As a student of architecture there is a certain point in your studies when you start wondering about how you should position yourself towards society when you’re practicing the craft of designing space. What are your moral codes, what principles do you design by, what influence does your work have on real life, real people? Can you do harm with a building? Can you do good? Is it possible to bring about systemic change? Is there a utopian ideal to aim for? In other words, you start to search for legitimations justifying what you’re designing. You do this partly from the insecurity every student (and probably professionals alike) have about what you’re designing. Insecurity comes with design, because every choice you make is to a greater or lesser degree arbitrary.

Illustrating the ‘arbitraryness’ of design choices: Six random entries from the several hundred of entries in the Stockholm Public Library International Architectural Competition. All radically different, all legitimate ‘solutions’

In design there is no such things, that one specific site and brief leads to one specific design (if you think you do have an example of this please let me know!). In the design arena you are looking for bearings, a framework, an artificial limitation that can confine the problem, limiting the range of possibilities that you have to work with. For example, you can decide to only make rectangular buildings, this already excludes cylinders, cones, spheres, and the entire array of blobby and deconstructivist configurations. While this is a formal limitation which has to do with developing a style, a handwriting, one could also search for an ideological, political, philosophical or moral framework which guides you in doing design. When one searches for bearings in this more abstract and not so formal realm one ends up in the theory department.

My theory interest started with Koolhaas, who emerged as this enigmatic figure since the start of my studies at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft. In Delft we are very effectively brainwashed into the modernist tradition. Many students come in favoring Gaudi over Corbu, Romanticism over Modernism, and we leave the school favouring Corbu over Gaudi. But then there is Koolhaas, for a first year student these are very weird building, strangely intriguing, but you cannot quite get your head around it (at least this is how it was for me). Then you find this architect actually writes (as one of the very few who are alive), and that his texts are like his buildings: hard to get your head around and often misinterpreted by architecture students. One thing that sets Koolhaas apart in his writing was his engagement with all the building which were not part of the architectural canon, the office blocks, shopping malls and skyscrapers (as Rory pointed out earlier in the comments) here I found agreement with my own views, as I described in part 1 of this biography, in architectural discourse we should not in advance remove 90% of the built environment out of view as not worthy of looking at or thinking about.

Another aspect of Koolhaas’ writing is that he doesn’t offer hope, or a way out. He provides coping mechanisms, strategies to deal with a reality. One of the ‘ideologies’ that slumbers under the surface of his writing is the Constant Nieuwenhuizen‘s uncomfortable utopia for the homo ludens: New Babylon.

Winy Maas speculating about ‘critical projection’ on the Breathing in an Utopian Vacuum mini-symposium, Stylos, TU Delft 2004

As intriguing as Koolhaas’ essays where, they were also deeply unsatisfying. The disenchantment and disillusion were too great for a young student of architecture who is searching for the meaning and legitimation of his discipline. Thus, fueled by naiveté I kept searching for ‘a way out’. This search manifested itself with through organizing a mini-symposium (a summary of the lectures and debate between Winy Maas, Winka Dubbeldam, Ole Bouman, Hilde Heynen, Hans van Dijk and Alexander D’Hooghe can be found here (pdf in Dutch)) with the bold title: “Breathing in an Utopian Vacuum (or drowning in a reality without critique)” Again it started with recognizing one of my own unarticulated sentiments in a text. This time in a text by Roemer van Toorn that he had written for the yearbook (the best sold architecture book in the Netherlands). Roemer was also looking for something, he was trying to theorize how architecture could be political, how it could resist capitalism and push agenda’s containing alternate ideas. This raised my curiosity, thus I visited him. We talked and he introduced me to a new buzzword, namely ‘projective’ that had been emerging in American academia and which seemed to hold the promise of a new theoretical framework or paradigm for architectural practice. A theory than embraces reality and takes it as a starting point, instead of reality as merely a domain in which ideas are deployed without any feedback. The outline of this idea was articulated in “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism” [pdf] by Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting. The outcome of this event wasn’t giving me a clear image yet of of an ‘ideology’ on which to base practice, but the issues that were was raised made me aware that this ‘projective’ thing touched upon sensitive issues, because it sparked much discussion. The main issue was that apparently there was a great disconnect between architectural theory and practice. Intrigued by this problem and eager to investigate further I initiated the The Projective Landscape project, but that part of the story has to wait till the next part of this biography.