Introduction:
Width and Depth

Three Built Works, 140,000 Hours

Architecture is slow. As we compiled this book and selected projects, to our great shock we realized that after 6 years of work, roughly 140,000 hours of work, on 128 projects with an average team of eleven people in two countries, we still have only realized three architecture projects, one exhibition, and one interior refurbishment. When we look at other relatively young offices we see the same ratio of built versus unbuilt works. The office B.I.G., for example, has produced ten buildings out of at least 400 projects over the last nine years, and NL-architects, now fifteen years old, has only (or perhaps already?) produced sixteen projects. So, despite the fact that we have five projects on-site that will be completed in the coming year, it is clear that we have chosen a slow profession.

Besides the slowness of architecture, we also have the feeling of working in highly restless times. Since the turn of the millennium, the western world has witnessed its share of revolutions and incidents. One of the greatest shocks was, of course, 9/11—just after the burst of the dotcom bubble. Then, related as some people suggest,1 we had the rise of populists and neo-conservative politics and its anti-cultural stance. After a few years of a real-estate-driven economic mirage, a result of the liberalizations of the nineties, we were hit with a deep economic crisis.

Within this context, starting an office of architecture in 2005 has been quite an adventure. Looking back, we observe two major changes in Europe over the last decade that have challenged the position of architecture in general and that of young offices such as ours in particular. The first is the increased speed of the hype and fashions boosted by the (social) media and press, which has left physical production gasping to catch up. The second is the dramatic change within the regulatory and economic background in which our profession operates.

Flatliners

First of all, the speed at which media can inform us of what is happening in the world and, therefore, also the speed at which architecture presents itself to the world, has increased dramatically. If we think back to the pre-Internet era of the mid-1990s we had subscriptions to maybe two or three architecture magazines that would appear once a month and present us with four to eight new realized works and four in-depth articles and critiques. This is all we had for one month to ponder, discuss with friends, reflect on in our own projects. Now, every day a website like dezeen.com cranks out at least six new products and projects, not to mention websites like arch-daily.com and architectenweb.nl that place press-releases within twelve hours of receiving them. This also means that new projects are washed down the website in the maelstrom of content, and that the average time a project is front-page news on the Internet is about six hours.

Paradoxically, when it comes to our physical world, in the coming decades slowness will probably be its most remarkable attribute. Especially in Europe, we see how the built environment and architecture struggle to keep up. In many countries the European economic crisis has deeply affected the building industry as a whole. As a result of the general slow down of the economy, real-estate developers have ever shorter windows of time to operate, as cash for developments is hard to get. Project development schedules get shorter to reduce the risk of immobilizing capital for too long. It is becoming normal to start building before having designed and detailed the building entirely. Façades are mounted on the lower floors before the upper floors are even built or the roof completed. Some of the big housing builders in the Netherlands have created their own sets of details that architects are to work with in order to reduce fail costs, deviations are not possible.

The result of these tendencies is that the traditional division between projecting and realization phases, between designing, detailing, and building is becoming harder and harder to sustain. The design sequence of analyzing, thinking, designing, and realizing is being compressed into a sequence of deciding, realizing, trouble shooting, and then deciding again only to be followed by more trouble shooting.

As the world around seems to spin faster with the increase of media, the slowness of the architectural process paradoxically seems to lead to less and less time to design and work through projects. A lot of our projects are lingering in different embryonic stages, occasionally zapped briefly back to life in order to meet some bureaucratic demand in the planning or financing cycle only to go into hibernation again immediately after.

Typecasting, or the Void After Starchitecture

Our exhibition Rien ne va plus researched and discussed the impact of the 2008 economic crisis on architecture.2 The simple question that led to this research was the question why, after bankers, architects where the first to be fired en masse as the crisis hit? How had we architects become so entangled with the money market?

Besides the obvious connection of architecture to highly speculative real estate markets, the changing role of architects was becoming clearly another important reason. Namely the deregulation of the profession has especially left its marks. In Europe until the early 2000s, architecture was a regulated profession with fixed tariffs, specific to each country, in a way very comparable to general practitioner doctors. In order to create a European market for architects, this practice of fixed prices was forbidden and the architecture practice was liberalized. Now that architects are no longer protected as a regulated industry, they need to seek out new roles and market responsibilities to claim. No longer bound to fixed phasings and to the responsibility of overseeing the entire process from design to detailing to site supervision, in many cases architects became aesthetic consultants for complex real-estate plans. Following the liberalization of banking regulations investment money became more easily available. As a result, large numbers of real estate developments were created not because of a shortage of housing, but simply because it was almost impossible not to borrow the available flow of money hedged on a lethal cocktail of bad stocks and sub-prime loans.

