Open Mic A conversation with Kamiel Klaasse
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Trevor Swanson Danielle Taylor Rebecca Alanis Bradley Bowman Erik Capra Matthew Carubia Carly Coulibaly Eli Crisafio Jacob Hoffman Yunyao Jiang Anthony Kosec Hannah Petit Jessica Risdon Jordan Satterfield Matthew Scalzi Ethan Snider Curtis Swan Felipe Valadez Anthony Wahl Kun Wu
Made by students enrolled in the “Video, Media, and Architecture� class taught by professor Marco Brizzi at Kent State University in Florence in Spring 2016.
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Contents 4 Biography 6 Interview
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Biography
NL Architects is an Amsterdam based office. The initial four principals, Pieter Bannenberg, Walter van Dijk, Kamiel Klaasse and Mark Linnemann, officially opened practice in January 1997, but have shared workspace already since the early nineties. “Architecture is the medium through which we hope to contribute to the understanding of contemporary culture -and to its development. We understand architecture as the speculative process of investigating, revealing and reconfiguring the wonderful complexities of the world we live in. Can we compress banality into beauty; squeeze the sublime out of the obvious? How can we transform, twist, bend, stack or stretch, enhance or reduce, or reassemble the components that constitute our environment into new and better configurations?� www.nlarchitects.nl
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OPEN MIC
AN INTERVIEW WITH KAMIEL KLAASSE
INTERVIEW WITH
Kamiel Klaasse FLORENCE 2016
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Your projects seem to possess a very clean and bright aesthetic. Are your projects reflective of your educational background? That’s a very good question and quite an interesting observation. Perhaps it has to do with an “unbuilt” dimension. We try to bring out the best version that something can be somehow. Maybe part of this cleanliness and brightness has to do with this “unbuilt” dimension, rather than being part of an educational or learnt aspet. It’s sort of an internal compass. We grew up in the Netherlands which is an orderly country, so to speak. We’ve cleaned our pavements as much as possible. There was an era when dog sh*t was all over in the streets, but now we like to preserve our public space and we pick it up. As a country, I would say we have the tendency to tidy up everything. We have no space for nature. Everything in our country is artificial. This is fascinating, but has an impact of our work as architects. Your design is always fighting the things that are natural. So the question is: How tidy should a project be? How controlled should it be?
What kind of advice would you give American architecture students studying in Europe? What do you feel that Europe can offer that the United States might not? I think you can say that there is this enormous history that you can learn from, this ancient past that can be very inspiring. At the same time, I think there is an enormous past you can learn from also in the US. To me, what is most amazing about the States is the expansive open space you still have available. But going back to your question... what is especially stricking about Florence is that, as an architect, you have to pay
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attention to what is already here. As an architect in a city like Florence, I think you have to consider the idea of density within the city and how urban life can be compressed and be made “compact”. Is your Facebook presence making your firm more popular? Does it attract more clients or just interest amongst your peers? Yeah, we need more Facebook friends. (Chuckles) I think a presence in the social media probably helps you to get a certain type of exposure. When there was just print media and no Internet, some twenty years ago, we were so happy when a new publication came out on our work. It was almost as precious as celebrating the opening of a new building! No kidding! Now, if you think about the size of the exposure you can get, it’s quite shocking. The photos of the openings that we shared online are going to last longer than the buildings themselves. But I still think that probably a book, printed on paper, might still be in the end the most precious way to preserve memory. I am really curious to see what will happen if in the future we can’t open these file extensions anymore. If this digital material is not accessible anymore. Going back to Facebook... What I like about it is the stuff we write. We use it as a blog, but there little or no feedback in the end. It doesn’t really create a two-way relationship. Would you recommend we use Instagram more than Facebook? It reaches a different demographic. Instagram is more visual based and it communicates more to the people. It’s also interesting to consider the power of hashtags. You can reach more
AN INTERVIEW WITH KAMIEL KLAASSE
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Basket Bar, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2003.
connections through the power of words. So I think maybe I should look into Instagram more. But the restraints of Instagram are something that deeply annoys me. It’s like a straightjacket. I totally hated the Facebook aesthetics, but I liked not having control of it. I liked that sort of messiness for our blog. It seems like you do a lot of work through competitions. Do you prefer getting commissions through competitions or would you prefer to be approached by clients directly? We have a phone in our office and every day I hope it rings, a new client calling us... But nobody calls.
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OPEN MIC
AN INTERVIEW WITH KAMIEL KLAASSE
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Basket Bar, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2003.
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OPEN MIC
Barneveld Central, the Netherlands, 2013 (photo Bart van Hoek).
(Chuckles) Of course that almost never happens. In all cases, when we do get the commission, we like to get immediate feedback from our clients. We like the idea of working together. It’s not easy, you know. There is always a few aspects of this profession that you might not master. There are very few architects who can master the entire profession, from client relationship to drafting to computing. But I think today things are getting more complicated. There are a lot of collaborations to establish to get a project going, a lot of consultants to involve. The next wave of competitions in the Netherlands are based on dialogue and are very based on the
AN INTERVIEW WITH KAMIEL KLAASSE
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Barneveld Central, the Netherlands, 2013 (photo Marcel van der Burg).
relationship with the client. They have to process the feedback and that is actually part of how they are judged. This is the procedure nowadays. In the NS Stations project, you decided to combine all the bookshelves, small storage spaces into multiple thick walls to help “clean up” the space. Are you constantly looking for strategies to save space to open up the floor plan, or is it only by request of your client? That was a very specific design. Basically it was a company that was about to embark on a new mission to see how they can deal with their office spaces, but they aren’t entirely sure yet on how to do it.
