The Architects Series ep. 18 - A documentary on: Powerhouse Company

[Music] [Music] i grew up in a farm [Music] my parents were not farmers but they they had bought an old farm [Music] it renovated that farm quite a lot and he always worked with an architect [Music] and it was was really inspiring to see that process after a while i thought it would be fantastic to become an architect so i studied architecture but i first went to technical school to become a draftsman to learn really about what it is to do to do all the drawing and to do all the technical stuff and after i went to the bear lag institute in rotterdam where where i studied more actually on theory and design [Music] my name is noah deru and i'm the i'm the founder of uh of powerhouse company para's company was founded in 2005 and we started out with offices in in denmark and holland copenhagen and rotterdam and we always wanted to be an international office from the start because we were also trained as let's say international architects on you know at international schools i always knew that i wanted to have my own firm and uh when i uh when i finished the bear lag i i was approached by byram coast whether i wanted to work with him at amo i worked there for two years actually i worked there exactly two years because i said okay i will work there but not longer than two years and after i will make my own practice and i think that that was i was quite young when i started my practice i was 29 but um i think it's it's something that i've i've never regretted it was not not easy but um i think in the end it's also just about hard work and and trying to be a client oriented which is really helpful i think for young practices [Music] when we started the office um we always imagined that it would be let's say a large practice that's why we also called it powerhouse company we want to be a group of really ambitious uh people that's why we're called powerhouse and we're called company because um we want to be professional on the one hand but also we want to be a group of friends and we want to collaborate really smoothly with with uh with the partners we work with because as an architect you have to work with many many different people so from the beginning onwards for us it was important to actually grow the office in order to be able to also do larger larger buildings and so from the beginning onwards i've been thinking a lot about how to delegate projects and how to actually build a team of specialists and you could say at powerhouse everybody that works at powerhouse is is basically working really from their own talent and we really have a very broad range of workers from let's say people that are working on technical drawings or people that are designing or people that are doing more research and we really carefully look at everyone that comes and works at powerhouse what is your talent and how can we maximum deploy your talent [Music] [Music] so my name is janice van de velde i'm now a bit over three years with the company and when i applied it was just in the moment that powerhouse was really growing they went a lot of competitions and my experience is mostly in building actually getting designs built and i always really liked the power of the company and the willing and the eagerness to to grow and to make nice things [Music] uh powerhouse company for me is is um i think first of all is really a passion i think uh passion for for architecture and a passion for people uh a passion for talent uh you know we are powerhouse we we want to be a group of uh really talented and uh and hard driving people but it's also a place of uh camaraderie and uh and fun and uh a certain relaxedness and elegance that that basically wants to create better buildings for this world [Music] the offices are quite international where that's also a bit where our history lies and yeah that i think that's really enriching the architecture that we make everybody from different countries have different strengths it's also nice to see and to mix it [Music] i'm estee nibbur and i'm the financial director of paris company and i'm working here now for almost six years and i'm working for powerhouse but also for the developer red company i think it grew kind of organic and weighed in the international scope of power house because for instance saunder operlo the partner of germany he started at barrels in autumn and then we were of course always connected already to scandinavia through the former powers office um now we no longer have this kind of setup but um somewhere i started working at ultranom and then we got this huge project in munich villa bay and there yeah he started to go there regularly because uh the project went to engineering and he yeah he was needed on site and from that moment actually the the german office grew a few years ago we were really physically going to china to get our feet on the ground now actually with corona times we had to all go back but actually this project starts to take off there so let's see how that will uh evolve if we also physically will will go there again or or not it also has to do with the public politics and how it develops and i think that's that's how all the international um daughters of powerhouse grew in a kind of organic way also with china we got an an assignment in china from a private client and then uh stan and ola decided to go there and from there build on the china office [Music] so yeah i don't know we build it up i think slowly and steady and it's also a bit hard to predict because you sort of go from one thing in another and you create your expertise in yeah each part of the of the world i thought it was very interesting to start basically a kind of a european office where we would be situated in different countries and also work on different projects throughout europe and uh we grew steadily over the years and now we are employing after 16 years we have employed around 100 architects in the office and we have offices now in oslo in munich in beijing and our main offices is in rotterdam and we work on a really wide variety of projects we work on chairs on skyscrapers on schools on social housing on infrastructure projects and i really believe that an architect is basically a generalist that is trained to work on a really wide variety of things and that's what we love to do at the powerhouse company uh so this is the lifestyle center yeah so this is how you enter and then this is a double high space you can enter the roof basically all the way on the right this is a beautiful unfolded elevation that could go on forever you could say infinite yeah and you can see like it's