Interview Bojár Iván András [Octogon] – Kas Oosterhuis [ONL [Oosterhuis_Lénárd]]
1 Where and what works are you currently working on?
We just finished the Cockpit Building in the Acoustic Barrier both in Utrecht in The Netherlands. The Cockpit building contains a 6400m2 garage and showroom for Rolls Royce, Bentley, Lamborghini and Maserati. The design has been received extremely well and we are now experiencing a rewarding spin-off. Recently we have got a request from a project developer in Abu Dhabi to design a fast track Master plan for an Automotive Complex of more then 100 times the size of the Cockpit Building. Also in the Middle East region we are working on a five star hotel called the Flyotel in Dubai, and we have been asked to submit several Expressions of Interest and Fee Proposals, among others for the Arabic Museum of Modern Art in Doha in Qatar. For these projects we cooperate with Arup Engineers from London. Behind the Cockpit we just started the construction of the twin buildings for a BMW dealer. We have named that project the Ekris Headlights, since we have been looking at shaped headlight as embedded in the body in their new BMW car designs. It seems that the speed and the styling from automotive design naturally matches with our Non Standard Architecture practice. We are finalizing a design for a Landmark building in Kaiserslautern in Germany, and also for a headquarters office for the international transport company VOS Logistics in Oss in The Netherlands. In this January we also started the construction of a housing project which features a special 3d facade design by Ilona based on an intuitive sketches. Here we developed a new technique for facede panels which are produced by a milling machine in literally hundreds of different shapes, together assembling the complete sketch. In last December we also developed a design for a five star hotel for Chengchun in northern China. We regularly take part in exhibitions where we make interactive installations like our interactive installation ProtoCity 2005++ last year in the exhibition Anvenir des Villes in Nancy in France. And finally we are been asked regularly for designing art projects in public space. Right now we are working on a light sculpture for the city of Breda in The Netherlands. At the Faculty of Architecture in Delft where I am a professor from practice we are building customized design tools using state-of-the-art gaming techniques. We use games because they are multi-player by nature and give us the clue to design tools for interaction design. My new knowledge centre Interactive Architecture which is based in our own laboratory in the iWEB pavilion at the TU in Delft performs research on 3 major topics: Interaction Design, Non Standard Architecture design and production, and Game Theory / Swarm Theory applied to the collaborative design process. In March we organise the 3-day international GameSetandMatch II Conference with 10 keynote speakers and over 60 scientific architectural papers to be presented.
2 How are you approached by your clients who come from various cultural backgrounds and how do they react on your architecture worldview?
Each client is unique and has its unique reasons why to approach us. There is pattern though. There are a group of clients who have approached us directly since they knew and appreciated our work. They knew about our combined art and architecture practice and typically they have a background in the arts themselves. The Garbagetransferstation, the Saltwaterpavilion and the Web of North-Holland all came to us this way. A completely different group of clients now come from the automotive world. They do not necessarily know much about our projects but they are impressed by the techniques we have developed for the File to Factory process and they like the automotive styling we have developed thanks to these new CNC-driven production techniques. They are not interested in our theory of Non Standard Architecture, but they like the outcome. Another group of clients, again a completely different species, comes to us for housing projects. They have come to us since our designs communicate an environment friendly feeling, and some of them have some obvious ecological advantages, like for example our Dike housing project where we embedded the homes in the warm stabilizing body of a dike. We have always have many requests to lecture all over the world, and as a by-product of that we have been invited for prestigious exhibitions like the Biennale in Venice and the Non Standard Architecture exhibition in the Centre Pompidou. Our clients seem to be as diverse as our practice is. Some of them visionary businessmen, some of them sensitive art consultants, some of them working on an academic career in computation, and others fighters for a better and nicer world.
3 What new perspectives for architecture are opened by the free-form surfaces and volumes as executed with aid of computers?
Essentially we have chosen to look at the world from the point of view of Non Standard Architecture. This means that we take the exception as the rule. In other words we have quit the aesthetics as a by-product from industrial mass-production. Instead we are now putting together a new aesthetic based on the principle of mass-customization. In all our recent designs there is NOT A SINGLE building component that is the same. All elements are unique, they are CNC produced according to our innovative File to factory procedures which links our parametric 3d models directly to the production machines. The big challenge of Non Standard Architecture is that it opens the ways for a new architectural language which is no longer based on repetition. But I must insist on the integrity of the design and the process. The new information artists / architects must understand the basic principles of the new paradigm, otherwise they and their clients will be trapped in the dead end street of endless series of exceptions. Based on our recent executed projects like the WEB, the Cockpit, the Acoustic Barrier and the TT Monument we claim that we can produce a true Non Standard Art and Architecture for standard budgets.
