Stimuleringsfonds

In an age dominated by digital media, the book remains an enduringly powerful medium. Books are capable of (re)shaping a culture, writes Marieke Berkers, and this is no less true of building culture. In this article, she highlights a number of critical voices in the architecture debate that use the printed word to hold a mirror up to the profession.

This is a descriptive translation of the original Dutch essay by Marieke Berkers.

The Architecture Grant Scheme supports projects that contribute to the quality, development, or deepening of the field of architecture in the broadest sense. In recent years, the Creative Industries Fund NL has supported a number of publications that provide food for thought in the architecture debate. By taking readers into forgotten histories or possible futures, the makers of these books seek to break open prevailing systems of thought. What happens, for instance, when you view the history of modern architecture not through the lens of the industrial revolution, but through the perspective of planetary warming?

Compact Shapers of Culture

Books are powerful cultural instruments. They are the ideal tools for presenting new realities of the past, present, and future, and as such they play an essential role in (re)shaping culture. They help determine the course of history: where do we come from, where do we stand, and where are we headed? Little wonder that, throughout the centuries, all manner of influential figures have actively sought to remove books from circulation.

Book burning is the most aggressive attempt to hack history, while writing an essay is its civilised equivalent. So goes the story of the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, famous for building the Great Wall of China, who around 213 BCE ordered his subjects to burn all books written before his reign. The emperor did not wish to be compared with the great figures of the past. He therefore attempted to erase all stories written about his predecessors and thereby annihilate history itself. He knew that books might well wield more power than that 21,000-kilometre wall. For these carriers of culture are capable of spreading across both time and the world.

Books help determine the course of history.

Knowledge is built upon knowledge. Books become part of canons. The fact that something so handheld, often weighing no more than half a kilogram, is capable of allowing ideas to travel across the world and through time makes a book inherently powerful and worthy of respect. Architecture critics frequently deploy this power to influence the architecture debate. The makers of four recent architecture publications, supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL, speak about their approach to opening up a new perspective on building culture through the printed word.

Looking Under the Bonnet

Marker Wadden. Natuur, bouwen, ontwerpen (nai010, 2023) zet de schijnwerpers op een uniek landschap dat volgens de makers van het boek vaker gebouwd zou moeten worden. Aan de hand van een praktijkvoorbeeld wordt getoond hoe met doordacht ontwerp en bouw een nieuwe balans kan ontstaan tussen natuur en menselijke aanwezigheid.

The publication tells the story of how a group of artificial islands came into being, forming a unique ecosystem for the preservation and restoration of the Markermeer. The commissioners of the Marker Wadden, Rijkswaterstaat and Natuurmonumenten, gave the designers room to innovate in the tendering process. In her contribution to the book, Kelly Shannon, Professor of Urban Design at KU Leuven, warmly endorses this approach: 'Marker Wadden is one of the many experiments needed to give shape to the world of today, and it meets the Anthropocene with courage.'

The book examines in close detail how this experiment took shape, covering both the design and construction of the islands, built up from sand, clay, and silt, and the construction of a group of off-grid buildings on the main island. Photographer Theo Baart regularly trained his lens on the area during the first three years after the project's completion. By photographing so soon after delivery, it was still possible, as the photographer puts it, 'to look under the bonnet of the project.' And that is precisely what characterises the book. At project level, the genesis of a project often remains invisible to the professional community, yet it is from the making process that the most valuable lessons can be drawn.

The designers involved in the project, Rik Visser of Vista, Franz Ziegler of Ziegler Brandenhorst, and Frits Palmboom of Palmbout, took the initiative to produce the book. To guide the making process, they brought in editor Teun van den Ende. 'There was an enormous pile of sketches and other unedited material,' Van den Ende explains. 'A book had to be made from all of that. How do you make analyses and design drawings legible, and therefore communicative?' He brought coherence to the many different contributing voices. 'I aligned everyone's use of language and terminology and toned down excessive jargon. I also wrote an introduction to contextualise the themes of the design challenge and place them in a historical context, making the knowledge accessible to those coming to it fresh.'

The collaboration produced a richly illustrated book featuring professional technical drawings, such as cross-sections of landscapes showing the compartmentalisation dam between shallow wetland and open water. The sketch-like drawings, unmistakably by urban designer Frits Palmboom in both style and viewpoint, best capture how design actually works. Palmboom draws on the American philosopher and professor of urban planning Donald Schön to articulate this design-led way of working: the reflective practice. Designers often do not act according to rational, predetermined rules, but through implicit, internalised knowledge. Describing this way of working, and above all illustrating it visually, is what makes these glimpses under the bonnet so fascinating, and particularly instructive for fellow professionals and students of (landscape) architecture.

