Studio Anne Holtrop

Anne Holtrop (1977) graduated in 2005 from the Academie van Bouwkunst in Amsterdam with a cum laude degree in architecture and in 2009 started his own studio. Today his office is based in Muharraq (Bahrain) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands). His work ranges from models to temporary spaces and buildings. Until very recently, he had only built a few small pavilions and various installations between art and architecture. Outside of the conventional architectural circuit, and more related to art installations, these extremely poetic pavilions consisted of small-scale spatial concepts and personal research on materials. In 2015 he completed his first two major buildings, Museum Fort Vechten and the National Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain. He was course director of the Studio for Immediate Spaces master at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam from 2012 to 2016, and was editor of the architectural journal Oase from 2005 to 2013. For his practice he has been awarded several grants from the Mondrian Fund, as well as receiving the Charlotte Kohler Prize for Architecture from the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds in 2007.

The Studio for Immediate Spaces (SIS) is a two-year MA programme at Amsterdam's renowned Sandberg Instituut. It aims at exploring and shaping spatial practices on the genesis and production of contemporary spatial configurations. Through extensive field investigations, SIS works as a laboratory testing ideas relevant to how we live today and how we could live tomorrow. Rural flatlands, suburbia and gritty city settings; Mediterranean shorelines and Alpine mountainscapes; open-pit mines and industrial legacies; abandoned buildings and unfinished infrastructures; harbors, airports and refugee camps: Such places were the sites of SIS's research and production between 2016 and 2019. Directed by Swiss architect Leopold Banchini, it embraced a truly global approach that crossed, and deliberately ignored, borders. This book offers a glimpse into this unique journey around the world. Illustrated with some 790 color and black-and-white photographs, it features work produced collectively by participants in simultaneous roles of geographer, researcher, architect, urban planner and designer. Brief texts on each project and essays by Leopold Banchini and IS faculty members Marie-Avril Berthet, Ludwig Engel, Fabulous Future, Mark Minkjan, Julian Schubert, and Maike Statz as well as by curator and writer Lukas Feireiss round out this exceptional documentation of forward-thinking higher education in spatial design.

The Visible Origin of Architecture: "I asked architects to send me important images that show the basis of their work. Images that are in their head when they think. Images that show the origin of their architecture. In this book we find 44 individual 'musees imaginaires'. The most unique architects living today each present up to 10 images to explain the autobiographical roots of their oeuvre. The images are explanations, metaphors, foundations, memories and intentions. They are poetic and philosophical avowals. They reveal a personal perspective on thoughts. They show the roots of architecture and expectations concerning projects. Conscious and unconscious. This book has the format of a reader. As little as possible is said. The images are small, legible and interpretable as icons. As individual collections, they present a personal view of an individual world, while as a whole they provide a universal view of the perceptible origin of contemporary architecture." Valerio Olgiati The images submitted to Olgiati are personal, confidential and poetic revelations of the deeper foundations on which the architects' projects are based. The collection acts as a kind of depth gauge of contemporary world architecture. The list comprises the 44 most unique architects living today: David Adjaye, Francisco Aires Mateus, Manuel Aires Mateus, Alejandro Aravena, Ben van Berkel, Mario Botta, Alberto Campo Baeza, Adam Caruso, Peter St John, David Chipperfield, Preston Scott Cohen, Hermann Czech, Roger Diener, Peter Eisenman, Sou Fujimoto, Anton Garcia-Abril, Go Hasegawa, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Steven Holl, Anne Holtrop, Junya Ishigami, Arata Isozaki, Toyo Ito, Bijoy Jain (Studio Mumbai), Momoyo Kaijima, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Atelier Bow-Wow), Christian Kerez, Hans Kollhoff, Winy Maas (MVRDV), Peter Markli, Jurgen Mayer H., Richard Meier, Glenn Murcutt, Ryue Nishizawa, Valerio Olgiati, John Pawson, Cecilia Puga, Smiljan Radic, Richard Rogers, Kazuyo Sejima, Jonathan Sergison, Stephen Bates, Miroslav ik, Alvaro Siza Vieira, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Peter Wilson (Bolles + Wilson), Peter Zumthor."

Why do we organise architecture exhibitions? Conventional shows - contexts displaying documentation, technical drawings, three-dimensional models, photographs and videos, frameworks where sketches and drawings are treated as if they were "paintings", models as if they were "sculptures" and photographs idealising what they depict within strangely uninhabited landscapes - are contrasted by practices of display that focus on a different kind of investigation and offer an uncharacteristic way of involving the public with the show by means of spatial solutions within the exhibition space. The attitude that characterises the traditional approach to architecture exhibitions inevitably generates a distinction between the visitors that can read and interpret the displayed objects and those who cannot. Hardly any empathy is generated between the exposed objects and the subjects viewing them; often these kinds of exhibitions only try to solve the problem of presenting objects that cannot be transferred into exhibitions spaces. In the last years we have assisted to the diffusion of exhibitions characterised by different approaches, i.e. shows in which architectural production is presented as an issue which is integrated in a broader critical context and assumes a central role from an unexpected point of view, or exhibitions that concentrate on an emotional involvement of visitors who are not confronted with a specific object and its characteristics, but with the transmission of an experience capable of establishing an intense relationship between the public and the content of the show. In order to explore these issues, this conference brings together critical contributions related to both the conception and the construction of contemporary architecture exhibitions.

Essays by Dieter Bogner, Friedrich Kiesler, Harald Krejci and Valentina Sonzogni.

Architecture Monogram' is a book series on emerging architects, landscape designers, photographers, and writers from Belgium and the Netherlands in which the designers reveal the personal obsessions and motivations that stimulate their design process. In this second issue of the series Swiss-Dutch landscape architect Anouk Vogel reflects upon ten years of independent practice in the form of short conversations with her alter ego that reveal the way in which she explores the margins of the discipline.

The two editors, graduate architects from the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture asked six renowned architects and four well-known artists, all among the latest generation in their field, about their underlying motivation, orientation and stances with respect to architecture and art. The result is inspiring, in-depth reflection, enhanced by quotes, symbolic images and presentations of real projects from the world of architecture and art that underline and symbolize their ideas and reflections. Interviews with the architects Kersten Geers (Office KGDVS, Brussels), François Charbonnet (Made in, Geneva), Go Hasegawa (Tokyo), Anne Holtrop (Bahrain and Amsterdam), Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara (DOGMA, Brussels and London), Junya Ishigami (Tokyo) and the artists Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine (film-makers, Paris), Philipp Schaerer (Zurich and Steffisburg), Yuri Ancarani (visual artist and film-maker, Milan), Bas Princen (photographer, Zurich and Rotterdam).