from: Dam & Partners - Work in progress, NAI, 2001, ISBN 90-565-183-1

Diederik:

Over the years the bureau has amassed a great deal of knowledge and expertise, upon which we continue to build. This quite naturally leads to an accumulation of new insights, and this defines the way we do research. The appearance of our buildings is extremely variable. For example, we quickly tend to discard a perfectly good aesthetic solution and start looking for a new one, in order to avoid repetition. Conversely, research into engineering and craftmanship leads to a continual expansion of knowledge and to ever more radical solutions. Innovation is self-generating. This is also how the bureau derives its organizational structure. We often let things emerge out of chaos, even as sound, structured systems underpin it. At the bureau, highly experienced people and young people work together - people with completely different backrounds. They come from a carpentry shop or from the university or from the art academy. What matters to us is an integration of knowledge and creativity in which you involve clients as well as, say, visual artists.

Cees:

The function of the client has changed significantly over the last twenty years. There are for example clients who act as real estate agents in bringing together parties who are able to make a building. One might think that this has transformed the function of the architect but that is not the case. His role has become more central than ever because the genuine master builder’s craft, the integration of different aspects, has become more important than ever in achieving good results. If you can separate yourself from all the interested parties and can think up something new, it is possible to work well with the traditions that we are continuing. Being conscious of tradition means inquiring into what you are doing yourself and what you have to deal with. Palladio is interesting when we are discussing differences between today and yesterday. And here I am not talking about form but about content. Tradition is quite often expressed by imitating something from the past –like clog dances from the sixteenth century- but the essence of something from the past is that it has something to offer. To me a good tradition is something flexible, something that you keep reshaping and adapting again and again. You might say that in essence just one line on paper is enough to start a tradition. The second line is an amendment to the first one, something that does follow on but that can entirely alter the direction of the whole. When something is new, it carries on the tradition but it pushes it beyond its limitations and explores the bounds of tradition. In some of Asplund’s buildings you can see this quite clearly, for instance in his courthouse in Gothenburg. There he created an extension to a neo-classical building that makes no compromises whatsoever, yet it precisely complements the old building’s size, scale and rythm. This is a form of respect to which we also aspire in our work and that you can see quite clearly in the house at the river Amstel in Amsterdam. The material and colour of the facade of this house stand in complete contrast to all other facades surrounding it, yet at the same time it is clearly related to them. Creating one’s own environment is the underlying motive of my work. From the bureau’s early days I remember buying shoes in a shop that I designed, and an ice cream in a shop I also designed, and then a car…and so on. I made things I needed and I still do. I don’t think anything comes about just sitting down at the table and saying “now let’s make a doorknob”. In other words, for us it’s all about things that concern us closely and that we want to see changed.