Teaching was there from the very beginning immediately because for me it's a place where you can do things which you cannot do in a commercial office.
So hello and welcome to Aripcast. It's a podcast of Prague based school of architecture, ARKEIP, the architectural institute in Prague. I'm Elan Fesler. I teach at ARKEIP and I'm sitting here with Winy Maas. Nice to meet you, Ellen. You also, and we're just going to have a casual conversation on architecture, on you, on what brought you to Prague, on work that you're doing, thoughts for students, and things like this. Um, we could say maybe to be a little bit conventionally organized, past, present, and future. Three different sections we could talk about. Um, so I would maybe ask then first for you maybe to introduce yourself to the audience, background, your Dutch, what was your starting as a landscape architect?
Yeah. No, no, in detail that was quite an important element to the landscape architecture episode, which has not been ended in the so looking back, um, my parents had a garden center and a florist. My mother's a florist and my brother also. So they had some influence on the choice because initially I wanted to do architecture, but because of what they were doing and I was helping in the business by designing the gardens because my father couldn't do it. So I did the drawings when I was like 12, 13, and then executing them. That was, I think, had a strong influence on like, okay, I want to do landscape architecture. Actually, I wanted to do both already from the beginning. And because I studied also, my secondary school was a bit like Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History', that book maybe that you know, where you are in a kind of giant garden, a former seminary for priests students. So it's a bit like Harry Potter, the whole atmosphere, and where the priests wore gowns and was taken over by ultra left-wing teachers that wanted to turn the world into a much more progressive environment. And that all in a kind of environment of villages in the southern part of the Netherlands close to Belgium. That was a second source because that for me was kind of eye opener to be in that environment which was intellectual, which was so connected with writers and with filmmakers and with thinkers and with scientists. Every teacher had an amazing relationship with Bertolt Brecht in the past or with writers as Harry Mulisch, a very Dutch but very good writer. And that caused I was like, wow, what a world I'm coming from a village where everything was about fighting between gangs in a farmer's village somewhere in the Netherlands. And then coming into this gymnasium that was like an El Dorado for me. And then being part of discussions, being part of the committee of the pupils, and that had like hidden in the ground somewhere behind trees in the forest their own place, where you of course you pick then stuff from the chemistry department to brew your own Geneva. So you can see a little bit the environment where we grew up. And there were all these kind of elements in that Harry Potter environment, and that led to a wish to be more intellectual than my background did allow for. So that combination then led to the next steps: filmmaking and writing and art and intellectuals.
You managed to merge, I would say, all of these things together in your work, you know, an intellectual but also realizing lots and lots of buildings and bringing together all these different arts, all these different ways of thinking and seeing somehow.
Yes, that I think was very influential and super intriguing for me to find a way in that. And I decided to do it step by step also. That's one thing. So that's why because from a gymnasium normally you go then to a university, but I decided to go to what they call in the Netherlands the 'school', which is like another level diploma school for landscape architecture, which was in a very small place somewhere in the swamps in the Netherlands and with only 200 students. And then to learn all the plants because it was not a scientific school. It was a school where you apply things. But the good thing about it is that you then have to learn all the things like how are things made, how the water systems work, how many plants can you know, what are all the ecological systems, and you have to be trained in that way. That helped me also a lot. Still now I know quite a lot of plants and every time I walk through a forest or whatever then I pop them up. But it helps also not to stop afterwards because there is always an education which is like higher, and this meant so I took that then as a tool basically to go later to university. And with the help of that first school of landscape, I could also skip the first year in university. So it made it more easy for me to access and there do initially urbanism because through landscape school I could enter urbanism, skipped the first year, but then also into architecture afterwards. That was a bit of a negotiation with the university and then they were a little bit like, you have to restart completely. They said, 'Come on.' And then they allowed me also because I did a good architecture project in the first time to do this kind of what we call this trilogy of subjects that are connected: landscape, urbanism, and architecture. Yeah. So there are more people that have done it, but this is somehow you can see it back in the work, I think, back in the approach, which is systemic and anyway wants to put objects in a perspective or in a wider context. That's what you learn, I think, more in landscape architecture, especially, than in architecture, which is very much object-driven, right?
Yeah. You tend to separate building from city and then landscape is just nature, but you try to weave all of these into one. You see even in the architectural projects, its insides and its outsides are blurred or they help each other or they refer to each other. And to make the word blurring a little bit more understandable, more precise.
No, that's very true. I mean, normally you see that the landscaper comes then in the end and he has to dress up the lawn in front of the house, and happily it's changing in many environments already. These kinds of collaborations are better settled.