4 Six years ago you mentioned two elements which are important in your work: intuition and the unexpected. You also said that you aim for the unexpected every day. Did you succeed?
More then 10 years ago we jumped into the world of Non Standard Architecture. We no longer could imagine our design in simple diagrams inside our head. We jumped out of the box. The very act of intuitive sketching by Ilona and 3D modelling by myself brings about the unexpected. It was no longer possible to have the 3D image of the design in your head before visualizing it. Now 6 years after our last interview we have learned how to control the out of control intuitive and the unexpected. It is still there but we also have developed new techniques to communicate the complexity with the production. Now we feel completely comfortable with complex surfaces, since we know how to make it efficiently. But there is more: in the recent years we have been experimenting with game development software and we are running design environments in real time. We design with particles, the relations between the particles. With my Hyperbody Research Group at the Faculty of Architecture at the TU Delft and in art installations we are now building constructs which are behaving in real time. Now we look differently at constructs: in our practice ONL [Oosterhuis_Lénárd] we are building relations between components using parametric software rather then building isolated 3d objects. And in our art installations like the MUSCLE at the NSA show in Centre Pompidou we run the relations in real time. These constructs are running processes, input-output devices which are played by the users. Architecture has become a game to be played by its users. Here we are dealing with unpredictability and uncertainty in a complete new form. The behaviour of many relatively stupid agents, think of the birds in a swarm, creates the bond between the elements, but not the overall shape. It is impossible to predict the shape the interactive construct will have at a certain moment. Of course it will be possible to bring the construct in a certain predictable state but then you sort of kill the process. Exactly like in quantum theory, when you observe the particle-wave system as a specific particle, you are not able to observe it as a wave any more, the process is dead.
5 Which developments in digital technology do you observe that are promising important changes and new perspectives to redirect the architecture of today?
In the last 15 years we have experienced two major paradigm shifts. The first leap was from repetitive industrial architecture towards Non Standard Architecture. This could happen thank to computation. Of course complex geometries were made in earlier days by hand, especially by locals using their own hands. But these constructs were never regarded as geometry. Euclidean geometry two millennia ago and Newtonian geometry 3 centuries ago still form the basis for 99% of the actual architecture production. Some 10-20 years ago Non Standard Geometry finally left behind the automatism to construct buildings as variations on platonic volumes using Newtonian logic, while the new software allowed us to work with boolean operations, subtracting one complex volume from another, and with complex surfaces using lofting techniques. Using computation in the design process paved the way for Non Standard Architecture. And now only 6 years ago ONL started a fresh new approach, we are ready for a new paradigm shift towards Programmable Architecture and Interactive Architecture. Now we look at buildings as a running process. We literally observe our environment differently through a new mindset. We take a new point of view and look at the world as a swarm of billions of interacting complex adaptive systems. We are exploring new tools to deal with the interactivity in real time, we are becoming programmers of behaviour instead of makers of dead objects.
6 Is there an exchange between the architecture and the arts of today? Can we think about it in such a way that the different disciplines evolve in a bi-directional dialogue? If yes, can you give examples?
Yes there is. I think that all innovation for architecture today has its origin in the arts. But I also believe that all innovation in the arts has its origin in technology. But we should go even further: all innovation in technology finds its origin in natural physics. Let me explain with a series of examples. Around 1920 Quantum Theory was developed by Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg. Quantum theory describes the behaviour of sub-atomic particles. Without Quantum theory the development of electro-mechanical devices like radio, television, computers and mobile phones could not have taken place. This the first step from theory to technology. That step took 20-30 years. Then without the existence of television, video and computers there would not been art forms like performances, installations and cybernetic art. They used the new technologies to change art from making paintings into something which unfolds in real time. That happened in the sixties and seventies of last century, it took another 20-30 years. An now, 20-30 years later architecture is ready to take behaviour as a serious, efficient, seductive and economically rewarding subject. One open question for me is if there is a feedback loop from architecture to art, from art to technique and from technology to theory. Would an architect be able to write an article for Scientific American? Would an artist be able to inspire scientists to develop a new technology. In the end the innovation industry must be driven by the evolutionary success of its products. The enormous success of the personal computer and the mobile phone absolutely has influenced the development of a whole range of related products, but not so much of new technological innovations. They will come from pure non-applied theory.
