As part of the DUTCH architecture exhibition currently taking place at the Winery, NEXT Architects presents two projects - the Villa Overgooi residential complex in Almere and the Glanerbeek bridges in Enschede - but in his lecture Schenck spoke about nine more works that, in his opinion, correspond to the concept of the exhibition … Arranging the works by scale in ascending order, Schenck began the story with the smallest object - the Fat Lamp object. This is a lamp with a slow incandescent effect, which gradually fills the room with light and also fades out smoothly, simulating the rising and setting of the sun. According to Schenk, this is the principle of artificiality in action.
Another project by NEXT Architects is called “Me, myself and you” and explores the concept of “border”, which in Holland, as well as in Russia, is most often associated with a fence. The architects have developed a fundamentally new concept of the fence, endowing it not with a separating, but with a unifying function. So, two-way parking for bicycles, a fence with fasteners for things common with neighbors, or a fence in the form of a ping-pong table can encourage neighbors to get acquainted and establish communication. Changing the standard ideas about the fence to the completely opposite is an illustration of another key principle of modern Dutch architecture - conceptuality.
Another principle is optimization, i.e. creating the most efficient buildings - formed the basis for the M&M living space project in Amsterdam. Since the light enters the apartment only from the north side, the architects decided the entire interior in white and divided it into four additionally illuminated cubic boxes. Inside the first box is a bedroom, and outside there is a bookcase and a reading area, the second is the kitchen, the third is the bathroom, the fourth is the guest bedroom inside and two workstations outside.
The already mentioned Glanerbeek bridges demonstrate the implementation of the principle of artificiality - the structures imitate the natural forms of the forest within which they are located. And since nature is always light and space, the bridge was divided by islets of greenery into three parts, differing from each other in height. The formed oases were immediately overgrown with grasses and bushes, and small animals settled in the supports of the bridge, made of porous stone. Interestingly, each part of the bridge has its own function - one of them is pedestrian, the other is for cyclists, and the third is for buses.
Another unusual solution was found by architects for the suburb of Rotterdam. To breathe life into the sleeping areas and make them a complete and aesthetically pleasing environment, it was necessary to establish a connection between the people living here and the historic center. This was helped by the "elastic perspective" - a staircase from which a view of the old city opens. The word floating in the air staircase, based on the Mobius strip, goes around the hill, and observation platforms are arranged in its bends.
Designed by NEXT Architects and monuments, considering them one of the most important elements of creating an image of a particular area. True, the works of the Dutch differ from Russian works of monumental propaganda like heaven and earth: where Russian architects strive for solidity and brutality, the Dutch advocate ephemerality and barely guessed metaphor. At the lecture, Marein Schenck spoke about the "Monument to Textiles" located in the south of the Netherlands in the city of Tilburg, which over the past hundred years has become one of the centers of the national textile industry. The monument consists of 250 glass “fiber” segments fixed on a common wooden base and entwined with plants that bloom at different times of the year and, due to this, color the composition in different colors. According to the architect, this decision allowed not only to create a living, constantly changing monument, but also to capture the dynamics of the city's development and its production.
The interior of the Amsterdam office of the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy embodies the theoretical developments of NEXT Architects in the field of office space organization. Architects advocate that the public space of the office, where the company's employees conduct brainstorming and meetings, should be completely isolated from the offices, otherwise business communication and the work itself will constantly interfere with each other. According to Schenk, it is not enough to divide these zones with a partition; some kind of transitional space needs to be placed between them, and in the case of the Wieden + Kennedy office, brightly decorated meeting rooms became such a space.
In 2004, NEXT Architects opened a branch of their company in China and are currently carrying out a number of projects for that country. One of them was the IBM office and research center, which uses the same approach to the separation of workspace functions as in the previous project. Public spaces here are open and surrounded by green spaces, while spaces for secluded work are concentrated in 40 sqm sections. each one. The Chinese projects of the Dutch bureau turned out to be especially interesting for the Moscow audience from the point of view of how the civilized principles of European architecture "take root" in the conditions of a country with a rapidly developing development. Marein Schenck himself looks at this process optimistically, believing that the future of architecture lies precisely with conceptual projects based on comprehensive studies of the processes preceding construction, and that sooner or later most powers will follow the example of Holland.
