Richard Meier on the design of furniture for the City Hall in the Hague (AR January 1996); and with Wiel Arets on developing the Stealth office system for the AZL Pension Funds headquarters in Heerlen. That system, designed to correct acoustic problems presented by hard surfaces inside the building, has become one of the firm's readily available ranges.

Arets is the architect of Lensvelt's new factory headquarters at Breda, about 45 minutes south of Amsterdam and 15 minutes away from the Belgian border. The shell of the building has been completed but the interior has yet to be finished and landscaping by West 8 requires more time for it to mature. What you can see from the motorways nearby is a crystalline box which is stretched out north-south over a flat and watery terrain alongside the A27 highway.

Arets' stripped down tectonics and taut geometries echo the abstraction of the Dutch landscape. His architecture, seemingly distilled from continuing debate and from earlier familiar sources of abstraction - the early Modernists, the sculptures of Serra, Judd and DeWitt, Aldo Rossi, metaphysical minimalism - has a powerfully cerebral character. You see it - as you do here in Breda - in the way forms and materials are juxtaposed and balanced, in the pattern of openings, and in the restrained handling of materials. At the same time severity is tempered by an expression of grain and texture.

Factory and offices are contained within a single shell composed of 8m high translucent glass strips with a U-section (used previously, but not on such a scale, for the exterior of police stations at Cuijk and Boxtel) so that the skin itself, which has a greenish hue, has a textured corrugated appearance. The light it transmits, whether from the outside in, or inside out at night, is magical. Where the shell is cut, as it is at the entrance to the offices, an internal skin of aluminium panels is revealed.

The factory at the southern end of the building is by far the bigger element, its eastern face incised with rectangular entrances for lorries. Through the glass you can see the ghostly images of pallets and other paraphernalia of furniture factories.

Division between industrial factory and offices is indicated externally by silvery boxes that thrust through the surface of the rectangle on the east and west. The eastern box, which provides a conference room, hangs 2.5m above the ground (such spaces suspended in midair occur in other Arets works) and forms a kind of ceremonial entrance to the interior of the building. Walking underneath it you find a long rectangular courtyard, an abstract garden, leading up to the front door between silvery walls. Overlooked by offices on either side it was designed by West 8 as a still life, with wooden decking underfoot, gingko trees and a sculptural mound of jagged slates.

The western box, which will contain a lofty entrance lobby, breaks through the building skin to float slightly above the ground, over a marshy field to be planted by West 8. There is to be no reception desk. Instead an electronic device will signal your presence. To the left are offices and the staff restaurant; to the right, a double-height showroom running the whole width of the building and overlooked on the south side by a long gallery of offices. Even unfinished and lacking its wooden floors, this is a spectacular space, the light diffused through the long north wall made more magical still by the insertion into it of small footlights.

Curiously, in spite of their abstraction, Arets' buildings are not independent of their context, as a quick survey of his very different works will reveal. This is less easy to see here perhaps because the Lensvelt building is fundamentally an industrial shed in a pastoral rather than an urban context. But inside and out, this is a piece of industrial poetry that asserts an ethereal presence in a landscape in which land, sea and sky so often dissolve one into the other. West 8's plan to surround the building with blossoming trees and a field of flowers should enhance such poetic insubstantiality. On the east, where the banality of an asphalt plain for parking intrudes, the firm corrects it with an oval slate hill surrounded by grass (positive) and a depression (negative) which will issue a vapour of fog through buried nozzles.

Architect Wiel Arets

Project team Wiel Arets, Ivo Daniels, Rene Thijssen, Paul van Dongen

Landscape architect West 8

Glass Bau Glas Industrie

Photographs Christian Richters