there here you see a bit of the facade so it's this twisting slat system that's totally engineered and we made it simplify that the middle part is not curved the middle part is actually three pieces of course but some parts are completely closed right it's not all open it's like a variation and a play of yeah and we try to put all of the closed uh program inside [Music] oh one of the things we really like at powerhouses to is to also have a good time with each other we try to be very open we have lunch every day together which is an important aspect of how we work we have a nice chef making a super nice healthy food so it's also the way how we work and maybe also the talents that we pick really like that and of course we're also an international studio so most people um interns that come here but also architects or everybody from from around the world maybe they also search this kind of connection next to making amazing buildings and doing super cool projects so we take a lot of time to celebrate projects we win for instance uh to do excursions together to look at art exhibitions together so we have a lot of let's say activities that we that we deploy we have the best parties in the world actually when i started the earth then i was also younger of course in my late 20s then i think we would go out every friday in the city um and then it changed because we'd also change the office also the parties change with the office that we have and of course with this new floating office i think we can have the best parties in this nice atmosphere [Music] do [Music] and i think one of the nicest things we've undertaken in the last few years is that we created our own office here in the in rotterdam in the indirect alpha where we also really work together to think what would be the ideal office and in this case we uh create office where we have very nice lights and large windows and very beautiful views but also very nice restaurant for our staff we have a cook that makes really nice meals for everyone every day so we don't have to eat garbage we can all eat fresh and stay healthy we have a very nice bar where we can party on the fridays and we have a fantastic terrace where we can swim and hang out a psycho club for uh a group of people that like to do that and we also participate in archicad in archicad which is a soccer competition of all the architects in rotterdam and sometimes we go to the tiki bar which is kind of a special place in a nice bar in the video the last christmas party was that although which is an artist we also worked together with that was a really brilliant party yeah just before corona hit us so that was uh really memorable and a lot of art in the office because we like to be surrounded by beautiful things so um yeah like that we we tried to create an office which is really uh a fantastic place to work and i think also for people that are not coming from holland a really nice home away from home you know so [Music] i think that our way of designing us has always been very very brief oriented very client oriented of course we we are designers we really like to design i think you can you can tell in our project that we we like to uh we like to work also aesthetically but i think beyond the aesthetics there's always actually quite pragmatic approach towards the needs of the client and we are always taking a lot of time to really understand and analyze the needs of the site and the needs of the client and from there to really work towards a project that is extremely practical and beautiful at the same time i think that elegance and beauty are really underestimated in architecture and we like to bring that back [Music] so my name is stefan prince i'm a partner architect at a powerhouse company and my work mainly consists out of public projects so school buildings i do train stations that sort of public clients and next to that i also work on complex inner city developments i think if you would look at the past 10 years i think the the first five was very much about let's say kind of a digital revolution in kind of the design workflow you know like bim is a very good example parametric design kind of kind of technologies you know they're all very much part of the design process but i think in the second five years in let's say the building industry you see a lot of digitalization in the realization of projects so what we do in many projects is that let's say the digital design that we have is immediately also supplying information to the suppliers of for instance a wooden building or for instance for complex concrete shapes [Music] one of the biggest kind of changes that you that you see that is now starting and that that will especially in the coming decade will really kind of be more and more important is this kind of you know this kind of integration of this kind of digital design and a kind of automated realization so i think that that will be a really big change in the way we build our buildings the future of powerhouse is very much a future of integrated architecture i really believe that architecture is is part of of let's say a larger field in ecology basically of disciplines there's architecture and design there's technology in engineering there's development and financing and there's also let's say maintenance and occupancy and i think all these things together work to create a fantastic architecture and uh what we're trying to do is to understand and uh and and basically gain knowledge and control over these different disciplines [Music] the interesting thing about project falconstein is actually that it's a project for a housing corporation and as you all know housing corporation is of course supplying houses for you know people and so there is already in that sense a kind of embodiment of enhancing people's lives right supplying a house that has comfort and that is protective etc um and with this falconstem project actually the the the challenge was how can we uh create and design a a housing complex a residential complex for a housing corporation in wood as we all know wood is of course a little bit more expensive to build in so the challenge was really like how can we create affordable housing in in a solid timber structure [Music] focus time project has very nice horizontality and kind of a grid like facade that is you know very much integrating let's say the wooden structure but at the same time all the kind of characteristic design elements are also very functional so you know the the borders of the balcony they protect the wood because you know wood shouldn't get wet too much you know so so i think this kind of integrated approach of the