This situation created an intriguing paradox. On one hand, it created so-called starchitecture or iconic architecture, which re-energized the public’s interest in architecture in a profoundly popular way now dubbed “the Bilbao effect”. These extremely condensed architectural momentum managed to supersede the intellectual populism of post-modernism (which was always a disdainful version of populism with its over-intellectualized discourse on semantics) with the populism of the spectacular (which is perhaps the only true populism, lacking critique but powerful in its direct communication). On the other hand, starchitecture isolated the practice from its mundane base of bulk production. Architecture with a big A became more and more exclusive and less able to adapt to an increasing number of programs, situations, budgets, and schedule realities. It excluded more and more layers of our society and larger and larger parts of our cities from the scope of architecture. There are still no starchitects of social housing blocks, preschools, or highway-side warehouses.3 Rather than collectively expanding the relevance of architecture in general, each starchitect created his or her own separate mini-regime and market as if to underline the importance of his or her own typecasting. Zaha Hadid and the regime of the blob at one end of the spectrum versus Peter Zumthor and the regime of the pure and handcrafted at the other end (very similar to the typecasting of, for example, actor Vin Diesel as the testosterone-packed action hero versus Hugh Grant as the stiff, uncertain, charming Brit).

The Architectural Divide

To a certain extent, the economic crisis itself was the result of an overestimation of the speed of time. Like a giant ponzi scheme, the economy relied on the simple illusion that if only the scheme of “free money” could keep going, reality would accept it and thereby make it real. If there is one thing that the economic crisis taught us about speed and architecture, it is that the acceleration of this process of designing and building has been largely detrimental.

The acceleration of liberalization in Europe during the past decades has also accelerated the drift of the architect from its classical position. The classical architect as a general overall designer who is simultaneously a thinker, concept designer, drafter, technical advisor, and building supervisor has been split into two different branches. Facing the collapse of the traditional sequencing of projects, half of the architects started to retreat into the role of the designer as identity-giver rather than a building designer. Some of these offices outsourced detailing to external specialized offices and others created nerdy internal specialized detailing departments. But they were always engineering exceptional solutions. At the opposite extreme is the other group of architects who build but don’t really conceptualize or theorize. Some of these offices tried to set up internal “laboratories” for young designers, but they work in the relentless realities of the new liberalized market where paying the lowest fees is more important to the client than having the best possible architecture. For a while, especially in the late nineties, the first group had it rather good. Spurred by the overstretched dot.com bubble, the importance of the idea or concept was overvalued vis-à-vis the art of building or crafting the project. Offices that relied purely on conceptual power flourished, with the influential Dutch “nine + one”4 and “Superdutch”5 generations as epicenter. But more than a decade later we can see that they added surprisingly little to the built landscape and in the end perhaps the second group of architects, the doers such as the Dutch Inbo or the Danish Arkitemarealized the biggest amount of work. Nevertheless, they are looked down on given their comparative lack of character in comparison to the starchitects.

Disintegration

In both cases we see the disintegration of the classical architectural process. Designing and planning—the virtual tasks of architecture—are more and more separated from constructing and realizing—the physical tasks of architecture. This process of disintegration is often suggested as unavoidable for the survival of architecture in the future.6 And, indeed, most offices seem glad to finally get rid of one of these halves: its either “Thank God no more painstaking detailing” or “Thank God no more cumbersome designing.” One of the most significant observations for us in that sense has been to realize at a time when more and more buildings are being produced there are still so few that are being designed by architects . More and more, design time is being skipped to accelerate the process and reduce costs. And even though in many countries cities are still growing rapidly, the reality of the new-built environment is more and more deceiving as it consists largely of mono-functional areas such as large distribution centers or suburban housing extensions.

The Beginning of Powerhouse Company

As a young and perhaps naive office defining its attitude, we thought that to choose one position (thinking) or the other (doing) would be deceptive. Thinking without doing would give us a growing feeling of irrelevance since the proof of the pudding is usually in the eating, while doing without thinking would create the effect of not being able to improve the pudding or invent new variations on puddings. So, from the outset on it has been our agenda to retrieve architecture as an all-encompassing practice, creating both width and depth and positioning the focus of our ideas on the complete process of architecture.

As we worked through our 128 projects so far, it became clear for us that thinking and doing can’t be sequential anymore but have to run in parallel to create some sort of new and seamless whole. Thinking about architecture means for us thinking about how to make it happen, both in terms of designing the right engineering team as well as choosing the right details to fight for. Making architecture in terms of doing it was becoming very much about the design of the building process and the proper way to select a contractor. In the end, architecture is neither about drawing nor about thinking as one is always proved by the quality of the other. It is about the critical moment of creation, namely the “doing,” the point where a thought is transformed into matter and has to stand the test of users, time, weather, and regulations… so we asked ourselves: can architecture become more “doable” again?

