Winy Maas - The Art of Coincidence

Thank you for inviting me here. It somehow I know Anna, I know that you're better than this other conference here in town, which I have never attended. So that is very good that you do it. Why? Because it gives a kind of personal touch to our world. And you were challenging me to give a lecture, not in a high-speed format, but to try to analyze myself and the influence it has given me. Of course, your title is a contradiction: you are not allowed to talk about architecture, only about impossibility. So I say I will show projects, but in another way. It's a kind of selected autobiography that I try to take you through to understand myself. It started inspired by a podcast maker, a journalist, who is asking people how they became who they are. Everybody starts at a moment of nothing, a pure coincidence when you are born. From there it takes long, but that coincidence is amazing. It's a refinement of your own DNA and your talents as a base for further existence. This construction of existence fascinated him and now, retrospectively, also me. It is like how to grow into destinations, the scenography that we have to embody today and maybe discuss later in the conversation. I am from the north. This is a picture of me coming of age. How every day, every month, that is my placement. I don't come from the mountains; I come from a place where climate change will be at its highest effect. I come from a place where endlessness was also inspiration, no claustrophobia at all. It was about perspectives that we would like to paint. In the 70s, beginning of the 70s, I was playing with my Lego blocks. Like every architect, that is one of the sources. I was on television endlessly, and it somehow influenced me, and I think a whole generation. It took 40, 50 years to deal with that observation. Then the second element: at a certain moment my mom started to become a florist, and my dad became a garden architect. They did that in a very ugly design. I grew up in that, and I was not only forced but enjoyed it. I started as a florist with my mom, going shopping for flowers and arranging them while going to secondary school, and making gardens with my dad because he was very technical and economical, and I gave it some taste. Then what could I do afterwards? This was all happening in a place you don't know, in that area. It was a village with a church, small streets, cute streets. Then the Americans came and bombed it in '45. So this is the village variant of Rotterdam. I was born and grew up in a lot of ugliness. What to do with that? Then I was 17, 18, and I wrote this letter to the mayor. 'Mr. Mayor, I live in an ugly place and I'm on the threshold of going away. I would like to ask you to organize an idea competition with architects and designers to think about this.' Not being aware that this letter has influenced me so much. He wrote back, 'Dear beloved Mr. Maas, good idea. I really like that you do it, so I will come back to you.' Fine. 35 years later, what happened?

It took him a while because he stayed in the Netherlands. You stay as a mayor and you can continue. I made some buildings and he saw that in the press. Then maybe it was better to get him back to that town. Normally you don't go back to your hometown, but in this case I went back. Seeing this place that turned into that, he asked me what I wanted to make. I dreamed about it. I said, 'Why would I make something? Because I want everybody to know this village in the future. Make a skyscraper, 400 meters high, and you can see it from Paris, from Copenhagen, from London.' He took it seriously. He wouldn't have done it when I was 17, but then he became older and started to talk about it. Then he got a political crisis because nobody wanted that. Then he said, 'Okay, you have one chance to do that.' I still remember it very much. I try to explain to students how you react in what is happening. In the Dutch system of politicians, you have about 18 parties, from ultra right to ultra left. You have to negotiate every week, go talk with them, they go back to their party. So what happened? How much should the building be? I went here, then there. No, it should be this. How wide? Then back there. It was like this. And how high? What kind of shape? What happened was that they could imagine on that place, which is very Freudian. It has 500 of the same characters, and they want to put that there. So we analyzed all these farmhouses, compared them, and made the average. We calculated how far this is from the average. Statistically, it was this. They said this. Of course, in two seconds I said yes, that's what we are going to do. It is very symbolical: I'm small and you are big. You have that also with second-tier cities like Barcelona versus Madrid. So you are bigger than you are. The doors are like this. The mayor was troubled. He said, 'Okay, we take it, but now it's enough. One joke is enough for my town. Now what do you mean? Material should be normal: brick, straw, wood, glass, okay.' So we selected only glass. Because then you can do everything about the history of the town in it. I could burn it into it. What happens when you do all this burning? There's an architecture of 2 millimeters that you do, but inside you have the biggest fresco or rose window. Everything was cooking in that glass. There's a collective house and a certain pride because it becomes a lantern in the evening. It fits in the town but twice as big as an average part. That was funny to see because it attracted some people. The mayor, who didn't speak English, had to learn a little to help the BBC explain that the town was now visible to the world. This explains the irony I put into it with the new technology. It's a double attitude: when you're born in a place and you want to escape, then you go further and bring it back. I'm actually very proud. My mom was very proud; she had to defend it on the market. 'What is your son doing there?' She said, 'You don't talk longer. I don't talk with you anymore if you hate it.' She became a little guerrilla, which I simply adore.