Lessons on Housing Cooperatives from Practice

Also written from practice, though in a very different way, is Operatie Wooncoöperatie - uit de wooncrisis door gemeenschappelijk bezit (trancityxvaliz, 2023). The book's authors are Arie Lengkeek, programme maker, researcher, and concept developer, and Peter Kuenzli, urban planner and housing specialist. Lengkeek sketches the long lead-up to the book, which began with a shared desire to establish a housing association.

In 2016, architect Ninke Happel, inspired by housing cooperatives in Zurich, took the initiative, together with Lengkeek and Kuenzli among others, to found the Rotterdams Woongenootschap. Reality, however, proved capricious: due to Rotterdam's strict regulations, the housing community never got off the ground. 'As we went along, the idea emerged to share the knowledge we were acquiring,' says Lengkeek. 'But not necessarily the practical knowledge of how to set up a cooperative; the internet provides more than enough of that, and it is constantly being updated. The book as a medium calls for knowledge that goes deeper, that does not date quickly. We wanted to set out how the history of housing fits together and what role the cooperative might play. In doing so, we show how you can translate convictions into plans, and which systems you run up against along the way.'

Action research, Lengkeek calls the methodology of simultaneously pioneering in practice and conducting research. 'That is how I want to work: learning by doing.' He describes the process of moulding knowledge into book form as 'research through writing,' pulling a somewhat pained expression as he does so: finding the right words takes an enormous amount of time and is at times deeply complicated. But the process of writing-as-research also helped him gain a firmer grip on the bigger story, on the motivation behind what he was doing. The book led to a next step in the larger project known as Operatie Coöperatie. 'A book is a thing,' says Lengkeek. 'You can hold it up. It can set things in motion. In our case, it sparked a political conversation about housing.' The book even made its way to royal desks; Lengkeek was invited to King Willem-Alexander's New Year's reception.

Ideas want to travel, Lengkeek believes. Once a book is published, you have no control over who reads it or where it ends up. Yet the way in which knowledge moves through time and space is not entirely without direction. Its route is shaped by historically embedded traditions, as architecture historian Hans Ibelings well knows. Throughout his career, he has regarded knowledge systems with a healthy measure of scepticism. 'Historically, English is the dominant language in the international professional debate,' he observes. 'As a result, books tend to refer to other English-language books.' Books written in other languages frequently fall outside the purview of researchers, making it easy for a canon to perpetuate itself along a narrow track, giving rise to knowledge bubbles. Another problem with books is the rate at which they turn over in shops. Once a book sells out, no new copy comes to replace it. How do you even find a book from fifteen years ago?'

'Architectural history says far too much about far too little. There are many books written about Le Corbusier or Rem Koolhaas, but far too few about all those other architects,' says Ibelings. For a long time, the history of architecture was consequently populated by Western European, male architects: a story endlessly rehashed in different forms.

The book as a medium calls for knowledge that goes deeper, that does not date quickly.

Architecture Through the Lens of Planetary Warming

In 2011, Ibelings published Europese architectuur vanaf 1890, in which he gave the architecture of Central and Eastern Europe its full due, placing a whole series of architects who had been isolated from the outside world by an Iron Curtain stretching 1,600 kilometres into a new timeline. It is in this same tradition that we should understand his book Modern Architecture: A Planetary Warming History (The Architecture Observer, 2023).

Ibelings began his exercise of retelling the history of modern architecture through the lens of planetary warming. Unlike Lengkeek, he worked in solitude in the proverbial attic room, gathering all manner of projects that could give substance to his specifically chosen perspective. His goal? 'To bring order to the chaos,' he says. 'From all that material, I tried to construct a new story.' He describes his research through writing as 'a rough sketch for a proposed book': a first attempt at building an alternative history. 'Aiming for completeness would have been a reckless undertaking,' Ibelings acknowledges.

Yet with almost 400 pages and hundreds of described and illustrated projects, this rough sketch amounts to a remarkably thorough first attempt. Many of those projects may well be known to professionals: Alexander von Humboldt's famous cross-sectional drawing of Chimborazo in Ecuador from 1807, for instance, Jean Prouvé's Maison Tropicale, or the project with which the book opens, Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace. What matters is Ibelings' choices in ordering, his choice of words in interpreting the projects, and the coherence that emerged through writing and editing, all of which leads the reader to look at architectural history in an entirely different way.

Architectural history says far too much about far too little.

Restoring Architectural History and Learning from It

Vrouwen in Architectuur (Women in Architecture, nai010, 2023) likewise demonstrates that the male dominance in architectural history is just one way of looking at our building culture. Its makers turn their gaze towards the female voice in architecture because they believe it has been overlooked for far too long. According to architectural historian Catja Edens, who was involved as an editorial member alongside Indira van 't Klooster, Setareh Noorani, and Lara Schrijver, no other medium can give that voice the weight it deserves. The book gives physical presence to female architects within the book collections of libraries, designers, and critics, which are largely dominated by male designers. 'The book was therefore given a visually striking, colourful appearance,' says Edens. 'It cannot be overlooked.'