The Beauty of Realizing Work

The direction we took with Powerhouse Company was influenced in many instances by the context in which we started the office. We met in the year 2000, as we started our studies at the Berlage Institute. Here, we mainly produced research and strategies (at the turn of the millennium this was still fashionable) under professors Bart Lootsma, Winny Maas, and Stefano Boeri. Immediately after, we worked for two years within the architectural regimes of the starchitects Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas. Afterwards, in 2005, we were both starved for direct, mundane, hands-on architecture—the scale of architecture that would allow us to design the entire process. In many ways we were fortunate to land two private housing commissions, Villa 1 and Spiral House, upon founding the office in early 2005. These commissions gave us the opportunity to craft the entire process from design to realization. Perhaps this is the feast of working with private clients: beyond their personal fascinations which motivate their desire to build a house, they often require that you take the full control of the process and deliver a full service. We realized only later that the crucial factor in all true masterpieces is a committed and ambitious client. This is true for villas (think of Kaufmann whom commissioned both Falling Water and Neutra’s masterpiece in Palm Springs) but it is also true for other commissions like Salk and Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute, or Rolf Feldbaum with Vitra's impressive list of buildings on the factory site. In that sense our first commissions were successful, largely because we had the luck of committed and very motivated clients willing to let us push the design towards unconventional solutions. Spatial qualities were always at the center of the discussion on the architecture therefore they allowed us to create a few buildings that became for us benchmarks of a successful design process.

We can see that the projects that don’t succeed or meet our expectations are often the ones where clients don’t allow us to have an integrated approach and let us have the overview. Clients who tell us to make “just a sketch” so we can see how to develop the project later on. A museum director who tells us, “We will see afterwards what we will do with the idea.” Or the project manager who tells us “don’t be so picky on the building size, I’ll fix it with the municipality”. These kind of clients inhibit a lot of the design possibilities and often prevent the project to blossom to their full potential.

Our convictions lie in creating buildings, objects and plans that are whole, that are designed to belong equally to the site, and to their clients, as well as to both ourselves and the zeitgeist. In the end it doesn’t matter whether the site is small or big, whether the budget is tight or not. We value constraints as meaningful limits and we truly believe, to paraphrase Charles Eames,7 that a good project is the result of the sum of all constraints.

Fourteen Projects, Four Themes

Out of the 128 works we made in those first six years, we have selected fourteen projects which best represent our ambition to creating work that is the sum of all constraints, that aspires to be an integrated architecture.

These fourteen projects hint at four themes which summarizes the approach of our work: Context, collaboration, design, and detail.

Context for finding the constraints that create the playing field in we which go to work. Collaboration as the basis for achieving maximum results. Design as the way to give form to the process of creating new space. And, in the end, detail as the point where the entire design process converges, the point where the design is “cast in stone.”

In our ambition to create an office for integrated architecture, these themes are the driving force for our works as well as the continual basis for our conversations and discoveries.

Context

The context of any of our projects is made of a composite set of boundaries that describe the limits of possibilities. They can be physical, as in the case of the topography of the site; social-cultural, as when dealing for example with luxury; or political, for example when working in China. In any case, for us designing is about making a change. If we have done our work well there should always be a before and an after. In that sense, projects have a component of adventure—we embark on a project but are never certain where it will lead for sure. This belongs, in our eyes, to the fundamental nature of our work: to imagine what is not there,8 from the reality and the constraints that we can observe. So the first thing we search for when starting a project is the mindset of the context: what is its nature? How can it best be transformed?

To explain how we work with the notion of context and how the context works with us, we refer to three types of contexts: the physical site, its historical precedents, and the context of the broader here and now, or zeitgeist.

The sun rises for free

Our architecture is above all about creating the experience of space. In that sense, the evaluation of the potential of the site remains fundamental to all our projects. Sunlight, views, topography, vegetation, climate, and even gravity are parameters that can multiply the qualities of a space. Villa 1 is an explicit example: the plan is based entirely on the way the sun’s path glides through the clearing in the forest. We camped out on the site for two days to experience the rise and fall of day and to see the way the light touches the site and creates views. As a result, the plan includes many design decisions based purely on light and view. But even for our more corporate work, such as hotels and offices, we set out to explore the possibilities of the sun and the view. When working on the H2Otel project in 2009, a high-rise building we developed in collaboration with Thomas Rau, we set out to research the architecture of high-rises in Chicago and New York. On top of the John Hancock tower in Chicago the fog came in from Lake Michigan and limited our visibility for a moment, but as the sun broke free from the clouds it was reflected back from thousands of windows into our faces. That is when we realized that all these towers had something absurd in common: each had four identical façades, despite the simple fact that sun exposure is tremendously greater on the south façade than on the north! Scanning the skyline with its hundreds of towers, all built in the last hundred years, not a single tower had a façade adapted to its position toward the sun. So it was only a simple step to start imagining a façade that is more closed toward the south, to block heat and reduce cooling needs, and more open toward the north to let the building cool down.

In the Netherlands, known for its thriftiness, there is a saying that the only thing that’s for free is the rising of the sun. This makes it even more curious that, even there, such simple parameters as the sun’s path and the dominant wind direction are often ignored—taking them into consideration can make buildings not only better but also cheaper.