design and engineering and the kind of thinking about how we can create a a place where you can you know have a nice balcony and have a nice living room etc very much got integrated into this in into this design we really think about how does it work if it's an office or if you extend or if you shrink or the office doesn't work you want to live there and actually it should fit all of that and gives the people a space to create for themselves or to own in for themselves and yeah there's always a fine balance between making a nice architecture which is strong enough to carry changes and so you want to personalize it but as a bigger skill it also has to have a strong identity i think [Music] [Music] [Music] i think the loop of wisdom is is a really um quite quite quite an interesting project that i'm really fond of we had to design it really quickly actually we designed it i think in only four weeks uh the brief was quite compact we had to design on the one hand uh a visitor center and on the other hand the museum and we had to also take into account that there was a park that needed to be designed and the two buildings had to be quite far apart at the same time they wanted the park to be some kind of connecting device between between these two buildings then they also said the park had to be able to change into a sports field because it's it's basically building for a new city in china in chengdu a new let's say a layout of the city of chengdu where in the future they would build a lot of housing around and also a big school in the area and then the school would need a big sports field so the park would also have to in the future also function as a sport field loop of wisdom is of course a super nice example of a public building which are quite hard to to get in the netherlands because you have to tender and you have to have a portfolio and in china these things happen so for our portfolio it's really a value [Music] and this was for us really the question how do we deal with all these extremely pragmatic and extremely straightforward demands and at the same time create something elegant and let's say yeah i think more intuitive because the area around is actually quite rationalized there's very large blocks uh and it's zoned per block so one one of the this block was basically zoned as a spark but the block next to it is maybe housing or or shopping so i thought maybe let's do something where we really use the landscape of chengdu which is quite hilly and we basically place the two programmatic volumes uh far apart from each other and we create a big loop that actually connects these two buildings and then that itself becomes a really soft and elegant gesture it moves with the landscape it kind of shows the topography in a way it also becomes a kind of iconic object which was also one of the questions from the client and it creates this fantastic object where you can walk over and enjoy also for free you can go to the museum or to the visitor center and in the future it could also host a sports field actually in the middle of the loop yeah so that was basically done in three weeks we did it really quickly the client really liked it and they started building one month later so we built that whole project i think in 14 or 15 months the loop is the perfect example of a landmark in china that has been built from there from the social media media marketing we will grow and and yeah get new projects that are adding up to that portfolio i'm paul stavert i'm a partner and architect here at powerhouse company and the challenge for us now is how are we going to execute these buildings with the same quality as that they had in the initial concept so the concepts are all very strong about how we can enhance the the the life on the street how we can really give a positive influence on a a low scale level and at the same time have this sort of you know because a lot of these very big projects what is the impact on an urban level on a bigger scale i think if you look at these projects in that that the dual sense um it becomes uh increasingly important uh to get all sides of this building like properly engineered and properly designed uh and especially in a in a market where construction cost is rising uh you're always being challenged to try and get the highest quality out of it in a smart way [Music] i think one of the big challenges of our of our current uh day and age is that this global capitalism what i was talking about earlier is is having a really strong uh influence on the way we we are living in our cities and i think it's very vital that as an architect you you always keep on thinking how to keep the city accessible for uh for all budgets and for everyone with basically from all different social standings so this seo is a very important challenge but of course there's there's one really big challenge behind all of that which is of course the the climate climate adaptation that we need to think about and of course the sustainability and as architects we we hold the key but we are always dependent on our clients because if our clients are not ambitious in terms of sustainability or in terms of uh social inclusivity it's it's very hard for us as architects to to uh to still design it in that way so um i think as architects we need to keep on focusing on on educating our clients to a certain extent or at least uh helping them to create a better world [Music] i think that for people that are approaching architecture i think the main the main drive you should have is to be really curious about architecture and not try to believe too much of what your architecture teachers tell you i think the problem of a lot of architecture schools is that they are way too obsessed with architecture as only a kind of design practice but architecture is so much more it's also about detailing it's about technology it's about sociology it's about capitalism in this in this day and age it's about financing it's about uh creating atmosphere it's about softness you know it's not only about it's also very much about teamwork it's definitely not about the lone ego himself being the genius master i really believe that architecture is so much more a teamwork than than you are normally taught in architecture school so for young architects students and people aspiring to become an architect i would say really open your mind be curious and try to learn as much as you can outside of architecture [Music] you

Channel: Iris Ceramica Group

Views: 9,638

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Id: 0kHpMh4NBWI

Length: 28min 33sec (1713 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021