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Radu Tîrcă and Ștefania Hîrleață are students at University of Architecture and Urbanism 'Ion Mincu', Bucharest. At present, they lead their theoretical research on the subject of thermal towns and diploma projects in Govora Baths under the guidance of Stefan Simion, Irina Tulbure and Ilinca Paun Constantinescu. As students, they won second prize and best student project in a BeeBreeders international architecture competition - Mango Vynil Hub, third prize in a Zeppelin national competition - Prototip pentru comunitate, as well as other mentions in other competitions.
An interview with Kersten Geers
The following interview was recorded via ZOOM on September 2nd, 2025. with the participation of Ștefan Simion and Irina Meliță.
SS: In your monograph, you spoke of a “near obsessive desire to make coherent architecture — an architecture that could strive for universality”, a pursuit that you described as unfolding “right in the middle of this mess – the even covered field.” To open our conversation, I’d like to return to that idea: as an architect who not only builds, but also writes, lectures, and teaches, do you see coherence as the thread that runs through all these different aspects of your work?
KG: I would say that you try to be coherent, and you don’t necessarily always succeed. But I’d also argue that there’s a difference between coherence and formula. Because you could say: if I define very clearly the bandwidth of what I do, and I stay within that bandwidth, then I’m always “right,” right? That would be a kind of coherence, but it’s more like a formula. For example, imagine if everything I built were always out of brick, or if everything I wrote were always about, I don’t know, 18th-century architecture. That would be a kind of coherence. But that coherence will only be there because I would limit my set of topics. I think the argument of coherence, as we meant it back then in the monographs, has to do with an ultimate, I would dare to say, test — whether what you’ve done, what you’re making, or what you’re about to finish, makes sense. It’s almost like an a posteriori test. It’s not something you do beforehand. What I mean is that it’s important to try out different tracks: to look at different things, to look at artists, to read other architects’ biographies, to visit buildings, to write a text, to do research with the studio, to make a building. You do all that, and then there’s the moment when you look at it and ask yourself: does it make sense for you? I guess that’s the moment when you can probably say, “oh yeah, it’s pretty coherent with everything else.” So in that sense, coherence is a very fluid term, not a strict one.
If I remember well, when I was writing that short introduction, it had to do with digesting — if I can put it that way — the work of Venturi and Scott Brown, and more specifically Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction (his first book, from 1966). There, you could ask yourself: if you allow a certain contradiction or complexity in your architecture, when does it work and when doesn’t it? And for us, I guess, it’s when those things start to fit together. That’s probably what we would then call coherence. It’s very formalist, if you want. I’ve always had the feeling that, although it’s a tricky word to use — the word formalism, since people associate it with very particular things, not necessarily what we do — I think it’s really about an interest in form. Or perhaps even the belief that, ultimately, it’s the form of things that makes you decide whether they make sense or not. That also connects to the way David and I work together. In the end, we’re two individuals, and then there are other people in the office. You move forward with a project, different ideas come to the table — the plan is drawn, the model is made — and at a certain point we think, “oh, wow!, that makes sense”. And making sense, I think, is a very vague term. But in that case it has a very formalist aspect, which is simply that we see it, we believe in it and we like it. And whether David likes it for one reason and I like it for another —that’s maybe not so important. The most important thing is that we feel it’s right. So that’s where the form of the thing starts to play a role.
And if I connect this, for example, with working together with Bas Princen, I think that’s very much what happens: you don’t need to explain him every aspect of a building, or why exactly, in the end, it looks the way it does. Of course, first of all, he’s fairly well informed about why we do things, and we’re also fairly well informed about what he’s doing alongside. So we evolve — his practice evolves, our practice evolves. And then he goes and takes a few pictures. Maybe he has seen some collages before, maybe a few plans, or maybe he just sees the building in its context. And then suddenly there’s a set of pictures — two, three, five, ten, fifteen, I don’t know — and he’s like, “yeah, makes sense.” So again, I think the form of the picture is somehow convincing, and we often have that sensation — that moment when we think: “Oh, wow!, it’s like we just discovered the building to be this.” We realize the building is close to what we wanted it to be, but we almost need the pictures to finally confirm it. That’s the dialogue we very much have, and that’s again where I think the form of things—the form of the picture, you could say — and coherence, if you want, play an important role.