7 In earlier days ONL designed biomorph buildings with hydraulic components like our muscles, continuously reacting on impulses from the outside environment, and as a result changing its shape. In what way has the revolution in biotechnology influence on architecture, like we say that the digital revolution has lead to a new lifestyle and a revolution in philosophy?
I resist to the notion that ONL has designed biomorph buildings. I agree that they sometimes display a resemblance to shapes as we know from natural history, but we never start with that idea. We never try to copy superficially the appearance of a biological species. Rather we try to invent new species which by its complexity and complex behaviour may eventually start to familiarize with living objects as we already know. We always try to get as close as possible to the genes of our designs. We have organized once in 1995 an international workshop simultaneously in Vienna, Budapest and Rotterdam titled the Genes of Architecture. Biotechnology has not directly influenced our work. I see it this way: New technologies allowed for the invention of industrial muscles, produced by Festo company who is big in providing for actuators in the processing industry. To use these muscles in interactive installations was an act of the artist in ourselves. The Festo muscles were not intended to be used in this way. The use of muscles as actuators is an evolutionary step in the proliferation of industrial muscles. We are happy that we could contribute to that evolutionary process. An from there we are tempted to build a new species of behavioural architecture from our knowledge and experience with art installations. I dare to predict that within 5 years we will have realized a building where part of the building behaves in real time using actuators. And that building would probably be built in the Middle East region.
8 If you look back into history where do you see the roots of the architecture represented by your design philosophy? Who do you see as your predecessors, and why?
Surprisingly my roots are to be found in the Dutch De Stijl movement of the early twenties of the last Century. They made a convincing shortcut to fresh universal mathematical theories which were dealing with a complete new understanding of the Universe. Last week I had a discussion with Ayssar Arida, the author of the book Quantum City, and I gave him this same example. Artist Theo van Doesburg and furniture maker Rietveld were considering space as a certain variable density of the Universe. They were understanding space as a space-time continuum where the built construct, chair or building, was something like a locally increased density of that space-time continuum. Even today I could not agree more. But now we have new tools, new production techniques for furniture design and building constructs, and therefore our projects look different. But they share a similar fascination for natural physics, mathematics and computation. One of my first realized works was an exhibition design from 1988, exhibiting the works of Theo van Doesburg in Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Other heroes to name a few are: from the thirties constructivist architect Ivan Leonidov for his Magnitogorsk plan and the Library, from the fifties artist Constant with his New Babylon project, from the sixties cybernetic artist Nicolas Schöffer for his book La Ville Cybernétique and his Tours Cybernétique [a small version has been built in his birth place Kalocsa in Hungary], from the seventies artist Frank Stella for bringing painting into 3d space and the Italian architects Superstudio for their great book Nine Cities.
9 What can you do with a client who is very sure of himself, confident in the personality of the architect, and has explicit views on the building he wants to realize?
What more could you want for a client? It is common knowledge that a good building only can happen if you have a good client. This does not necessarily means that the designer and the client agree on all issues. But a strong visionary client will respect a strong visionary architect. Being respectful does not mean that you leave the other free to do anything, actually respectful means to me that that one must find a way to agree to communicate on facts and figures as much as possible, and try not to interfere with the expertise of the other players in their own domains. If the client is a good businessman, I will respect him for that, if the architect has explicit ideas on form processing and production techniques, the client will respect him for that and let the architect decide on what is a good shape and what is the appropriate way how to realize the design. And yet they will both have an opinion on each others strategies. The businessman should absolutely tell the architect if he likes the design or not, but he should not interfere in the many details where the expert in the operational field of forms and shapes decides. One must give all players in the collaborative design process the authorisation to make their expert decisions in the design process. Only if we put experts together in such a way they will be able to develop an produce according to the best of their knowledge and experience.
10 Now concerning the Cockpit and Acoustic Barrier in Utrecht building, can we regard this as experimental architecture or did something change?