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Crossoverzaal, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2014 (photo Luuk Kramer).
AN INTERVIEW WITH KAMIEL KLAASSE
Let me tell you this story, as I think it is interesting. There is a very innovative insurance company in the Netherlands that some 15 years ago decided to reorganize their office in a completely radical way. It had to do with IT and the fact that everything can become footloose and independent from time and space. So you can do any kind of work anywhere. To them it was not important where you did your work but that you reached a certain target. And they were technically the world’s first to understand what we all now understand. That we can all sort of work while doing anything, so that’s the kind of flexibility that was clear about fifteen years ago. But that also meant there was a certain resistance because people couldn’t put up their favorite pictures or plants. In that office they could sit in many different locations, there was no fixed space or fixed cubicle space. In a way it was a relief but it was also sort of a panic. All these people had to reinvent themselves, and of course there is this real-estate behind it. You want to use this space more intensively. You don’t want to have desks and spaces that people don’t use half the time, if the space is more flexible people can inhabit all spaces and still get their work done. It also impacts architects: to be more compact, you don’t have to build as much. But then there is this incredible paradox there, although they sort of shrink their offices at the same time they thought it was a fantastic idea to create these launges and benches that are completely luxurious. Although they shrank they created this sense of expansiveness. Like the Google office, a spin-off of that type of environment.
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Many of your projects have a great deal of “green space” in and/or around the project itself. Is this a concept you like to use for your designs? In your opinion, how important is having “green spaces” for the occupants to use and observe? I‘m glad you noticed. I think it’s really important to bring nature into the indoor environments. I don’t know if it’s how I grew up, on a farm, in a village with an incredible amount of green around me. I have a personal love for nature, but when I was a teenager I was very bored with it. While in architecture school, I also got more interested in urban-related topics. And so the more “urban” period started for me and I kind of forgot about the plants. Then I think it sort of came back when I became fed up with city life and wanted to embrace something else. In the Netherlands we really explore the possibility of having green roofs. Having insects, leaves, and birds. The whole neighborhood is invested, it becomes a new highlight to which the public can relate. Well... just think about this aspect. More and more often we notice that when it rains the drainage system is not responding to it. It is flooding. Well, green roofs can help absorb the water. In a way, we can battling the downside of urbanity also by using greenery and vegetation. Do you feel it is necessary to put a high level of emphasis on high detail computer renderings to display your project idea, or do you feel simpler drawings can be just as effective? I am so glad that these renderings are possible, because I am not too good at drawing. When I started studying architecture, we still had to use drafting boards and it got sort of messy and things did not come out right. It
OPEN MIC
AN INTERVIEW WITH KAMIEL KLAASSE
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Gymnastics Hall Welgelegen, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2011 (photo Patrick Bals).
was difficult for me to really convey my ideas through hand drawings. But when I got out of school, the digital tools were starting to become available. Pretty soon I was also able to hire other people who could work for me and who were experimenting with the new media, so it was sort of a blessing. To tell you the truth... I totally don’t understand how in the last century they were able to create beautiful buildings. It was so tough, you would have had to have such an incredible imagination. Now you can easily move things around in a drawing, use Photoshop to create a new reality, etc. But we have a new dilemma today. We have all these tools available, but we need to learn how to use them properly.
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Funen Blok K - Verdana, Funenpark, the Netherlands, 2009 (photo Raoul Kramer).
One incredible tool today is 3D printing. It’s even more incredible than rendering. Models represent ideas to your client, they are a design tool. So, it’s definitely a blessing now to be able to use all these tools, but it does not reduce the work. Now your drawings just get more and more intensive. In a previous interview you had mentioned that blurring public and private space was a key
AN INTERVIEW WITH KAMIEL KLAASSE
concept in the Groninger Forum project. You mentioned that the Dutch keep their windows wide open traditionally, so this idea of lack of privacy was common. However, you said that things are shifting, at least in the Netherlands, and they are starting to become more private. How do you think this shift in the cultural norm will change the way you think about the design of these spaces? Yes, it’s true. In the Netherlands we used to leave windows open. It was sort a religious idea of that you cannot hide anything from God. Well, I think that today only fifty percent of the Dutch believe in God. God has “left the building” so to speak. We are no longer afraid of Him. We don’t behave well anymore. That is probably why we have to close the curtains again, so we can have our secrets again. And I’m not sure yet how it will affect the way we use space. With all the smart devices we have in our home, there is sort of this new kind of transparency that un-hides everything. Your firm designs a lot of community spaces. How do you conduct precedent studies on the area you are designing for? Sometimes, the good thing is that your clients do it for you. They also use Pinterest. (Chuckles) No one knows better where to go and what to do than your client, they are better informed somehow.
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This interview with Kamiel Klaassee was primarily focused on his education, firm, design strategies, and his personal thoughts on architecture. It was a collaborative effort among students of the Video, Media, and Architecture course at Kent State University Florence. Guest lecturers were brought in from all over Europe for a Spring lecture series and students were tasked to create an interview before each of these lectures. After analyzing numerous interviews with other architects, students researched and explored the work of the visiting lecturers. Questions were then devised by each student, and these questions were analyzed based upon their thematic similarity and their relevance to the work of each lecturer. The most appropriate questions were chosen for each interview, and the specific students who created these questions then were charged with interviewing our guests, using the chosen questions as a base and posing any other questions that flowed with the interview.