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Garden Pavilion (7 Rooms / 21 Perspectives), Office KGDVS in collaboration with Bas Princen, Venice Biennale 2010.
SS: I’d like to return to the word you used—‘fluidity’— since it allows coherence to be interpreted in different ways. I’m interested in how coherence might relate to autonomy — whether the autonomy of the discipline, or of generic and typical plans. How do improvisation, subjectivity, and authorship play into this, especially given your often clinical, radical approach? Many of your projects appear very straightforward, almost aiming at a kind of zero-degree architecture.
KG: I think the plan type is a very important factor, among other topics. But what’s interesting is that these types, of course, come in many different final guises. I mean, the figure as it appears — whether in the plan or in the way the building appears, if it ever gets built—might remind you of another one, or it might be part of a family of other types. And that’s perhaps the fluidity of the thing. But it’s not about how it was designed, and it’s not a type that we project onto something a priori. Some architects work in a way where they almost start with the solution. Like: “Okay, it’s another bar, another little courthouse,” and so on. That’s not how we work. Of course, in a given context we might have some preconceived ideas. But when these ideas are drawn on a plan or made in a model, we often think: “Oh yeah,” and realize connections to previous projects. It might remind us of something we made before, or we see it as part of a family of projects. Especially now, as we’re working again on the set of 3D monographs—one, two, three, and now four, five, six, due at the end of November, when we do the conference — you start to see them along a certain timeline. The office numbering tracks when projects started, so you see some projects that have been ongoing for years, others that ended long ago, and some that moved very quickly, since the timeline is very rigid. The first ideas come early, and then you start to see some fascinating patterns and you would say: ”Oh, wow, wait a second”. When we did the Beer project, for example, we were also working on another project with a similar roof, and we were clearly testing this roof. But I do remember that in the process itself nobody in our office said: “Let’s do the same roof as that other one.” That’s not what happened. Rather, it became apparent that the roof was a sort of obsession at that time. Hence, you can see it as a group of projects, but it’s not a linear process — and I’m very happy it’s not linear. If it were so linear, so unilateral, I guess the practice would have already lost most of its blood and it wouldn’t be very vivid anymore.
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Brussels Beer Project (BBP), Office KGDVS , 2018 – 2022, Photograph: Bas Princen.
SS: I’d like to turn to San Rocco and architectural magazines, since you’ve been involved from the very beginning. To start broadly: how do you see architectural magazines today? And before San Rocco appeared, what were your motivations — what themes or questions were you most interested in?
KG: That’s of course difficult to answer, but let’s start from a historical perspective — I think that’s the easiest. If I’m not mistaken, we launched San Rocco in 2010. And of course, when we launched San Rocco, it was, first of all, a group of people. There were not so many, but still an important group of friends for me. On the one hand, there was Pier Paolo Tamburelli, who I think was very important for the magazine. There were Giovanna Silva, Stefano Graziani and Andrea Zanderigo.
San Rocco cover, Islands,
Issue 1, 2011.
There was also Matteo Ghidoni, and his group at that time called Salottobuono, which later split. Then there was Matteo Costanzo, who had in Rome an office maybe less visibly connected, but still very important in the very beginning. And yes, there was also Francesca Pellicciari and Pupilla. So, in a way, it was a fairly small group of people. We were there from the very beginning, and the group of people remained unchanged throughout the magazine’s entire run. We started it together, and in the same way, we brought it to a close.
Okayama Nishi Police Office, Arata Isozaki, 1997,
published in Pilotis by
Go Hasewaga in
Book of Copies, San Rocco.