None of our executed works are experimental. Before any design process we do not know where we will end. But this is true for most designers. It is after all a creative process full of surprises along its way. What makes ONL special here is that we take bigger risks. For example when we were invited to exhibit at the Biennale in Venice in 2000 we proposed an interactive installation using game software. We never worked with this before, we never had built such a behavioural installation before. We had 3 bright collaborators at that time which we invited to join the team [Richard Porcher from France, Andre Houdart from Belgium and Nathan Lavertue from the USA] and gave them each the task to built one of the three environments of the Trans-ports installation. We have been working together with sensor and interface expert Bert Bongers who already worked with us for the real time behaviour of the Saltwaterpavilion. None of us and none of them had any experience in interactivity before and yet we succeeded. It worked almost perfectly, theory was tested successfully and since we developed the concept of Trans-Ports further. The same can be said about the Cockpit building and the Acoustic Barrier. We had never done it before, and certainly not on this scale. We did develop the Web of North-Holland some years before, but now the whole process was set up from the beginning as a parametric model, and instead of making drawings we scripted the behaviour of all nodes of the constructs, and communicated the relevant data through tables with the production machines. The project was not designed in the traditional way, it was developed as a product and offered for a fixed price. We have been working very closely together with the steel manufacturer Henk Meijers of Meijers Staalbouw. We have linked, very much like autistic savants have direct access to their central database deep down in their brains, our scripts to their Autolisp routines to build the successful machine to machine communication. We take the risks of the responsible entrepreneur, so in that sense we do not regard it as experimental but more as as form of entrepreneurship. We do not create problems for others to solve [as so many architects do], we design and build complete working products.
11 What do you think, will traditional tectonic systems with their inclusive canonical approach come to an end?
ONL's approach to designing and building, both in art projects and in architecture, will not be mainstream in the coming years. But it will step by step replace the old system. It is evolution at work. The old system depends on a market of isolated mass-produced products placed to order in a building catalogue. Once the market has transformed into a just in time production apparatus of mass-customized project specific components, where all components are unique and are assembled as a 3d puzzle, only then the traditional system will come slowly to an end. In the near future the old and the new will co-exist and compete. All we can do is to place our products on the market and wait and see what real time evolution is doing with it. It is fascinating to realize that we are living inside evolution. I am very aware of the fact that we do have the power to slightly correct the trajectory of evolution.
12 In your work the designs are almost placed like alien monolith bodies in their environment. They give the impression to be introverted and busy with themselves, as if they dislike their environment and show their back at their environment. Can you imagine that you make a design in a historical setting? And that your cyberarchitecture relates itself to a historic urban environment?
In my earlier writings I took the black monolith coming from outer space and having landed on the surface of the earth from the film Space Odyssey 2001 as the ultimate example of the environmental role of our designs. Our designs are designed in weightless space, where there is no gravity so we can easily tweak the volumes, twist them and rotate them freely around. In the meantime we gather information about the future landing site of our weightless bodies. You could imagine this as a bi-directional communication between the site and the spaceship. The spaceship design sends signals back to earth and earth prepares as to accept the alien body. Earth and spaceship inform each other on every relevant aspect of the future successful reception. First when the floating design lands gravity starts to execute its actual forces on the design. Before gravity has been simulated through calculations, informed by a crew on earth. Urbanists seem to be trained to think that buildings grow like plants from the ground up, using local food to grow. Nothing is less true, they come from elsewhere, all concepts and materials are transported from remote places as to be assembled on that very spot. I have noticed that many urban planners have developed a sort of xenophobic fear for alien bodies. But I have a completely different feeling about this. Look at what happened after the black monolith landed. The apes started to wonder what it was and especially how it could be that the edges were so straight and sharp. They had never experienced something like it before. They had to take an intelligence jump to cope with it, a sort of quantum jump into another state of consciousness. I think this is exactly what our designs could bring about in historic settings. Proof of this theory is the implementation of iconic buildings in old city fabrics like Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Although somewhat more traditional then our designs you can clearly see this process at work. Like all xenophobic theoreticians they would like the aliens to look like us, they have difficulties in accepting that society is a very complex organisation, which is continuously transforming because it feeds on materials and information coming from a space exterior to the boundaries of their own protected environment. But obviously the implementation of the newly arrived body only can be successful if both parties inform themselves and each other properly. Our buildings do not place their backs to their environments, they rather make a soft landing in a carefully prepared nest. Their bi-directional information threads will be carefully interlaced and their physical presence will be equally carefully interwoven.
