at the end of the 80’ s and beginning of the 90’ s the character of my work changed: i started to hate architecture and became more and more interested in building. building meant for me working with others, cooperating with others and getting others involved.
officially i am still an architect, meaning that my name is registered in the dutch architectural register. that is sometimes handy, like having a driving license. It does not mean that you can drive but at least you are entitled to do so. i guess that i am a competent architect and a competent driver. and besides that ihave a broad building experience: i know how to build a house because i have done so a number of times.
but being an architect and having experience as a builder is only part of the game. the other part is dealing with the concept of what you are doing, and that is much more interesting. questions like what is a house, why does it look the way it does, why is it built the way it is are much more interesting, especially in connection with the work of many others, like for example john cage. john cage took a pice of tape from a mozart opera, cut the tape in pieces and fixed the pieces together again in a different order. it was still mozart but the osunded different.
i did the same with the housee project in pori. it was still a hosue, as all pieces of the original hosue were used, but at the same time you could not live there anymore. the whole project took long to get realised. it was difficult to find a way or rather a working concept, that could be realsied. several models were made to find out how to do what i had in mind and finally in 1993 it was possible.
table nummer 1 was built in a similar way. i wanted to make a table that was not a table in a traditional way. it was like using 1000 meters of wood, cut in pieces of different length and painted in different colours. and that long length of wood became a table. i guess that in htis case the broken kilometer by walter the maria kept running in my mind and sitll does.
another project was realized in tilburg in 1994. instead of building an installation with scaffold material and open the work to the public, things were differtent. at the first day at the opening all guests participated to make the place inaccessible with the scaffold material and at the final day the guests then present took the scaffold material apart and made the palce accisible gaain. during the hwole installation the place was open for the public but unfortunately not accessible.
the 3 drawings presented here were meant for a presentation at the stichting de achterstraat, the calpreview project in hoorn, the netherlands, 1994. the theme of the work was “hello, i am here” and the drawings present the idea to make a temporary huge statue of a man (standing with his legs apart above the entry of the harbour of hoorn), functioning as a kind of statue of libery. the idea came forth of my thoughts and experiments with the projects mentioned above. the idea was inspired on the first ideas for the statue of liberty that were meant for a port in egypt. the 3 drawing measure 120 x 170 cm.