Deserving of Sanction January 16, 2012

NEWS

February 25, 2012

Ben van Berkel to Lecture

by Raymund Ryan, Curator, Heinz Architectural Center

Ben van Berkel comes to Pittsburgh as part of Distinctively Dutch, the current arts festival hosted primarily by the Cultural Trust downtown. Several vanguard performance groups are expected there over the next few months (http://dutchfestival.trustarts.org).

Ben, his partner Caroline Bos, and their colleagues work from offices in Amsterdam, Shanghai and Hong Kong. He has always been interested in mobility, planning and change, and in how such intangible forces impact architecture.

He first came to notice in the early 1990s when he won the competition to build the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam. Here’s something I wrote at the time for Blueprint in London: “van Berkel’s projects have inherent form, a massing which retains a moulded sculptural presence even when acted upon by external, tangential, undesired or unexpected forces. It’s as much reaction as action, a negative as well as a positive.”

And here’s something, also from Blueprint, five or six years later when Ben and Caroline re-organised their practice as United Network Studio and had recently completed the Het Valkhof museum in Nijmegen: “The new museum is almost a non-building. Not only does it blend into the hillside, the plan appears devoid of columns – a prime UNStudio aspiration. The staircase hall functions in fact as a giant hollow column, integrating volume and structure and light with a suggestion of ceremony. It is the ceiling…which sets the architectural pace.”

UNStudio later won competitions for the Music Theatre in Graz, Austria and the wondrous museum for Mercedes Benz twisting and curving alongside a highway in Stuttgart, Germany. Today of course UNStudio is truly international, reconstructing the Villa NM in upstate New York and working in Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China. Is there anything specifically Dutch about this work in the emerging markets of Asia? Not least, I think, a focused energy on the harnessing and the dissemination of expertise.

Ben has titled his lecture ‘The New Understanding’. He writes – in this post-Lehman Brothers, globalised world – that “perhaps now, even more than at the height of the boom, engagement is necessary to identify the topics that we need to understand in new ways. These topics are: knowledge, cultural versus economic values, speed and the future.”

Everyone is invited to hear this provocative yet optimistic architect lecture on Wednesday, 29 February in the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall. Six o’clock. Free and open to all. Hope to see you there.

All photos by Christian Richters