13 Modern architecture after Mies van der Rohe wishes to be practical and rejects ornament as an aesthetic issue. At the same time digital technology has undoubtedly brought about many new things, not in the least a new relationship to form. Without doubt the new forms have aesthetic aspects and address issues of beauty. Does the free-form architecture and specifically your architecture deals with aesthetics and what forms the basis for your aesthetics?
Modernist architecture and especially Mies van der Rohe has chosen the aesthetics of the Stijl movement to build the modernist movement empire. Mies was not so much interested in the variable densities of the space-time continuum like Theo van Doesburg was but he was aware of the fact that that this language was well suited to build cheaper, that is: without ornaments. And this stripped Spartan architectural language was on speaking terms with the principles of mass-production of steel and concrete components. Digital technology, Non Standard Architecture [NSA] and File to Factory [F2F] Computer Numerical Controlled [CNC] mass-customization principles are naturally bound to each other. The NSA architectural language of doubly curved surfaces, of soap bubble constructive principles, calculated through algorithms rather then drawn as 3d models comes from within the complexity of the new NSA world view, it comes from its own logic. Although theoretically possible it will be quite irrational to use digital techniques, NSA techniques and mass-customization production techniques to build a simple square box. Traditional techniques will be more likely to apply. It is like using swarm behaviour algorithms to describe the fixed position of two points in space. The aesthetics come from the bottom-up processing within the system, but the styling of the complex surfaces come into play as top-down interventions from the exterior of the skin of the building. I am very much keen upon establishing a balance between the bottom-up and top-down aspects of design. That is why I am, besides practising the new paradigm of NSA, also very interested in automotive styling. Beauty comes from within and is at the same time imposed on the object from the outside. This matches perfectly our theory that buildings are complex adaptive systems communicating with their exterior and their interior environment. Buildings are the interface between the exterior urban and climatic conditions and their interior users.
14 To what extent has architecture in your experience become dynamic since the diffusion of digital technology, and to what extent are the client and the users of the building conscious of these dynamics?
Once a building is fixed in an explicit shape the only thing that counts is: how do we experience the shapes when moving in or along that structure? Our design for the Acoustic Barrier was made from the point of view of the car driver driving with a speed of 120 km/h along the barrier. The experience of the driver has a duration of 40 seconds. In these 40 seconds ONL wishes to offer the drivers an experience of slow transformation, intended to make them feel comfortable. Not disturbing the eye of the observers, but rather giving them a sort of light visual massage. Experience Lite. The experience is dynamic but not wild and exotic, but rather a smooth 1,5 km long stretched feeling. There has been much misunderstanding that NSA architecture is wild and restless. If not handled well it sure can be like this, but ONL prefers to create sensations of quiet excitement. We are not crazy expressionists, we are not shouting loud, we try to offer the public a sensation of slow beauty, finding its way into the hearts of people, and making them feel better, like it makes feel ourselves better. To reach this goal we need to work on the digital platform and we need to develop project-specific routines and scripts to organise the tens of thousands unique components. Architecture Goes Wild as is the title of one of my books, but Non Standard Architecture does not necessarily looks wild. It is our explicit goal to produce natural beauties. The next upcoming paradigm shits towards Programmable and Interactive Architecture has in our vision a similar goal. We do not design buildings like the Muscle and Trans-ports to disturb people, but rather to offer a natural feeling of slowly changing conditions. The building transforms slowly like the weather does. Eventually it may explode like a thunderstorm, but that is only functional as to appreciate the silence after the storm even more. But there is another strong argument for developing Programmable Architecture. The technology of using actuators in buildings may be used to make buildings and bridges even stronger and more efficient with their components then traditional constructs that are calculated as to resist tot the strongest possible force. Adaptive constructs react in real time to forces acting upon the structure and tighten their muscles as to resist only locally to the forces. The rest of the structure does not have to work that hard, and does not need to be post stressed. Post stressing in real time promises to be a real economical advantage for bridges, skyscrapers, floating airports and such large scale structures. As a conclusion we can say that by having developed a pure Non Standard Architecture and in their prototypes of Interactive constructs ONL widens the bandwidth of possible experiences and emotive feelings of built structures by its clients and its users.
15 Do you observe a difference in the attitude towards your architecture between The Netherlands, United Arab Emirates and Hungary?