In the end, buildings always have to deal with the local conditions of sun, views, topography, pollution, and accessibility, among other things. They never escape the trivial physical dimensions of the site. We would argue that even when designing an air-conditioned building and creating an artificial climate one has to address the issue of enclosure and the confinement of the newly created context in which windows cannot be opened. Wasteland or forest, Internet or no Internet, place or non-place, architecture always has to take a position on these simple parameters.

Zeitgeist: The Continuum of Fashions and Trends

The zeitgeist9 is meaningful for us when it extends far beyond trends and fashions, when we start to see influences across different layers of society. Speaking about zeitgeist we always end up speaking about generalities, but at a certain scale of observation generalities do matter. Obvious examples are the development of the Internet and the explosion of information media that has triggered a general questioning about the relevance of place in architecture. Another example is the real-estate bubble of the period from 2005 to 2008 that generated a surge of spectacular architectural icons and a renewed focus on luxury in architecture. Crises such as the burst of the real-estate bubble and the economic collapse that followed are producing a particular mindset which influences, for example, the current trends and fashions revolving around re-use, recycling, and a renewed social agenda for architecture.10

Some architects argue for an “autonomy of architecture” or strive for an “absolute architecture” that refrains from reacting to these shorter- or longer-term trends. They argue that architecture in itself has enough of a repertoire to avoid entering trivial discussions on frills and fashions. But somehow every “fundamental” architectural style is born from the possibilities or the impossibilities of its own times. For example, one could argue that Mies van der Rohe’s minimalist steel structures were created within the competitive capitalist background of Chicago in the 1940s. The themes and dilemmas of our times are worth observing, exploring, and investigating as architects simply because they form the world around us, to paraphrase the original subtitle of Wallpaper* magazine. TV programs like MTV Cribs11 and magazines like Elle Living often influence clients and their dreams in a greater way than, for example, the particular conditions of a site. Architecture can never fully escape its contextual zeitgeist since history always re-contextualizes and often judges architecture as part of its time.

Upon starting our office, we initiated a series of research on some of the forces shaping our environment, such as the effect of the Shengen agreements on the growth and integration of different regions, with our research project EU City. In the wake of the financial crisis we set up the research project Rien ne va plus, on the intricate relationship between architecture and economy, which resulted in an exhibition, a reader, and a short movie. We explored the way economics and, especially, liberalization in Europe have influenced changes in the very basis of our profession.

When we set out to redesign the V37 and V42 Victoire yachts, our first step was to analyze the recent history of the market for yachts. We discovered that it closely followed the evolution of the baby-boomer generation. We then extrapolated this research into possible ways of repositioning the brand, Victoire, itself.

Sometimes, as in the case of Victoire, research into the wider context clearly creates a direction for the design to take. Sometimes, as in the case of Rien ne va plus, it doesn’t. But it always highlights changing needs and possible new directions which in turn influence our work.

Architectural Amnesia

When we were studying at the Berlage Institute, Bart Lootsma proposed researching a historical urban plan from our native culture for a period of three months, using only original sources to research in detail the economic, political, technological, and social context in which the plan was made. Labeled Research for Research, this exercise has been an opportunity for us to re-open and explore history’s gold mines. Charles, being French, researched Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine and discovered the extent to which this project was consciously conceived of as a media strategy to impose a new agenda on the debate on urban design, rather than as a design proposal in itself. In that sense its polemical dimension had been incredibly efficient and instrumental. As a polemical strategy it remains a very interesting plan even though the project itself is regarded as a total no-go today. Nanne, who is Dutch, researched Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen’s collaborative work on the 1935 Amsterdam Extension Plan. He discovered that this plan, which is always mocked as boring and unglamorous, was actually the blueprint for Le Corbusier’s manifesto on the functional city and the basis of the current Dutch zoning laws.12

Through this research we realized how often architects tend to focus only on projects and overlook the driving societal forces that shaped the minds of a particular generation. We also learned that many art-historical texts exclude the intricacies of the shaping of movements and styles and therefore distort the idea of what a style actually is. The Bauhaus, for example, is often pictured as a purely modernist school, but for a long time it was a mix of many different styles, characters, and personalities.

Within the historical context of project precedents, we often discover that some solutions by architects of previous generations or centuries were imagined in situations very similar to the ones we face, even though they were designed in different ways. The tragedy of architects, of course, is that only a portion of all their thinking and making is in the end visible in the building. We make clear references in parts of our projects to the works and thoughts of other architects because they taught us how to deal with particular situations in architecture, whether it be the problem of a sliding wall or the problem of a house without window frames (both occurred in Villa 1, and both had previously been solved by Mies van der Rohe)—history always provides examples of answers.

