Published Wallpaper October 2008
Ben van Berkel wants to talk about space-time. At 9am, it seems a little early to be talking time-warp continuums, the potentials of looped narratives, the applicability of the tri-fold diagram. It also seems a little out of context, as we’re in the breakfast lounge of the Gramercy Park Hotel, Ian Schrager’s pre-40 Bond practice run at an extra-louche (“Schnabel was here”) darkly nostalgic Manhattan joint, but when van Berkel’s on a roll, he’s on a roll.
Let’s start at the beginning. Twenty years ago Ben van Berkel and his wife Caroline Bos founded van Berkel + Bos. Van Berkel was the architect and Bos, an art historian and former journalist, was the critic-in-residence, composing everything from essays to project descriptions – roles they continued once their practice transformed into its current incarnation, UN Studio, in 1998.
Van Berkel & Bos was behind the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, a single-pylon engineering marvel, and the Moebius House in Het Gooi, a fluid space inspired by the continuous one-sided Moebius Loop (most often see as the recycling logo). It was this house, completed in 1998, that ignited the architectural duo’s interest in space and time, the idea of folding dimensions and architecturally, and inspired their desire to re-evaluate the way they look at shape.
The same year, van Berkel, unhappy with the way the studio was mono-focused on architecture and its articulation, and inspired by the fact that he wanted to work on many different scales, formed the looser collective of UN Studio. It went on to design everything from bridges and houses to museums and masterplans and even a 55m table, “The World’s Longest Table for all Cultures.” But the collective was in Europe. The old world. And very much part of the Dutch group of architect such as Winka Dubbeldam and West 8 and MVRDV, firms that were as good at engineering pig farms as they were at folding a façade, as interested in books as they were in buildings. Now, UN Studio is breaking free.
“I believe very much in this kaleidoscopic aspect of life,” van Berkel says. “Today, you’re on the phone, you’re emailing, you have two hundred contacts who you’re communicating with, and they’re all in different parts of the world.” It sounds exhausting, but not unfamiliar. “That’s our space-time condition,” he says. “And I want to bring that to architecture.” Sitting with me at the Gramercy Park Hotel, he’s living what he’s saying – his Blackberry keeps buzzing and ringing, and he’s trying to find time in his tightly scheduled day of photo shoots and interviews to keep this conversation going. He wants others to be aware that it’s what they’re living, too, and believes that you can do that with architecture by making a building work as a mirror. He believes you can use the way the space is shaped – the way the hallways are formed, the windows are detailed, and the layouts are designed -- to show the people in it that these shapes are just architectural articulations of their existing reality.
Van Berkel’s latest existential experiment is stateside, in New York, where UN Studio is joining the ranks of Manhattan luxury condo starchitects. A whirlwind few years of condo building in the city has seen the completion of Philip Johnson and Annabelle Selldorf’s Urban Glass House, the launch of Neil Denari’s HL23, the opening of Jean Nouvel’s 40 Mercer, the construction of Deborah Berke’s 48 Bond Street and Herzog & de Meuron’s collaboration with Ian Schrager up the street at 40 Bond, the unveiling of Asymptote’s 166 Perry Street (next to Richard Meier’s two towers), and $2 billion in sales of Robert A.M. Stern’s Central Park West apartments. It seems like the city couldn’t possibly hold another.
But New York is about potential, and Manhattan is about ambition, and so this latest addition, UN Studio’s Five Franklin Place in Tribeca, is going to be just fine.
“Let’s liberate architecture from any kind of stylistic reference,” van Berkel says. “Who cares about the box, who cares about the blob?” Five Franklin is neither. It’s a twenty-story, 55-unit condo building, slipped into a historical street on a historical neighborhood, and the big big articulation that van Berkel wants everyone to notice is the series of steel bands that sweep along the side of the building, turning and twisting into balconies and terraces and ornamentation and back into function. The steel is historical (Tribeca is famous for its cast-iron detail) and the ornament is polemical (modernism is, finally, dead?) and the twisting and turning is simply van Berkelian play. “The bands are almost creating a kind of second body around your everyday life,” he says. They give the building have more than one façade. More than two. Three, even. If you read the building from far away and close and super-close, “you discover that there might be one thousand and one facades.”
Van Berkel sees an architectural continuum, with the impeccable detail of Miesian articulation on one side – all corners and angles and proportions and planes – and the experiential all-the-buildings-are-a-stage emotion of a David Rockwell on the other. He sees the formal continuum, from blob to box. But he also sees the time continuum, from past to present, from five minutes ago to the oncoming second, but he doesn’t take those three lines and hold them up against each other. Instead, what van Berkel does with his architecture is to take each end of those lines and hold each end together so that they stop being continuous and start being a circle. He sees the thousand and one facades as dots on this conceptual circle. It’s a diagrammatic approach to architecture – and it’s a move that is both bold (given how stylistically played out a formal fold is in these post-Greg Lynn days) and takes a lot of translation – but it works.
“You have to instrumentalise it,” says van Berkel, explaining how he turned this abstract concept-diagram into a building like Five Franklin. “If you don’t know how to instrumentalize, you can’t do architecture.” It seems like an ambitious approach, always folding and warping ideas and re-thinking and re-contextualizing facts, but van Berkel says it comes down to having no more than two or three points per project. They just have to be good ones. So, with Five Franklin, we have an update of history with the steel, a play on recognition and identification with the movement of the bands, and the dynamics of everyday life with the expressive interiors, products of a collaboration with B&B Italia.
The project is aspirational. It’s a building that affects how you want to be at home, how you want to pick up a book (from the two-story bookshelf on your way up the curved stairs), and how you want to step outside (through a slot in a series of bands). Each of the interior layouts seems to sweep and move with its potential occupants, the Corian kitchen island blending itself into the living room with a dramatic swoop, the multiple and moving bathroom mirrors reminding us of the multiplicity of self-identification.
“Architecture in itself is only mirroring and embracing a particular kind of event,” van Berkel says. In this case, the event is life.
