The Witte de Withstraat

Witte de Withstraat

Archipelontwerpers as Architects

Archipelontwerpers has designed a model project in Rotterdam: the Witte de Withstraat.


In terms of expression, each project is the opposite of the other, intended to provide references for the discussion about penthousing in Rotterdam. On the basis of the experience that the firm of architects has acquired in designing several penthouses in Scheveningen, this IFD model project explores the limit of the architectural and urban design aspects as well as those related to production technique.


Various scenarios have been written for the penthouse in the Witte de Withstraat, varying from one large penthouse and two smaller apartments to a continuous space to live, work and exhibit in. To shorten the time required to build the penthouse, it is made of prefab building components ready for fully dry assembly.


The challenge of the project is to show how an industrial process of production can be connected with a highly personal home environment. To make the logistics of this serial production of one-offs manageable, the architect for the Witte de Withstraat cooperated with the IAAA to develop a special algorithm using the Artificial programme. A random series of configurations was generated, one of which was selected and elaborated further.


Artificial Whoever wants to build in a more flexible and varied way has to participate in the building process and to give the impression of being personally responsible for every detail of the building that is to be designed. You have to design at a higher level of abstraction and only specify rules of play and limiting conditions; the specific elaboration is left up to the final user or to chance.


There is a rich tradition of this more distanced approach in the arts. Ever since Marcel Duchamps, more and more artists have taken up the challenge to produce non-intentional art, which was already implicit in Immanuel Kant’s view that our rationality is more limited than our cognition, i.e., that we know more than we can articulate. All kinds of very different tendencies have developed protocols for the creation of works of art by more or less autonomous processes. They are set in motion by the artists, but the final result is not known in advance: écriture automatique, action painting, biological processes, aleatory art. Sol LeWitt (1969): ‘The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from the idea to completion […]. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course’.


The clearest example of a distanced approach is algorithmic art, a term for a work or category of art that can be described by a rule of calculation (an algorithm) that is laid down with mathematical precision – in other words, complex and unpredictable processes are defined by means of fully explicit rules, which are then consistently and accurately implemented by the computer.


In theory a simple algorithm can be carried out by hand, but when we speak of algorithmic art we usually have in mind computer-generated art. By means of an algorithm you can define a large category of different images with full precision, for example by indicating that all possible variants within a certain pattern must be systematically gone through. The algorithm is a ‘meta work of art’: the mathematical characterisation of a collection of possible works of art (Scha and Vreedenburgh, 1994). A similar question is at issue in architecture as in art, with the difference that the production process (viz. keeping the cost of producing building down to a minimum) is even more constrictive in architecture than in art. To avoid the production of monocultures, designers have to be able to link pluriformity with a precisely described process of production. Here lies the potential of a programme like Artificial, written by Remko Scha and Jos de Bruin from IAAA (Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam), which can generate arbitrary works of art in this way. The designers draw up rules of play in a process of this kind that determine which situations are possible. In this way the architect can take decisions for a specific context on scale, rhythm or the repertoire of applicable elements. Each specific situation receives a morphology of it own.


This is how the penthouse in the Witte de Withstraat in Rotterdam was designed. Archipelontwerpers formulated a number of rules of play, after which IAAA converted them into algorithms. Afterwards arbitrary spatial configurations could be generated. One of them was the basis of the design that Archipelontwerpers went on to elaborate.


The use of computer programmes in the design processes is no longer unusual. There are a good many architects who work with them, like Greg Lynn, Foreign Office, Ben van Berkel, Lars Spuybroek, and Kas Oosterhuis. Their method is called ‘parametric design’. They introduce several parameters (from highly specific, such as the orbit of the sun, to highly abstract), which will subsequently affect the shape of the final building. This places the legitimation of the architectural object outside the sphere of influence of the architect. But in most cases the architect will resume his position by eventually selecting and freezing a particular configuration from the process. The term ‘fluid architecture’ refers mainly to the blob-like designs in which this can result, and not to the permanent status of change.


The difference in the use of Artificial for the penthouse in the Witte de Withstraat lies not so much in the use of software of a different kind, but rather in the reason for using it. Archipelontwerpers were concerned in this project less with the complexity of the architectural object than with breaking open the (industrial) process of production in which architecture is imprisoned. In their view, this process could be driven in a formally unambiguous way by means of algorithms, while the result would be an unpredictable industrial series of unique products. This approach may prove to be extremely suitable when it comes to giving rooftop building a chance.

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