Powerhouse Company as a Context

Our contextual approach is essentially embedded in the way we set up our offices. When we discussed starting an office together, we realized that wherever we decided to establish our office it would create some limitations that would restrain both our playing field and our imagination. Therefore, we decided to try to create the office in at least two different locations at the same time, even though this would be more difficult and less comfortable. Copenhagen and Rotterdam, initially our default choice since these were the cities where we were living at the time, became an interesting geography. On one hand, these cities share the same European socialdemocratic history, to which we feel very much attached. On the other hand, they are developing in very different directions: Rotterdam is one of the poorest, most populist, and cheapest cities in north-western Europe,13 whereas Copenhagen is one of the richest, most expensive, and most socialist.14 Setting the office in those two locations allowed us to always have at least two different points of view to compare, with enough distance and contextual space between us to leave room for unexpected solutions to emerge. Hence, we imported into the very structure of our office some of the characteristic difficulties and potentials of the globalized world in which we were about to set to work.

Collaboration

How Do You Do It?

The idea of working from two countries touches upon a rather unique feature of our office: long distance collaboration, or as we call it, “working apart together.” Often people ask us how we do it and why it works. Also, they sometimes ask us: “But what is it that you do and what is it that he does?” These questions reveal a remarkable aspect of architects and the perception of their trade: aren’t architects supposed to be lone authors? This although architects almost never make work on their own. For us it is one of the most rattling questions of architecture education: why are architects taught to design unique buildings as sole authors, while in the reality of the practice designs are made in teams and buildings are implemented in teams? If collaboration is key to making successful buildings, why is it not taught more often? What is so suspicious about collaboration that it is ignored so persistently?

Ego and Team Player

When it comes to our ideas on collaboration, our office’s name tells part of the story. The name Powerhouse Company is the combination of two ambitions. The first is to be a true powerhouse of architects, in the sense that the Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word: “one having a great drive, energy or ability.” This is the basis we select our staff on, this is what we hope our clients all aspire to and therefore seek in us, because the premise for greatness is simply to have great drive, energy, and ability. Secondly, to be a company—not solely in the corporate sense of the word, but more importantly in the sense of the word fellowship, which includes the promise of a team that is ready to go beyond the ordinary.

Collaboration requires lots of communication and work. It is not necessarily easy, since it requires being prepared to change your mind on behalf of greater ideas. The crucial part of our geographically distant collaboration is that when we produce our ideas we make them clear in order communicate them over distance and eliminate any misunderstanding. This is also where the distance between the two offices works really well: we cannot simply turn around on our office chair and chat up some ideas before starting to draw. Instead we send each other files by email, a process known in the office as “ping-ponging.” This is a dialogue through drawings and models, condensed in PDFs, in which we react to each other’s ideas by proposing alterations, variations, and reductions. As in musical improvisations, there is an unspoken rule that we cannot discard proposals. Rather we support each other’s line of thought. This forces us to disappropriate projects from the early stages and create a more collaborative mindset for the entire project.

This set up, which we call the “ego and team-player model”, has three consequences which would differ if we were sitting in the same place. First of all, we design more. Secondly, we have relative independence in running our respective offices, so not so much energy is wasted on infrastructural discussions. Thirdly, we have an enlarged playing field because we work from Denmark and Holland. Perhaps, as a model, this can eliminate some of the negative aspects of ego competition that have destroyed a lot of brilliant teams in the past…

Powerhouse Company & Co.

In the course of the years we have fine-tuned our model internally and also externally. We extended our collaborative model to the way we work with consultants, pushing them to get out of the position of consultants into the more committed position of co-authors.15

We approach contractors from a similar point of view, inviting them to take part in the “ownership” of the work as the people who will craft the building. This takes a particular mindset and commitment from builders because they need to know their trade very well to take part in the early decisions. A momentum of commitment and ownership is created, which allows them to appropriate the ambitions of the project and not just endure them.

In the past three years we have also started to collaborate with other architecture offices. With Thomas Rau, one of Europe’s sustainable architecture pioneers, we have explored projects such as The H2Otel and the Dance and Music Center in The Hague. With De Zwarte Hond, a highly productive, realist Dutch architecture firm, we are working on the headquarters of KEMA in Arnhem and the Erasmus University Student Center in Rotterdam. With Schauman architects, one of Finland’s foremost offices, we entered the Fan Bridge competition and are about to start on an urban plan in Turku. Collaboration with bigger offices that have longer and different experience than we do fuels both parties with new insights.

We also collaborate with other young offices to stimulate the formation of our own generation. Our work with Superunion from Norway and Anne Holtrop from Amsterdam is based on a particular affinity with their work and attitude. Looking into the genealogy of twentieth-century architecture we see that behind the cliché of the individual genius lie recognizable groups which together created a new context and momentum.

What we found through our various collaborations is that a good collaboration can only be maintained when both parties gain from each other, yet also have the feeling and conviction that they could do it on their own. This applies to ourselves, to both our collaboration internally and with other firms.