SS: How did the group first come together around San Rocco?
KG: Well, I mean in a sense, it was a result of a set of dynamics, I would dare to say. On the one hand, I knew Pier Paolo Tamburelli and the baukuh friends, together with Andrea Zanderigo, who’s also at baukuh, from years before. That was essentially a friendship which started, I think, around 2002, maybe 2003 or 2004. At that time he was studying at Berlage (Berlage Institute), and I was involved in Berlage with Pier Vittorio Aureli ; Pier Paolo Tamburelli was studying together with Martino. Of course, that was not exactly studying, it was more like research units, which were an important part. So I think Pier was, in a way, my introduction to many of these other people. Andrea became a very important friend, and also Stefano Graziani. They were already clusters of people, and baukuh was already in Genoa and in Venice. They had their own cluster of people, and they knew each other a little bit by accident. There were also various people who maybe wanted to do a magazine, like the people from 2A+P/A in Rome — and I already mentioned Matteo Costanzo.
Labyrinths, Anne Holtrop in Book of Copies, San Rocco.
The Salottobuono people as well, and not just Matteo, but also Giovanni Piovene, were involved. They were, I think, deeply involved with Domus at the time, in the evolving direction guided by Stefano Boeri, of course, who was moving around a bit, from magazine to magazine. They were doing some infographics, I think that was one aspect of it.
But I think really — and I don’t exaggerate — Pier and myself, maybe Andrea a bit, we were very much running the discourse of this thing. I think Pier deserves a lot of credit, because it was this conversation which had started a few years earlier between me and Pier: maybe we should do a crazy magazine. I actually said to him, ‘Hey Pier, do we do a magazine?’ — I think it even had a working title at the time, something like Two Buildings, Two Texts, something in that genre. We shared this malaise with what was going on: magazines like Domus, like Archis (or maybe already Volume), which were very uninteresting, basically just copy-pasting texts that offices gave, with a few pictures. That was it. We thought: could you still do a magazine, a little bit in the tradition of Oppositions? A magazine which was actually about architecture, where anything was allowed, maybe with a bit more humor than Oppositions. And also because we had this agenda in some sense — certainly at baukuh and at OFFICE and with some of our close people — that we needed to counter this lifestyle, some kind of neo-journalism in architecture, and also in writing about architecture. We felt we had to bring back architecture itself, writing about architecture, with a slight fun factor, by embracing figures of the past, mixing them with something super contemporary, and most of all daring to say, to speak out: I like, I dislike, bullshit, whatever. I think that’s how it started.
And of course, you might have the small group of people with that idea, but the first step was the group who finally started it — already hybrid, not always with the same ideas. Matteo Ghidoni, who I liked a lot at that time, certainly was not representing the same thoughts on architecture, but that was fine. Stefano Graziani and Giovanna Silva were photographers, and they had a different take. Giovanna developed later her Humboldt Books project, this whole idea of traveling, documenting and discourse — that was an important element. And you can clearly see it: if you look at the magazine, there are texts written by Pier, or Andrea, or myself, talking about certain things, and then there are other texts written by others, talking in the end about very different things. And of course, then with the call for papers, it was also a way to bring in people we felt close to, whether it was Oliver Thill or Sam Jacob from FAT at the time. People who we felt wrote similar things or had similar ideas, who were embracing in the same way a cluster of thoughts. That was important. And then, of course, with these calls, other people came in, people we didn’t know, who suddenly wrote fantastic things — and we wanted them again.
Tutta la solitudine che meritate – Viaggio in Islanda, Giovanna Silva, Humboldt Books, 2019.
Drawing by Sam Jacob, for Les Nuits sans Kim Wilde, written by Simon de Dreuille, published in San Rocco, Issue 2 (The Even Covering of the Field), 2011.
