REINIER DE GRAAF

At the Rotterdam-based Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Reinier de Graaf has been at the centre of an architectural practice that has not only shaped the built world in a series of international mega-projects over the past 25 years, but also influenced critical thinking about what architecture is and can be. It is a profession at a major crossroads, even, some might argue, at a perilous precipice. The very definition of what the profession is and does is being challenged by changing social and environmental ideas, as well as by shifts in geopolitics and identity politics. Reinier de Graaf has published three books: Four Walls and a Roof (2017), The Masterplan (2021), a novel about an “architect craving recognition”, and most recently Architect, Verb: The New Language of Building (2023), an investigation into and critique of an industry “in search of an identity in the 21st century”.

Interview by Masoud Golsorkhi Photograph by Adrienne Norman

MASOUD GOLSORKHI I really enjoyed the book; it’s a bit like a State of the Nation Address on the current state of the profession. What prompted you to write it?
REINIER DE GRAAF I like writing books because they give me an opportunity to reflect on what I do with a certain amount of independence, without the pressure of satisfying any client in particular. It gives me a window at objectivity, which in the ulterior motive-driven profession I am in hardly exists otherwise.

MG Would it be fair to say that the profession is at a crossroads or crisis point?
RG My books are about, I think, the contrast between the profession’s selfimage and the image the world has. If my first book was about the myths that architects themselves project onto the world, this book is, in a way, a testimony to the myths projected onto our profession by others who hold it to account in no uncertain terms and also in ways I don’t think are right or appropriate. There are ten virtues in the book, which haven’t strictly been invented by architecture, but that nevertheless, architecture is being held to account for. That tendency is getting so powerful that our profession is undergoing profound changes as a result. It is certainly different to how it was ten or even five years ago.

MG Maybe we can start with the way architecture projects itself onto the world. What has happened these past ten years?
RG Architecture is essentially an esoteric activity where there is almost, by definition, a whole range of subjective, or call them intuitive, decisions. Once you have to rationalise them down to six digits by a comma, you get into trouble not because it can’t be done, but because once you spend your energy doing that, then creative and implausible instincts are interfered with and hindered. The book’s ten topics, including liveability, creativity, beauty, place, wellbeing and sustainability, are important and beyond question. What I question are the extreme demonstrations of virtue that come in their wake, and which make argument almost impossible. I mistrust these demonstrations of virtue, because they are colossal monuments to the obvious. We’re all in favour of world peace; we’re all in favour of beauty; we’re all in favour of a planet that will last a bit longer than the half a century it might if things continue this way. Merely professing support for that is meaningless unless we develop the instruments of “how”. Architecture by definition is an art of the operational and not just a manifestation of virtue per se. What makes architecture beautiful is that it finds a way out of impossible situations, and it’s all in the how.

MG One of the key pressures you identify in the book is how to deal with the issue of resource sustainability and environmental footprint. Are you relatively optimistic that solutions are being found?
RG It’s a good thing that everybody is preoccupied with it. Unfortunately, what happens is that everybody is preoccupied with it in isolation. When we talk about carbon-neutral buildings, then buildings themselves are often measured in isolation – not the consequences of how they’re made, where the materials are from. In other words, the whole production chain is never stressed in its entirety. In the Netherlands, we have a large number of electricity-based businesses for which the power is generated by coal-fired plants, which are more polluting and environmentally unfriendly than all petrol cars combined. So, you can feel very good about yourself when you’re driving a Tesla, but it doesn’t mean shit if things are not looked at in an integral manner. The world at present is not able to look at things as a whole, and even less able to mobilise action to deal with problems at the necessary level of integration. If that doesn’t happen, all of these terms – liveability, sustainability – will just pay lip service to a cause that is further and further beyond reach.

MG It seems that architecture of a certain ambition – at least in terms of scale – has had almost no choice but to find clients among some of the most despicable people on the planet, simply because they are the only folks that can afford the opportunity. As a big practice, is it impossible to do small projects?
RG Not necessarily. We still design chairs and furniture, though obviously, we design cities as well. It is about choices. It’s one choice to be a big firm, but another to only do big projects. I don’t think the two are automatically related.

MG It would be wonderful to really campaign for big architects to do small things or to instil the discipline of doing that.
RG Architects need to do the big things right. My first book included a diary about working in the UK, the Middle East and Russia. It simply recorded my own experience in those three contexts, and Russia wasn’t anywhere near the North Korea it is now. What we found there is that each system has its own inefficiencies, its own irrationalities, and the only difference is that the consequences of those irrationalities present themselves at different moments in the process. We spend enormous amounts of time arriving at decisions. In a dictatorship, one often spends that time undoing the catastrophic decisions taken at the top, informed by sycophants. One way or another, there’s always a lot to be done.

