abstract of interview with Saskia van Stein (curator Netherlands Architecture Institute, NAI, Rotterdam)

see interview here

In my work I like to see architecture as a landscape where non-coherent things co-exist together. I use the landscape in some projects quite literally, in others more as a metaphor. A landscape is for me an environment where different aspects of uses, social relations, political point of views and spatial organizations, can happen at the same time.

What I try to do is to bring things in contact, which are not coherent at all. The tensions it creates makes my designs very tactile both physically and mentally. Within these tensions I believe new possibilities can emerge. Users will feel like pioneers in it.

In short said, my work is about the coexistence of non coexistent things.

I think best is to explain this with my work:

The work The House of Glass was Suddenly All Solid Walls started for me with the sentence ‘You need a border to be able to unite.’ by Wim van den Bergh. I researched all kinds of relations with a given 30 houses. I did models where all houses where attached to each other, like an endless field of spaces, models where every house was single standing (much like Tokyo), and models where the houses were used as walls to enclose outside garden spaces. In this last situation each house is related to several courtyards and each courtyard connects to several houses. So, for each courtyard a resident has different neighbors and with them he has to define what kind of courtyard they make.

I like this kind of tension, where you don’t know if this would be better or worse situation. For me it is a lot better then a house with a front and back garden, where you know for sure, nothing interesting would happen. In this situation things can happen, without a forced one direction of use or without any confrontation at all. It tries to open possibilities.

Trail House is a single house with a fragment of the existing paths (or trails) as the plan for the house. A house with the same curvature as a path, a house that curls, bends and split through the landscape.

The plan as an objet trouvé of a landscape element, has defined characteristics without being formed by its architectural function. A curvature, a dead end, a bifurcation, all are special spaces with its relations.   

Mies van der Rohe’s design for a glass skyscraper with all its curvatures of the facade, going in and out of its shape, fascinates me already for a long time. I imagine it in such a way that the plan of each floor could be a fluid one. Where you could somehow step outside of the tower and look back inside another part of it. At the same time I was tracing the outlines of all kinds of shapes I found during my residency in Tokyo. I was fascinated by the interstitial space between objects, buildings and people. They call the interstitial space that is bound with its object: MA. It can exist in everything. With tracing these outlines I was searching for not only the space it encircles, but also the space it creates outside of it. One of these tracings - a kind of inkblot, I used as the plan for A tower. Which in a way resembles the glass skyscraper by Mies. It is a model where each floor contains one apartment, 12 in total. In each apartment from almost every  position you look through the outside into another part of the house. And up and down of course interestingly into your neighbors house.