At Work - Neutelings Riedijk Architects

Résumé : This book is about designing buildings, about our architectural practice, about how we have been making designs during the past decade or so. Designing can be described as a quest, a journey of discovery without a map where just the place of departure is known. This quest can only be understood with hindsight, reconstructed from obscure sketches and crumbling models. Our reconstruction is not chronological but is a mental construct, an architectural logbook that reports on our wanderings. Journeys of discovery are unthinkable without a principal; there would have been no Vasco da Gama without Henry the Navigator, no Columbus without Isabella of Castille. The commission is known at the time of departure but the arrival is shrouded in uncertainty; will we discover a western route to India, or America? This book, then, is not about the brief, those parting words on the quayside before the ship leaves port, but about what befalls us on board in storms, rain, sunshine, headwinds. This travel report describes the critical mix of bravura and modesty needed to design for someone else, with someone else's money, a building that is to be erected by someone else again. Designing is a three-sided affair, a synthesis of knowledge, skill and evocation. These three polarities are mutually strengthening, at times difficult to distinguish between but as inseparable as fibres in a rope. Inspiration and intuition are the binding agent in this trilogy. The first two, knowledge and skill, are essential qualities for undertaking a journey, knowledge of the weather and the stars, skill to keep the vessel on course. Evocation however is indispensable to be able to envisage reaching India without falling off the edge of the world. This book is about the issues and themes we consider important to a design, and is guided by our preoccupations, obsessions and desires. The process-based considerations often acting as catalysts in a design process are only mentioned in passing. Our intention here is to try to unravel with the aid of sketches, models and tryouts the knowledge, skill and evocation required in our profession and take you with us on a journey through our work.