The receptiveness of clients and users of our architecture is in principle not different here or there. Recently the national consultant of Dutch highway architecture told me that he did not meet a single person who did not like the Cockpit. This is very good news, because this informs us that our designs may have a natural beauty indeed, which is appreciated by experts, client, users and casual passengers. We experience a similar appreciation in the Middle East region, and hopefully also in Hungary. The difference is not in the visual appreciation but in the economic conditions of these three countries. How far they are developed technologically determines if they trust the new technology. Does it feel familiar or do they fear the technology. In the Middle East they do not have the factories themselves, they have to import virtually everything, which makes them a little bit suspicious about building in steel and glass after NSA principles. In the Middle East, where 99% of the buildings is build as in-situ concrete they make use of many in our eyes poorly paid workers from Pakistan, India and the Philippines. But they have the money, which urges them to make their decisions on how to spend the money much faster then in The Netherlands and in Hungary. Where decisions are taken faster they are also taken on a more emotional basis, which gives us the opportunity to propose explicitly iconic constructs and images to fall in love with. I think that Hungary has the chance to have the best of both worlds. As an economic region Central Europe is growing faster then The Netherlands, and they do have the production facilities themselves. This makes us very optimistic to be able to realize some of our designs in Hungary.
16 Is it a coincidence that your architecture and the world of cars find each other from time to time?
In 1999 I wrote an article for Archis magazine titled Vectorial Bodies. At the bi-annual car show in Amsterdam I took pictures of headlights, folding lines, continuity in power lines of the body styling, inlay techniques, body shapes and analysed emotive aspects of the design. I started the article with the observation that one always enters a car through the side door, never through the front door. One steps into a vectorial body, a body with a vector. And that is exactly what our design are: bodies with a vector. And I was myself amazed by the observation that in all our design we always come in through an entrance at the side. In the Saltwaterpavilion the door is detailed as a cutting out of the skin, just like the door in the body of the car is not expresses a frontal porch but as a minimal cutting in the surface of the body. There are so many similarities that we started to use the term Automotive Styling for our own building bodies. But we do not design cars without wheels, in the same way that we are not designing biomorphic species. The simple truth is that we embody speed and friction in our designs, as much as we embody smoothness, flow and behaviour. It is recognized by certain clients that our architecture is well suited for situations along highways where speed and flow from the point of view of speed is a possible design issue. Like it is recognized by other clients that our architecture is well suited to build buildings as a memorizable experience rather then as a static piece of architecture. Our architecture fits very well where there is an explicit people flow [multi functional buildings and shopping centres], an explicit flow of cars [along highways or on the banks of a river], and where the clients are looking for iconic landmark buildings, which are experienced dynamically from different viewing angles, experienced from people walking by, cars driving by or from ships passing by.
17 Are you, like other architects, sensitive to fundamental physical motives hoping for having an eternal impact on the people surrounding you or on society as a whole?
I am fully aware of the fact that the buildings designed by ONL are subject to change by their users and that they eventually are destroyed. This has not happened with ONL buildings yet, but it did happen to some buildings designed by my father who was a well respected modernist architect, and it surely did happen to many art works and installations we have made. We respect the temporary nature of our constructs. They last as long as they last. The architect is not the one to decide how long they last. They may last for centuries if it is validated highly even if the construction methods are not very durable like is the case with the Rietveld house in Utrecht. Society does every effort to preserve it against all odds, and with a good reason. And sometimes very valuable works of architecture are destroyed even before they have had the opportunity to prove themselves as durable and worthwhile conserving. The interior of the Waterpavilion, both the NOX sector and the ONL sector, has been completely changed although it has been published worldwide as a very valuable and ground braking design. The summer pavilion the WEB of North Holland has been taken apart after its intended one year life at the Floriade flower exhibition in 2002. We have been so lucky to be able to offer it another life as the iWEB, hosting the Protospace Laboratory, my interactive design studio for collaborative design and engineering in real time at the TU Delft. When it comes to programmable interactive constructs like Trans-Ports the life expectancy of these constructs may be similar to that of or complex geometrical NSA constructs. It is a building after all, and it will be completely dependant on the owners what we can expect for the lifespan of the building. The most important meaning of any piece of architecture though is how it takes command of parts of the brains of people. If it has the power to settle in peoples brains for many generations, then it has real meaning in the development of the theory and practice of architecture. I can not say say that this an explicit goals of our practice but until now we have succeeded to be present in other peoples brains quite extensively. An accurate check to measure this kind of presence is to count the number of hits on the Internet our names. Now my name has 17.300 hits in Google, while Pritzker Prize winner Zaha Hadid has 370.000. The more hits the more likely society will be ready to preserve the designs.
