From the editors
TAKE IT SERIOUSLY Words Federico Ruiz
This story begins in Zaandam. I went there to visit the Inntel Hotel, a building that I find to be hilarious. Its façade consists of a bunch of traditional wooden houses, stacked on top of each other in the least traditional of arrangements. The comical effect was even stronger as I considered how architects usually despise humour in architecture. While standing in front of it, I couldn’t help but ask: what was going through the mind of the architect? I went to Wilfried van Winden, the author of this colossus, to try get an answer to this and other questions I had about his work.
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Van Winden is a soft spoken, 65-year-old man. When he opens the door of his office, the first thing I notice is his shirt. It is black, with a silver floral embroidery on the chest. “He is as decorated as his buildings,” I think, “that makes him a very coherent architect.” Later in the interview, when I ask him about the tension between historical continuity and disruption in his work, he reveals that this connection isn’t only in my mind: “I remember [that] when I was in primary school, I could always choose my own clothing. And then [other children] laughed at how I looked. But I supposed that they were very jealous, it didn’t make me think I had to do something else. I didn’t mind. It is not a goal to be disruptive, but I don’t mind if it happens.” When we sit at his large, black wooden table, I first ask him about his years at BK. He tells me how he enrolled in 1976 and opened his own studio together with Joris Molenaar in 1985. New responsibilities came with work, and at a certain point he was not sure about finishing his studies. Then, different personal and professional reasons made him reconsider this decision, and he finally graduated in 1987. At the time, he tells me, BK was faculty with a clear preference for modern architecture. Despite this, there was some room for dissidence. For
instance, together with other students and teachers, they would have informal meetings for discussing architects and preoccupations that were outside the mainstream canon. Their interests were broad and included in the Catalan architect Josep Jujol and the Italian Villas of the XV and XVI centuries. The latter theme earned a special place in van Winden’s heart after an excursion to Rome with teachers Rein Saariste and Vincent Ligtelijn, in which he also me Joris Molenaar. This idea of broadening their field of interest was, perhaps, the main thing that stayed with them from BK: “it started during our studies […] and it became part of our work.” This way of proceeding, taking things from different times and cultures in order to produce something new, was eventually given a name: First, it was Radical Eclecticism, following Charles’ Jenks short essay for the 1980 Venice Biennale. Later, after van Winden started his own practice in 2009, it became “a more positive and inclusive notion named Fusion”. In WAM architects’ website, Fusion is defined as “a mindset rather than a style, a strategy that stands for an inventive way of mixing and interconnecting present and past, East and West, tradition and innovation, and high and low culture.” Following this definition, van Winden