MG What about education? Do you know what percentage of architecture students actually end up being architects? It seems ever-shrinking.
RG I think it is shrinking and has been for a while, but it begs the question: what else would architects be good at? There are certain architects who’ve had political careers with very mixed results. It is a peculiar discipline in many ways. It’s true that architecture, once you regard it as a purely conceptual discipline divorced from building, is a domain in which expectations of the future are formalised and visualised. Therefore, it is a speculative domain by definition, and the essence of speculation is that it defies measurement. If you make architecture 100% measurable, architects simply become engineers. What architects have to offer versus engineers is the unmeasurable speculative – they imagine the futures that engineers calculate. I have taught at schools, generally either postgraduate courses or people at the end of their studies, those who have been through the usual baggage. My courses were always about zooming out, bringing about an awareness of the context they would be operating in so that the same shock that I had in my first job wouldn’t be so shocking to them. Of course, we get many young people in the practice who are either still in university or fresh out of university, and there, we simply plunge them into the deep end. They work on competitions, but mainly we try to build confidence by demystifying some of the heavy-handed aspects of our job and teach them to defy certain unrealistic expectations as well. Inventive freedom is something very much cultivated inside the office.

MG I enjoyed reading the glossary at the back of the book, which I hope is meant ironically. Although I know at least one fashion designer who thought Zoolander was a documentary.
RG It’s interesting that you ask that. The book’s subtitle is now “The New Language of Building”, but it was originally “The Ultimate Guide to World- Class, Award-Winning, Innovative, Creative, Sustainable, Liveable, and Beautiful Buildings that Foster a Sense of Place and Wellbeing”. I liked that title very much, as did the editor at Verso, but Verso is now American, so he told me that the subtitle wouldn’t survive the American half of our publisher. I’m also not sure that in the current climate, this title would be seen as ironic. I might have had a readership that actually thought they were going to get a recipe for success.

MG For me, as somebody who works in the communication industry, it’s exciting that you put your finger on this. One of the key failings of the whole globalisation narrative was this development of increasingly obscurantist language around certain areas, art being probably the worst culprit, though fashion, design and architecture, as well as politics, are also guilty. That insider language is designed as a formal barrier to public participation. I’m just wondering if there was something architects could do to try to include a more diverse community to participate in architectural decisions, commissions, feedback and so on. Being too earnest for a moment – can you cut through?
RG Since the beginning of the millennium, our office has had a parallel think tank called AMO, the reverse OMA, in an effort to apply architectural thinking onto other domains; that was the early mission statement. In the context of that, we have been working with political scientists, journalists, and people from all walks of professional life in order to conceptualise certain issues. It would be good if that happened a little bit more, and it would also be in the interest of the profession to engage in those kinds of operations more.

MG My impulse is to bypass the professional elites and talk to the audience as a whole. Architecture has been quite slow on, say, TikTok.
RG It’s a very old profession and with that comes a certain amount of delay and slowness, a certain attitude of healthy or unhealthy scepticism.

MG We’ve featured quite a few projects from both AMO and OMA in the 25 years of the magazine. I remember particularly the EU flag project, which I know you had a big hand in. I wonder if you now feel that – at the dawn of a new age of multiple and competing global narratives and maybe even at the dusk of Europe – a new vocabulary is required to address a kind of multipolar world where globalisation isn’t taken for granted?
RG Globalisation has had a false start, in my opinion, an overly naive false start where after the fall of the Wall the world thought that globalisation equalled Westernisation, where globalisation was supposedly how the whole world could share in the benefits of being like us. Globalisation’s first iteration has been not only a Western, but an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. It’s very clear that if globalisation happens, it cannot be on anyone’s terms in particular. We don’t know what a compromise between all peoples of the world will look like. It’s ironic. We are in a globalised world, with a globalised language, with fences around all these terms that I’m describing, and at the same time we’re on the eve of World War Three – a condition of global civil war, one could call it. Supposedly we all agree, but we all kick each other’s teeth in. That is partly due to the fact that globalisation was really started as a victory lap. Take the term the “Fall of the Berlin Wall” – that is a misnomer. The Wall didn’t fall; the Wall was demolished by the same people who put it there. Irrespective of whether or not they should have put it there, the “Fall of the Wall” is a triumphalist inaccuracy. There’s always revenge to be found further down the line and I think that is what we’re witnessing at the moment.

MG One could argue that globalisation also accompanied a depoliticised form of architectural language and practice, an architecture divorced from high-modernist expectations of itself as an integral part of a political and social programme. Is there an opportunity for architecture to rediscover that?
RG It is high time that architecture became political again. ◉