Then I went to another inspiration that pushed me indirectly to be an architect. I went to Beekvliet. Beekvliet is a school that existed 200 years. I escaped my village to go to another village, which is very Catholic, like a seminary where you become a priest. The first year I had to sleep over. They make bishops and popes there. These were my teachers. It was the first year with also girls, half and half. What is interesting about that school, I didn't expect that the prisoners of war were there. All the ministers that didn't run away to London in the Second World War had to be put there. The brain of Dutch society was born on that place. They were together for three years and manufactured the idea after the war. I'm very happy now to make their museum and hear their story. That was happening in my place, I didn't know. So being in a village, then given to this kind of situation, made me. This is the complex how they built out of it. Here I am sitting in this park. How I became I started to talk more. I wanted to come out. I became the president of the students' organization and I wanted to talk out. I learned from all the teachers there, and this helped me a lot. Honestly, I would love that you would have such an education. It was better than my secret history of Donatart. Some of you might have read it. It continued with this. Just before I left, they went from this to a new building. This is maybe a reason I became an architect. It was so bad, cheap as a survival act. I come from this, all my stories sleeping on top of this, drinking in this garden, my first motor ride there. We had our beer, we put some chemistry to make our own gin. Now you give it to transport that into this. So what happened? Here you see it happening, they move from there to there. Couple of years later, phone call comes. 'Can you do something about that? We have this thing and we want a new kind of place to meet each other.' We tried to do that. The budget for schools in the Netherlands is terrible. One toilet is already the max you can finance for the kids. I found it a bit boring. So I wrote a letter again to Carl, the dean. I said, 'I think it's a bit boring. We have to do something. What shall we do?' We had a Zoom call and started to paint over it with all the participants. The idea was to ask people to think about the stories of the school, 200 years of history. There are so many stories. Let's show them further. We put the stories around the school and started to imagine how the stories could be put on top of the building. That has been done with an artist, Ian Kirkpatrick from Canada, to show that there was this room where we smoked, this place where my favorite Dutch teacher was writing and inspired me to read. All the Dutch characters, what we did in the forest, writing pamphlets in the evening. Also the buildings that surrounded Mascom, my favorite architect, close to my name. He was there, how he went to different bars, how he traveled, how he had a terrible accident in '83 with casualties. How the former rector went away, how the new came, how people become more Americanized. You have that also in your secondary place. You have to throw this hat now, stupid, but it's copied of the past. Then how the new building emerges. That's what this building is now about. It comes together all the stories in the entrance, and then you spill out on this blue ola to be together.