Gathering knowledge that has not been built up through conventional channels demands a different way of working, Edens explains. 'We wanted to supplement architectural history by giving women a place within it. The knowledge we needed for that was not self-evident; we knew we would not simply find it in existing books and archives. That is why it was so courageous and original of publisher Laurence Ostyn to issue an open call, giving everyone the opportunity to contribute information. The making of the book thus became an organic process, taking shape on the basis of what came in and through mutual dialogue. What is interesting is that this is new knowledge. It is important to give it space and not force it into existing frameworks, so that room is created for new perspectives.'

The choices of content also reflect this open and organic way of working. The book combines different kinds of texts. Biographical pieces introduce readers to women in architectural history, such as Manon Peyrot, who studied at Cornell University in the United States from 1944 to 1948 alongside her male peers and went on to a long career at Amsterdam's Public Works Department. Or structural engineer Riné Boerée, who became a concrete specialist at the Corps of Engineers. And Elisabeth de Lestrieux, writer and self-taught designer of houses, gardens, and interiors, or Jakoba Mulder, who after graduating from Delft University of Technology specialised in urban planning and worked, among other roles, for Amsterdam's city development department.

Author's note: Because the names of these women have gone unmentioned for far too long, I deliberately dwell on them here. Women have ground to make up when it comes to taking up space in books and texts. As an author, I seize this opportunity to contribute to that. In the same spirit, the book's designers, Team Thursday and Wibke Bramensfeld, introduce a comparable 'reading hack': they have consistently given the names of the female architects additional letter spacing, so that they catch the eye each time the book is opened.

Alongside the biographical contributions, the book also includes methodological pieces, such as that of Indira van 't Klooster, who develops a vocabulary for a new, multi-voiced form of analysis, and that of Setareh Noorani on alternative, inclusive ways of archiving. These contributions illustrate that this is about more than naming names. For how is it possible that these women remained unseen, undervalued, and unrecognised for so long? Can we restore that history, and what can we learn from doing so?

How is it possible that these women remained unseen, undervalued, and unrecognised for so long?

Order in the Chaos

The makers of the books discussed above made strategic choices in text, image, and design to reinforce their message. Precisely now, in a time when existing systems are faltering — the belief in progress, liberalism, the perspective of a history dominated by white men — such a questioning, critical attitude is of great importance. This attitude is also reflected in how emerging generations of architects engage with books: where others worry about declining reading habits, they ask critical questions. For them, the issue is not whether people read, but which stories are told and from whose perspective.

The hunger for alternative readings of our culture is enormous, especially among this generation that poses critical questions about the construction of archives and the canon of narratives. Consider, for instance, an initiative like The Black Archives, a historical archive that collects stories from Black and other perspectives that are often underrepresented elsewhere. What a richness it is that, in times of great uncertainty, there are always books that bring order to the chaos and serve as mirrors reflecting on the building culture of the present, the past, and the future.

Architectural historian Marieke Berkers is a researcher, writer, lecturer, and adviser in the field of development commissions, primarily from a cultural and socioeconomic perspective. In this article, she highlights the following books:

Hans Ibelings, Modern Architecture: A Planetary Warming History, The Architecture Observer, Montréal / Amsterdam 2023. Graphic design: Haller Brun.
Teun van den Ende (ed.), Marker Wadden. Natuur, bouwen, ontwerpen, nai010 Publishers, Rotterdam 2023. Graphic design: Studio Maud van Rossum. Photography: Theo Baart. Authors: Theo Baart, Teun van den Ende, Marcel van der Meijs, Frits Palmboom, Kelly Shannon, Rik de Visser, and Franz Ziegler.
Arie Lengkeek and Peter Kuenzli, Operatie Wooncoöperatie: uit de wooncrisis door gemeenschappelijk bezit, trancityxvaliz, Amsterdam 2023. Graphic design: Marius Schwarts. Research, graphics, drawings, and text: Arend Jonkman, Happel Cornelisse Verhoeven, Ninke Happel, Jan Konings, Rok Jacobs, Boris Koselka, Bob van der Vleugel, Robert Cuijpers.
Florencia Fernández Cardoso, Catja Edens, Hilde Heynen, Rixt Hoekstra, Ellen van Kessel, Maria Novas Ferradás, Indira van 't Klooster, Setareh Noorani, Fatima Pombo, Carolina Quiroga, Lara Schrijver, Erica Smeets-Klokgieters, Lidewij Tummers, Linda Vlassenrood, Vrouwen in Architectuur, nai010, Amsterdam 2023. Graphic design: Team Thursday in collaboration with Wibke Bramensfeld.