By Andrew Mackenzie

Your proposition for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale asks whether national identity has been, as you say, ‘sacrificed to modernity’. Some might view this as a project of reclamation, not unlike Frampton’s regionalism. How would you differentiate your proposition from Frampton’s?

Well, Kenneth Frampton is a smart guy, but the problem is that he looked at regionalism as an antidote to cosmopolitan development. In so doing he perverted the cause of regionalism, because suddenly regionalism was mobilised as a private cause that it couldn’t sustain. However, the question of national identity is an open one. For instance, at first sight the Netherlands is a very internationalist country, but looking closely you can see an enormous return of, not vernacular, but quasi-vernacular architecture and quasi-old fortresses that are newly built with a national flavour.
Look at Zaandam, and that huge assemblage of so-called vernacular buildings.

I understand this moment very well, because the vast majority of so-called modern architecture now is really a kind of gimmicky Modernism, and this creates space for traditionalism to be gimmicky too. It’s like a set of communicating vases, where movement in one translates directly to movement in the other. I see this less from an architectural perspective than from a social or anthropological one. Recent years have seen an extraordinary growth in what I would call quasi-vernacular, particularly across Europe.

Hotel in Zaadam by WAP architects

If Zaandam represents a kind of quasi-vernacular, what qualities, quasi or otherwise, would you ascribe to you as a Dutch architect?

It’s at the same time a simple and a complex question. In its most blatant sense I have a huge sympathy for orthogonal organisations, and this, at some level, is very visible in the work. But at the same time there is a counter force, as a result of my early years in Indonesia. My parents took me to Jakarta when I was eight. I was transplanted from a ruin to an extremely chaotic tropical city that was in a state of euphoria because of its recent independence. There I went to an Indonesian school, spoke Indonesian and behaved more or less like an Asian child.

When I returned to a totally reordered Netherlands at the age of 12, I never felt comfortable in that state of completion. From there many of my interests are clear. I was exposed to Dutchness as a young child, then its counterpart. So, I would say that I am slightly less dogmatic than the Dutch. You might say that I am as attracted to Mondrian as to batik and, in this, I would say that the work is an oscillation between the two. 

Exhibition in Osaka,1970’s. Midoni-Kan (astrorama) - Architect: Yoshiro

Exhibition in Osaka, 1970’s.Toshibia IHI pavilion - Designed by Kisho Kurokawa

Is this also why you are interested in Asia? I’m thinking particularly of your collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist on the book Project Japan: Metabolism Talks …?

Yes, in particular China and Japan are very important countries for me. Japan, for being the first non-Western country where there was an architectural avant-garde. My interest in Metabolism is an interest in how globalisation rearranged architectural areas of initiative, in the sense that you can no longer claim that the Western city is the model that fits all. I was interested in how this end of the Western hegemony was already announced in Japan in the ’60s.

Your work in China has been somewhat controversial, due mainly to assumptions that are made in the West about what might be called the client’s values. How do you respond to criticism regarding your engagement with communist China?

The CCTV Building, OMA

Of course we do not participate in any project where we fundamentally reject the values of the client. We interpret the client’s values, not always in a literal way.

In the case of China, I had visited it for the first time in 1995, years before the CCTV competition in 2002. Working with Harvard students, I had developed more or less an understanding of what was going on and where the country was moving. This led me to the political conviction that all of us have a huge stake in how things develop in China. It is incredibly stupid for Europe to point fingers and insist on Europe as the only model of democratic behaviour.

After the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there were a lot of expectations that the world would turn into a seamless tapestry of market economy and liberalism, which to me was clearly not going to happen. On the contrary, what became obvious was that the market economy would be joined by a very diverse patchwork of different systems and different degrees of democracy. So essentially I said yes, not so much to CCTV, but to participation in the development of China.