18 What is your method of working with Ilona Lénárd, and how do you work together?
Ilona and myself are now both principals of ONL [Oosterhuis_Lénárd] in Rotterdam. We have decided some years ago to fuse our practices into one new practice for Art, Architecture and Programming. In effect we already practised the complete fusion from 1989, but we thought that the world around us was not ready yet to accept the fact that we see the equal importance of art and architecture in our design practice. But we made the right choice, since after our formal fusion we have had both more clients from architecture and more clients from the arts. When we were living for one sabbatical year in the famous studio designed by Theo van Doesburg for himself [we were selected from a pool of 30 applicants] in Meudon near Paris we decided to join forces. Before then we operated as two distinct practices, Ilona has had solo exhibitions of her individual work, and I had been working as freelance designer with other architects and actually realised some very innovative office buildings. I had the background of industrial prefabricated production before I started working with computers. But it was actually Ilona who opened the way to work intuitively with computers around 1985, when she was putting together her sandwich aluminium Metawell series, all of them based on intuitive computer sketches. It was a real revelation for me that it was possible and legitimate to work with computers in an intuitive way. It changed our world. Since the early nineties we have been working very closely together with housing project like the Dazzle Paintings, the private house for the Hutten family, the housing project the Dancing Facades, and the Saltwaterpavilion. In our collaboration Ilona mostly made the initiating intuitive sketches to be translated by me and our staff into 2d [Dazzle paintings] or 3d [Hydra in the Saltwaterpavilion] applications. The intuitive and unexpected became an important factor in our designs. The intuitive and the unexpected were always framed in a strong concept, which could be described in some strong textual lines. I was very much acting as the visionary programmer, Ilona as the intuition actress. As a matter of fact Ilona has been trained as a professional actress in Budapest and has performed on stage for two years with the Déryné Theatre based in Budapest. Later Ilona graduated as a sculptor at the Willem de Kooning Academy in The Netherlands. This way of cooperation has been a constant factor in most of our works. Now we are both principals of our formally fused ONL company and we have around us a highly educated team of collaborators to make the 3d models, renderings and do the programming after our guidelines. We feed them with a constant flow of fresh theories, bold concepts and introducing new techniques, and we also learn a lot from them.
19 The visual heritage and the heritage of spatial constructions has common root in Modernism. But De Stijl, Bauhaus, or any personal or institutional mixtures, are also to be found in the Hungarian culture. Does this mean anything to you? Are you considering the heritage, are you interested in where they come from, or are you indifferent to these issues?
My fascination with theory, technique, art and architecture really goes back to the twenties of the previous Century. That period was in my eyes crucial for modern civilisation. Many new theories were constructed using language and mathematical formulas, many technological inventions and applications were made and found their way into art and soon after that into the avant-garde of architecture. The effects were widespread indeed an have found their way to the imaginative works of Mohóly Nagy and Molnár Farkas and many others in Hungary. As for The Netherlands my heroes were Theo van Doesburg, Johannes Duiker and Gerrit Rietveld. I do not have any difficulties in seeing a direct relation between these giants and our actual work. The common basis is that we have our minds virtually connected to the understanding of the universe. This may sound vague at first sight and avoiding concrete viewpoints, but I experience this as a very tangible and utterly important. These days I am reading the book The fabric of Reality written by the natural physicist David Deutsch claiming that Quantum Theory implies that there must be billions of parallel Universes. Last year I read the book A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram, in which he boldly states that our Universe is a running computation of discrete steps in a very complex set of interwoven cellular automata. My favourite magazine is Scientific American, I am always looking forward for the next issue. These theories do teach me more on the essence of architecture and its genes then any book on architecture has ever given me. And after reading these books I do relate the new concepts back to the history of architecture as we know it from experiencing the real work. History is not an objective reality, it is rewritten every moment in our brains. We are in a constant process of evaluating and rethinking the bold moments of history. I am convinced that the right way to go for the information architect of our era is to inform ourselves on the actual techniques and use the tools which are available to us, and to construct with this knowledge and these tools an appropriate architecture of the zeros of the 21st Century, just like the sensitive architects did in their time. Later people will look back at this period and find their inspiration exactly because it has given consistently and honestly shape to the actual developments in society.