Howard Roark: The Sequel

The way Facebook and Twitter as social media networks facilitated the fall of dictators in the Arabic spring revolutions of 2011 indicates the power of the Internet in mobilizing the masses.16 But other behemoths are also crumbling under the power of the mobilized masses that swarm over the Internet, whether publishing houses and bookstore chains or the once powerful newspapers that are now, more then ever, printing old news. Simple websites and viral Internet buzz came to challenge them through smart, lean, mean business models based on loose, opportunistic collaborations. Even in heavy industries such as the car industry (General Motors’ Chrysler) or the oil industry (BP), we see the fading of the over-centralized power of the large corporation into more agile “swarms” of actors. Many twentieth-century corporate Molochs are transforming their position under pressure of the Internet, whether they produce news, oil, cars, movies, or music.

If Howard Roark, lone hero of Ayn Rand’s architecture novel The Fountainhead,17 is the ultimate model of the twentieth-century architect, who will be the Howard Roark 2.0 of the twenty-first century? It is hard to argue with the path Howard Roark chooses as he defends the purity of his ideas against the deceitful power of “popular taste” as falsely managed by powerful critic Ellsworth Toohey. Roark also stands unbreakable against the shameless power of the newspaper industry that scolds him and tries to break him. But the powers he fights are very twentieth century. Powers as Molochs. At the dawn of the twenty-first century the idea of power as concentrated in the hands of one individual has begun to erode. If we translate Howard Roark’s adversaries into the current times, who would they be? Would he fight a twenty-something social-media-network owner à la Mark Zuckerberg, a modern equivalent of Gail Wynand, the super-rich newspaper tycoon? And who would replace Ellsworth Toohey, now that cultural critics no longer have much power, unless we count Oprah Winfrey? The main question is, would Howard Roark still be the lone genius? Or would he create alliances to make things happen?

The idea of the architect as a lone genius is imprinted in the collective idea (or perhaps caricature) of what an architect is: a misunderstood, slightly autistic, ungraspable creative genius who is always late and always over budget. Architecture students are still taught (and dream) to be lonely geniuses, judged on the brilliance and originality of their own ideas, never on their capability to function within a team.

In our collaborative model, we attempt to include all possible constraints into the design process, in order to seek an optimized outcome. At the same time, we never seek a middle of the road solution. Nor do we suggest that there cannot be a genius idea. To push design out of business-as-usual habits presupposes a certain amount of power of conviction to force people to realize that a new reality is possible. A great design is a new regime that defies existing ideas and implies new techniques for making things happen. Collaboration is necessary to create an internal momentum with enough intensity to break free from the pressure of habits and propel a good idea to the level of something able to be implemented. What a good collaboration requires is lots of production, just as any good relationship relies on a lot of communication. Production to keep on fueling the debate and exhaust possible side steps and come to the optimal result. Production as a means to design.

Design

The past twenty years have seen a proliferation of architectural publications. Magazines, websites, blogs, and apps are feeding us a continuous and delightful stream of architectural renderings, stunning photos, and jaw-dropping animations on a daily basis. Though this creates the pleasurable illusion that more and more architecture is being produced, it also seems to influence the way architecture is being written about and, in return, how it is designed. In terms of architectural criticism, we have witnessed a strange reversal going on: as the quantity of architectural designs being published increases, the time allocated to write or read about them is now shorter than ever. Many things have been said about the erosion of the conceptual content of projects by this continuous flow of images, but little has been said about how this has influenced the design of ideas. For us, it gave birth to thoughts about the relationship between ideas and form and finally about the relation between the finished object architecture aspires to be and the design that creates it.

Design versus Bluntness

If an architect or a critic had only five minutes to speak about a project or a building, they would choose to speak first about the idea and then, if there was any time left, a little about how the form had been crafted. It seems that at the dawn of the twenty-first century we are still haunted by the ghost of the twentieth century with its academic stylistic speculations. Under those conditions one would rather stress the underlying principles than explain what the form of the building produces. As a result, the discussion of design is almost non-existent in the architecture debate, which remains focused on conceptual arguments.

At the same time, we see a stroboscopic production of ideas and a redundant proliferation of diagrams that leads to a thinning out of the content of buildings. When we look at the built environment we wonder about this obsession with ideas and the lingering disregard for design issues. What we see is not a superficial world without ideas but rather a world crowded by a chaotic profusion of ideas—but not necessarily a world crowded with good buildings. So we question whether the debate we inherited from the twentieth century is still valid or whether it’s a growing anachronism. Looking back at northern European architectural production from the past twenty years we find, on one hand, an amazing accumulation of promising ideas. On the other hand, these buildings are mostly of such roughness that they require a serious effort to ignore their hiccups in order to appreciate their underlying ideas. They often seem to wish to remain an idea and a distant comment on reality rather than to fully take part in it. For us, they embody an unsatisfying attitude of disengagement in architecture vis-à-vis the reality of the city.