I think this idea was very important: the magazine had an agenda, it was a project — a project against what we felt was a very boring field of communication about often-built work. It needed a manifesto, which was in a sense the San Rocco manifesto. It needed a plan, which was this five-year plan. It needed topics, which we announced. Of course, it was also done with a certain sense of humor. In a sense, it was deliberately doing everything the other way around from other magazines, because the topics were often unclear, there was no plan, no timeline. We thought we needed that — for the magazine as such, but also for our own health, meaning that it had an end point. And that end point also made the magazine, in its very form — if I can use this word again — as an amount of statements about what talking about architecture should be about. What have I always liked about San Rocco is that even if in certain issues 50% of the texts are not what I would be saying, it doesn’t matter — because the form was set, the boat was designed. If you then entered the boat, it was okay. I think San Rocco worked well exactly for that reason. And ultimately, I think San Rocco stopped because — and this was very much a decision among our small group, especially Pier, but also myself — these calls for papers, which were always in a way the next argument for the next issue, became a lot of work. Gradually we felt that everything was coming from our side, and not much else from the outside — no twists, no other ideas. It became, in a way, a vehicle for our own ideas for the 10th time, the N-th time. Although we had always thought the magazine would end at some point, we hadn’t yet passed the five-year mark, and we had actually produced fewer issues than originally planned because it took so much time, it made sense then to close it. So, when we did the Bramante issue, it felt like the right moment to bring it to an end. It felt good, it felt great. By then, we had also gotten a bit older, and we sensed that there were other projects where we could invest the same energy. In that context, closing the magazine made perfect sense, I think.
Bikini, Francesco Librizzi,
San Rocco, Issue 1 (Islands), February 2011.
SS: I noticed many analogies between San Rocco and your architectural philosophy. Some are small but telling — like the cover of San Rocco without text, and similarly your monograph cover. More broadly, I find the magazine’s approach to history interesting: it doesn’t aim to contextualize everything historically, but rather brings past buildings into the present, renders them instrumental. I sense this is also your interest — for instance, in the way you sometimes refer to the classical.
KG: Yeah, sure, I would, in a sense, agree with what you say. At the same time, I’ve always felt that the beauty of San Rocco is that it’s not at all far from what was done by us alone. First of all, in a sense, David was never consciously involved in San Rocco. I mean, my collaboration with David is the office. It’s certainly true that, in a way, when San Rocco went down a bit — meaning we stopped being super busy with it — that was around the time I had already started doing all this stuff, like Architecture without content and all these things. It kind of coincides to a certain extent: I started putting more energy into teaching as a project, which also didn’t allow me much time and I started to make these monographic books, for example. One thing took over instead of the other, and that was also true for Pier and so forth. At the same time, despite all its parallels, the beauty of San Rocco, for me, has always been that it was really the result of all of us.
OFFICE Kersten Geers &
David Van Severen: Vol. 1, 2, 3, Publisher: Walther König, 2017.
I mean, yes, I embrace San Rocco’s cover the way you describe it, but I would never have come up with that actual drawing myself — it clearly came from Salottobuono, not from Matteo, but from one of the partners who was actually drawing like that. And then it became a figure on its own. I certainly share the approach to history with a sense of humor, but the initiator of this — and often the push — came very much from Pier Paolo. We were co-writing this call for papers, he was really instrumental and I’ve always appreciated that, it was very important. And so, for a moment, I think San Rocco was also a place where we all learned from each other and we came closer to one another. Let’s say baukuh was an office, not exactly like an office, but to some extent we grew close to each other and we started using each other’s references, and that was part of the beauty of that collaboration. For example, Stefano Graziani, who I didn’t know very well before we started, became an important person alongside Bas in our own kind of world. That was interesting. It really was like defining a place, inviting a few people, and giving yourself that space to create something beyond the sum of its parts – and that was very special. And it’s true that in retrospect, you can see many parallels to us, to baukuh, to others. But it happened along the way, and it even became influential to other people, and even influenced our own practices – and I say ‘our’ in the plural, because I think it’s not just ours, it’s all of these.
