Interview by Sophie Lovell
Photographs by Orlando Lovell
You have a successful business making your own furniture, so why architecture now as well?
When we moved studio in Eindhoven in 2010, we developed the building ourselves. It’s much more than just a workplace: with a restaurant, studios, event space, shop and an art gallery – and it’s big, with around 80 staff. This inspired others to ask me to suggest ideas for developing other old industrial buildings.
How big is the architecture studio in your company ?
Just one architect and me at the moment. We didn’t expect many architecture projects, but now have more than we can handle. One is the concept, communication and redevelopment of a beautiful 1950s building in Rotterdam – 22,000 square metre of mixed-use residential. So we’re quite busy.
You’ve a new idea to provide a basic grid frame building for occupants to slot modules of their own design into. Don’t you miss out on the creative bit?
My thinking is to create a steel structure, which gives occupants freedom to create their own worlds. So for this I’m more like an engineer than a designer or architect. For me it’s the opposite of freedom.
So you want to create a rigid structure within which the occupants can be free?
Yes – so it is clear for everybody what their options are. Normally really individualistic things can’t be piled up or put together. With this structure you create boundaries, both technical and aesthetic, that people have to work within.
Do you imagine a different kind of workplace community evolving out of this structure?
There will be a range of different businesses – from the very small to the big. But this process is not about determining how it’s going to be, or who is going to be in it, which is the normal way buildings are developed. Architects and developers want to know what’s going to happen: to predict the future, make a plan and then execute it. But the future is not predictable, it’s a stupid way of working. It’s much more logical to create a structure and open up an organic process.
With a mentality built on safety and security, when projects become bigger and more complicated, more energy is put in to make them more predictable. But that’s looking for false certainty and is the opposite to what you should do.
You need to find a process that incorporates insecurity, acknowledging that people are individuals and want different things, and taking this as a starting point. Then you’re only making what is necessary and demanded.
Piet Hein Eek (*1967) graduated from the Academy for Industrial Design in Eindhoven, The Netherlands in 1990. His diploma project was a set of cupboards made from scrap wood, which he sold and used the money to found his own design studio. He now operates his own design and production firm building his designs, made primarily from recycled materials on site in his own workshops. He also has a shop and restaurant on his factory site as well as studios. His work is sold in numerous galleries worldwide.
Do you think there’s space for communal attitudes within working environments?
Yes, but the main issue isn’t that of communality. Like when a good government takes care of stability, freedom and food, people are able to grow, get educated, become entrepreneurs, because their basic needs are covered. They dare to do things because they’re secure, in a safe environment.
So freedom, in your view, comes from creating boundaries, rather than removing them?
Freedom comes from the opposite of what one normally associates with the commune idea: in the way an environment is managed. I think the only things one should arrange is the hardware needed for people to develop themselves: not creating their world for them, but enabling them to create it themselves.
But most architects and developers and politicians try to arrange too much: they don’t try to create space, they try to fill it in.
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