Following this observation, we became less interested in the directness or bluntness of ideas. Over the last decade, bluntness became less an evidence of brilliance and novelty and more the symptom of an idea abandoned at an embryonic stage. That’s why we feel the necessity of thinking, speculating, and speaking about the intricate relationship between design, form, and details. For us, designing has become a way of emancipating the building from the crudeness of the functional diagram. Functionality has somehow been misunderstood as a goal of architecture rather then a means to an end. What Louis Sullivan meant when he wrote that “form follows function”18 was not that every function must be reduced to its most functional form, but rather that every function must be given its most erudite form. As Sullivan describes it, a soaring eagle has the form of soaring in every single aspect of its appearance, while a sitting eagle obtains the ultimate form of a sitting eagle. “Form follows function” actually means “form follows flowers”—to quote Joost Meeuwissen, who introduced us to the texts of Sullivan—as every function in the end must blossom into its ultimately beautiful form. So design—or a much better word: form-giving, which implies the giving of form to an object—is actually a liberating process through which a building leaves the world of ideas to fully become part of reality and engage with it.

Toccata and Fugue, or: The Joyful Wandering of Ideas

It is liberating to realize that our current architectural epoch perhaps over-estimates ideas and underestimates design. Ideas do not have to be desperately new or fundamentally classic. Ideas are perhaps not as important in the design process as we were taught. An idea cannot be good or bad until it has (not) proven that it produces a good potential design. An idea is just the beginning of the beginning.

The myth of the unique and synthetic idea has lost interest for us. Instead of looking for a unique idea and hoping for a stroke of genius, we produce as many ideas as possible at the beginning of each project. To evaluate them we test them through design. Design is the crash test for our ideas.

For each project we design up to ten different projects, which means that we miraculously design far more projects than we have commissions for. We see this as an opportunity to increase our repertoire as well as to intensify our favorite phase of the project, the design phase. Through this process we have come to identify ourselves more as craftsmen than as intellectuals. The more we design, the faster we become at it and the broader our repertoire of ideas. In the same way that there are seemingly infinite variations within the limits of a musical theme such as a fugue, we explore the potential of an idea through variations of design.

Like any other resource, ideas are made valuable only through the possibility of their exploitation and the value of what can be produced from them. This re-appropriation of the design process has allowed us to involve the heritage of architecture and speak again about architecture, and, yes, this implies that we have put aside critical assumptions from Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and Guattari and Deleuze in our architectural discussions. Instead, we again study plans and sections. We took off to Chandigarh, Lille, Moscow, Lucerne, Basel, Sao Paulo, Hamburg, Los Angeles, Palm Springs and Las Vegas, Beijing and Shanghai to see how designs perform in reality.

Trial and Error: Cultivating Intuition

In his book Blink19 Malcolm Gladwell presents an intriguing insight into the phenomena of intuition. In one example, he shows that when people have less time to answer a question they are more likely to give the right answer. The explanation of this experiment is very interesting for understanding the way we work. If people were intuitively giving the right answer to a question, it was simply because they were processing a large amount of information each day, information which is stored but not always consciously accessible. Intuition is a way to access this information without being aware of it.

Our design process aspires to develop a particular intuition about design. This implies testing the way that the forms and shapes we produce create space. Curves, for instance, have started to fascinate us—the smallest tweak in the tension of the curve immediately generates a different character of form. In Villa 1, the curves of the wooden furniture piece are carefully designed to be both tense enough to create particular spaces or “rooms” for the piano and the desks, while at the same time relaxed enough to let the space flow freely. Ever since this first experiment with curves, we have noticed the power of well designed curves in many great objects, whether Mies’s Barcelona chair, with its 2-D curved legs, or the 3-D curves of the Bourroulec brothers’ chairs.

By multiplying design possibilities for form and shape project after project, and by exposing ourselves to an exponential number of design challenges as we venture into, for example, product design, we find ourselves starting to develop a design intuition. Not the mysterious and obscure intuition that no one can speak about, but rather the cultivated and informed intuition of the craftsman. This attitude is closely related to our ideas about collaboration and the crucial basis of produc tivity that makes collaboration possible. Through this productivity, creativity itself becomes less a mystery and more a kind of muscle that we can flex at will. Simply put: in order to become creative we just have to create more. Perhaps one day we can design the way we breathe: continuously and effortlessly…

Detail

As the speed with which architecture presents itself to the world increased, so too did the proliferation of beautifully collaged renderings using a lot of “inner glow” filter. Yet there is a lack of detailing in the representation of architecture. More atmospheric than realistic, these images often convey more the visual power of an idea than the illustration of its architectural reality. When we were making site photos for the DMC The Hague project with Mats Andersen and Trond Greve Andersen, the founders of the Norwegian visualization company MIR, they remarked how great the structure of Richard Meier’s city hall in The Hague is for rendering. “So much structural detail, such clear detailing, with good sunlight that would really create a lot of depth. Most architecture designs today,” they went on, “are designed without any detail, are only surfaces without real definition, and so we always struggle to get depth and definition into a rendering.”