So that was staging a generation or more into a building. So what is a building? What we could ask. I went to the school to study landscape architecture. My dad said this is the next step, and then you come back to the shop. It's a beautiful place with canals, roses. I learned 50,000 species basically. Then we did things in the city with those species. Remember me being theatrical, advertising roses, making a play out of that, or going to the willows and doing a sweeping willow act. That's what I learned. Then I said I want to do more of that, go further. I went to Delft to study urbanism and architecture. One learning exercise I would recommend to everybody is the International Design Seminars. This one started in '87. I can show you the book. It was organized by Herman Hertzberger, who inspired me to be social and make stairs. Aldo van Eyck was still alive, my fan because he was so direct. I remember his first lecture. He was standing there with a huge mop over his head, yelling to the audience about the architecture of the Netherlands, that it should not be that way. I said yeah, that's a character. Now I'm on the right school finally. Then this young character was also there, and Rem Koolhaas. What a dream team. Coincidence or did I make coincidence? That is the question. So we decorated with each other. I made a sketch for a building of Rem, how we can make a garden that connects through the highway. Then we presented it and created activities. We had the intention to let everything stand there. So my first speech to them. Downstairs from the market with all those strange shops, it's like a kasbah. The kasbah continues. You can see that I was super nervous. They would not continue, but we continued. We did it with students. They were intending to get rid of architecture at the technical university. So we protested. We made a moment in '89 when there was a Czech spring. We said, 'If the iron border is leaving there, then we take it here to protect our university.' We built that iron wall, combined it with all kinds of architecture, surrounded the building with that action. Then we made our workshop collaborating with Japanese about the future of Delft. This is Delft, but actually the mechanisms below about the water system, how that could inspire the city. In '96 we continued exploring the world of shadow. In Frankfurt, you see the article: we had the age of modernism about light, and now we come into the epoch of shadow because of climate change. Exploring the darklands with Herman and Zaha, we looked at how much light we could need. In '98 we continued further. I was showing fire. In 2000, there was a discussion from cosmetics decoration to mechanics in architecture. Then in 2007 we worked on legacy. What do we leave behind 50 years after us? We tried to show that with slogans, and then we showed it in the city. Here you see how we interfered in this neighborhood, how we thought what we could do with other groups, how to deal with the city center, and made one place like this. The time square will be one for all in Rotterdam to celebrate architects that show their vision.

Studying is nice, it gives me a lot of conversations, but my dad said he would not pay for my study. So I had to do some jobs. I worked with different ones. I show you two elements that came across my path. I didn't go to the US or the UK, but I worked for UNESCO in Lamu, Kenya. I made with Italian architects the transformation of a market hall, the first market hall in Africa. Then I came back again. I went back to Suakin in Sudan, between the war of Chad and Eritrea, a beautiful island town. I was sent there to check if it was still there. This is what the map showed. All the buildings were gone because they have marble. If I were a sheikh, I could buy and sell it. The only thing I could do was enlarge the water basin around. They completely pontooned two dredgers and made it in a month to protect it. Should I have done it, or should these people have had more money? But this was my mission. Then I could go back and I met Rem somewhere on a plane. I went to graduate with him, and afterwards I went to OMA. Rem said, 'Africa? You weren't in Morocco. What kind of building?' The first curve was made in OMA to make a synopsis of the landscape of the dunes and turn that into the center. Another project that inspired me so much, and actually the discussion we need to have with you later, is La France in the book they made in Paris. It looked like a grand surrounded by buildings you don't want to see. How to deal with that? In the past, this dichotomy: do we dare to do that? We calculated your maintenance program: a facade 10 years gone, a structure 40 years gone. The economical value if you calculate that over time, at a certain moment in 50 years you would have something beautiful peeled away like scratches. This could be the new future. This is a discussion: what do we keep endlessly the same, or is there a moment of full recycling? You see here how we imagined the different carpets coming in to make that possible. That inspired me for lightness. Heaviness is one, but lightness is another. Think about buildings that can redevelop, be reused. How Rotterdam can use this kind of sequence, how we gradually can transform it when we need it. What techniques to use to turn that into a hyper-changeable environment was my dream. We built it at the moment in OMA world. Inspiration counts. I wanted to show for architects that I started. Then it ended with Rem and Philip Johnson. I went with Rem on a trip to New York to talk about collaboration. The relationship between Philip and Rem was historically not so good. He was older. We went into his building, his office. Here you see how we were talking. You come into the office from the elevator and you see someone with big ears, ah, that's Philip. Rem had to go to the bathroom after a talk. Then he came to me and said, 'Monkey, monkey, how long are you working for them? Two years maximum. He eats you. He consumes you.' This was the best warning I have had. I love Rem, but also how not to stay too long was the message. So we went and made MVRDV. The first images of our office. We won a competition in Berlin to make something different out of an endless sequence of blocks. In Hanover we could construct this. This is still for me the moment that urbanism, landscape architecture, and architecture come together. You stack the landscapes, and it became a ruin in the best German tradition. Wagner was involved. I liked it. It was Dutch territory, so it could be done. Now it's overtaken by an office and becomes reused. Then in Rotterdam we continued. I want to show you this agenda I had based on the Club of Rome. With this depot, I think this forest on the roof is a contribution. You have to deal with CO2, carbon, cooling, birds, biodiversity, water management. We continued in Amsterdam with this rock to make it livable. Finally a rock in the Netherlands. In Paris now, this is nearly finished. Then back to Rotterdam. What we just handed in is a building that can be overgrown by new techniques and hopefully gives a message to this planet that goes beyond what we know. Use new constructions to inspire people. What I learned from Rem is making books. Books are so nice because they give you a way to talk, think, make a structure, and study. I still love what we did with Benham in this place. Now I'm trying to make after KM3, KM4 to address time, from capacity to time. The ultimate one is the students. I couldn't have done that without universities. This is a plea to share our knowledge with the younger generation, to fantasize of the future even if there is a traditional education. When the students came in, it got into fire. What a coincidence. I had to speak outside. We made it build it up again. I could make this and invite people. That's what it is about: to get more togetherness. Always good to travel around and be together in more places to deepen your thoughts in triangles of extremities that construct the future cities. Piece by piece can be made. That leads to a trilogy of landscape with humans, with animals, with humans. Next year coming out with stuff and humans. That leads to calculations from carbon to the complete metabolistic. Finally, after the Japanese time, we make a new metabolistic architecture that is talking about this relationship. Then we can theme transforming this for thinking cityscapes. Imagine that the planet would transform into a biotopia. This dream is done. With that we try to apply this to this conference with the bus boosters, calculating how we have to compensate our behavior in this town. It leads to new kind of Busousan, how we do it with universities at ARIP. All the students of the Czech Republic to manifest against their regime at the moment, to see what the Czech Republic should do in Europe to fight for a better future. Make a map with all the ideas, 200 students, to indicate what should be done to make that place better. That goes to the parliament and the Senate in September to address it. This is what I learned from the Club of Rome: they speak out, you formulate that on the way, and we transform it to the platform. With that I selected for you a sequence where architects, not architecture, illustrate this paradox. It became an art of coincidence, a construct of existence with emerging destinations. Thank you very much.

