Marianne Loof column
During the award ceremony for this year’s addition of the Amsterdam Prize for Architecture, Michiel Riedijk introduced the winner, Ru Paré Community, with the question: what should a building be, a mitten or a glove? A glove allows you to use your fingers, and it shows the shape and movement of the hand. A mitten conceals the fingers, and while you can freely move them on the inside, you won’t see this from the outside.
This question was originally posted in the 1970s by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, two giants in the history of American postmodern architecture. To the modernist credo of ‘Less is more’ (Mies van der Rohe), Venturi and Scott Brown simply replied: ‘Less is a bore’. The mitten/glove-question is not however a rhetorical tool to establish the kind of historicizing, interpretive thinking that postmodernism is so well known for, but to point out a building’s ability to transform and take up new functions - to be non-specific. Industrial buildings throughout the 19th and 20th century are a prime example: with their column-structures, and large spaces and windows, they have time and again invited a transformation in use. The right answer according to Venturi and Scott Brown of course was that a building should be a mitten.
In our post-crisis moment there is a tendency towards ‘gloves’: highly expressive buildings that show the elegance and movement of the fingers. Their unique shapes and lush green facades are lavishly displayed on high-end renders. But as production costs are on the rise again, new tenders are slowly beginning to be accompanied by a call to end these shenanigans.
It can be refreshing to emerge from a time of abundance. But only when it means that we will start to produce real mittens, not just poor gloves. Let us make buildings with truly general qualities that are able to change with the times. Buildings that are sustainable and circular. Michiel Riedijk and his jury-team found Ru Paré Community to be Amsterdam’s finest mitten. Venturi-Scott Brown revisited.
April 2018, Cobouw.nl