The Uncoolness of Detailing

Another result of the over-importance of the conceptual idea over the last decades is the disappearance of architectural detailing from publications—and lately even from plans and sections.

But since these buildings that over-value ideas get built without these ideas having been designed as architecture, they will always struggle with their own physicality and, in the end, leak and fall apart too rapidly. As if these building want to tell us: this idea might work as a rendering, but it is simply not working as a building.

Somehow the notion seems to have developed among architects that detailing just isn’t important, possible, or perhaps even cool. Who ever talks about it? When we scan the publicly available lectures of two of the world’s most successful offices at the moment, Zaha Hadid and B.I.G., they don’t speak about the details of their work. One of the things Rem Koolhaas said about detailing was the intriguing punch line “no money, no detail.”20 A rather grim outlook that may be true, but for sure doesn’t solve the problem of detailing for the bulk of architecture projects that deal with limited budgets. Of course Peter Zumthor speaks about it, but with a sacredness that almost prevents any architects practicing out of the Swiss economic safe-haven to attempt to do it in his way. Detailing, it seems, became part of another profession, an expertise detached of architecture itself. It belongs to the people who engineer buildings, not those who design them.

Emancipating Bricks

We often quote Louis Kahn, who, filmed while teaching students, once asked a brick: “Brick, what do you want to be?”21 Kahn assumed that every material has a logical way of being handled and used as a construction material. So as ideas became less relevant in the design process of our buildings, the focus on detailing in our designs grew. The more we detailed, the more we discovered about the possibilities in architecture within the definition of space and detail. The more we looked into the properties of materials, the more we saw that it was possible to re-inject details even in low budgets. For example, the addition of a few kilos of Muscovite mica (a.k.a gold glitter) in the cost-effective plaster of the Spiral House façade gave it a much higher resolution while adding depth and contrast. Materials started to inform us of what they could and could not do. Aluminum, for instance, is very nice but quite restless, and tends to expand and contract a lot. So, if we want to use aluminum plating as a façade we have to use a lot of wide joints. All-white stone is in essence the softest stone around, and its porosity makes it near impossible to use outside horizontally, since it freezes up. Nerdy stuff indeed, but crucial to the way the buildings will appear and function.

Details became a strategic layer of our projects. In Villa 1 we approached every detail and patiently refined every connection of every material. Not only because our client kept insisting on a flawless house, but also because we were very keen to resolve all the problems within the details (see our rubber crucifix detail). And it was convenient that we had enough time and the site was close by. This allowed us to select the right veneer package and handpick the right rubber for the crucifix column. For the far-away Spiral House we had to limit and choose which would be the crucial details. Advising the contractor from a distance, we decided on the forgiving properties of a wood structure rather than the precision of steel, yet meticulously detailed the window frames.

Sometimes we choose to work only with prefab materials, such as prefab concrete panels for office building façades, as this gives us much more control over the detailing and at greater precision. And in our yacht designs for Victoire, everything is detail since the space is so small and three dimensional compared to a building.

When a Plan Comes Together

We believe that architects should be generalists. They are the only ones in the building process that have a complete overview of all the forces, influences, and technical layers that need to find their place within the building. Architects discuss their design with the structural engineer, the fire-safety advisor, the client, and the contractor and should always have an opinion about all of this without being a specialist in any of these fields. It is through a generalist approach that the architect can occupy this unique point of view, one that we would simply call an overview. From this overview the co-relation of all details is visible and each can be judged as crucial or anecdotal. It is also from this particular position in the force field of architecture that the architect can re-imagine new ways of combining technologies to get a better result and even think of re-injecting architecture in commissions that had been given up on.

Seen from this point of view, the idea of architect as generalist implies for us that he or she must try to master detailing. Because, in the end, whatever has been discussed and trivialized about the design in conversations with other advisors, it all comes together in the details. This is where structure, material, installation, and construction all meet. Detailing is the final ground where all the design considerations are cast in stone, so to speak, where they prove that they can be mounted together and together create a great building rather than a by-default collage of parts. Details are the ultimate resolution of an idea, the final articulation of the power of design. Just as in a good script it is the details that give life and reality to a character.

To create a great building is to carefully select materials, place them together, and craft them into details with care. Time or no time, money or no money, brutal or articulated, there should always be clearly defined details. Materials can crack, but there are good cracks and bad cracks. As Louis Kahn demonstrated, in the magnificent and sensuous Salk Institute, an imperfect concrete with exposed bubbles can be far more beautiful than a perfectly smooth one, and can start to echo the richness of Travertine.

God is in the details, Mies van der Rohe once famously claimed. We don’t believe in God, but we do believe in details.