No, I was for the second. You're completely right. I wanted to sit because I thought there's an intimate... I mean, this is I show things that I have never shown before. So that's that you cannot find on internet even. So what is the... I found that pretty intimate what you said.

I think it's an honor to get that thrown over you. I would never have said it myself. Also, you are refusing to answer a question from you. I was in my instincts. I'm not going to summarize myself for many reasons. I think it's because how can you pinpoint yourself? It took me now 20 minutes to describe it a little bit. I don't think that is also not my attitude. I would prefer like let's see.

Well, I think working with students is one act of optimism because they have a future. Being active on the European agenda with the Czech Republic, but now also with Hungary and with Albania, with all the stories you have seen, to turn that into an operation where we unite somehow by difference. That is my spatial mission. That is also optimism born maybe in the moment of pessimism, born on the moment of seeing that doesn't work. That means I can only answer it by doing it. Even in a... like I didn't show yet what we do for the European Union with the universities in the Czech Republic and in Ukraine: to use the civic side of drones at the moment to find out all the updates we can use for urbanism, which becomes crazy. I will show you later. That gives an incredible energy to it. It is like if you go through the core of a storm, the hurricanes, you have to dive into with a plane, that is what I somehow feel.

No, that's quite funny. I think that people that come from Amsterdam are normally spoiled because of the beauty, and they behave a little bit elitist. They also got the right of elitism because the value of the old center of Amsterdam became so high that no poor people can live in it. So ugliness is very double: you want to escape, and on the other hand it creates a lot of liberty. Rotterdam is a clear example of it. Without its ugliness, it would not have given so much rich contemporary interpretations of architecture and inventions. I also think I need ugliness because if I make a beautiful building, then there's a good contrast. So you have to survive by giving the alternative again in a construction of making something alternative. These are things that came out of this dichotomy.

Thank you very much.