SS: I remember at your 2014 lecture in Lausanne you spoke about carefully choosing which photos of your projects are made public. How do you see the role of photography in your work? Do you discuss this with photographers before they shoot? And do the photos, in turn, influence how you think about the buildings afterwards?
KG: Yeah, well, the simple answer is yes to all. An exciting, more elaborate version of the answer is that our office period — our time in the office so far, David and myself which is about 22 years, from 2000 to 2022 — it coincides almost exactly, maybe six months or a year difference, with our friendship with Bas Princen. So, in a sense, office time and Bas time are the same to some extent. From the very beginning we did a few projects together — experimental projects about Rotterdam with Bas and Milica. But it’s also true that we were trying some things: a few competition entries, one lost, plus early attempts to build a building, starting with this small interior in Antwerp. It all coincides with our exchanges with Bas.
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Tower and Square – Rotterdam, Office KGDVS in collaboration with
Bas Princen, Milica Topalovic, 2004
Office Entrance – Antwerp, Office KGDVS,
2002-2005, Photograph: Bas Princen.
He was always there, from day one, because he photographed his first place in Antwerp. I asked him for that, although I hardly knew him. In a way it was a gamble for us, I guess, but also for him — and it was from then always, and in a complex way — not just simply once a year when he comes and photographs, but on many occasions, many situations. I mean, we’re good friends, so that means also that his interest in photography — who he likes, who he would show to me — has also influenced very much how I look at photography. Evident names like Lewis Baltz or people like that, which were very formative for him at a certain point, became also very formative to us in terms of how we judge our photography and Baltz is a particular example. Of course, there are also many of these Germans, but Baltz was a shared fascination — shared afterwards, not in the beginning — which I’m sure Bas brought to us.
Lewis Baltz, Hidden Valley, Looking Southwest, gelatin silver print, c. 1977–78, Nevada series.
And then he says “Baltz,” we say, say “Ed Ruscha” and then all of a sudden, we think “hey, wait a second, one has also an interest in the other“, and so forth. And then of course later in the process, perhaps came Stefano, with his own set of references, and you have Armin Linke, and I don’t know who else — I mean, now I use the clichés again, but there are many more, obviously. And they made this exhibition together recently in the CCA — their world is more complex than these kind of simple tropes.
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The Lives of Documents— Photography as Project, curators: Stefano Graziani, Bas Princen, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Canada, May 2023 – April 2024,
photograph: Matthieu Brouillard.
But what I want to say is that their way of looking at photography — the status, the quality, the amount, the way you show it, the size, all of it — has heavily influenced the way we look at our work. And since we have always had an interest in — well, I often quote Ruscha — artists who have a very deliberate, premeditated approach to their work: they conceive an idea, execute it, frame it, and compose it.
Ten years ago I might have used Ruscha or Baldessari as evident references. Those never went away, but as we grew older, we also looked at other things. Many of these artists became household names. It’s like saying, as an architect 15 years ago, that your favorite artist is Gerhard Richter — it is a bit the same. Their personal presence may be less now, but we learned a lot from them: how they looked at images, how they thought about composition, how they understood the status of the object — many of these conceptual artists, not just painters, but many more. And of course, we also learned from our photographer friends and how they were referring to the art scene. So you have a lot in common. All of this mix together means that, yes, we make a collage, which defines a certain idea of looking. Today it happens on the computer — as many of the students in Mendrisio, or before in Lausanne did — and also now in our office, by working in super complex 3D programs. We still try to make them look at the view of the composed image, even though it’s now composed in a very different way. We think that by reducing viewpoints and simplifying, we have more control, at least in these views. Later, other elements may or may not be part of the project. I think these are important thoughts, connected also to the conceptual idea about the status of things: this is one project, another project, which has to do with hierarchy and with framing. And of course, our approaches themselves are already about framing, so we have a lot of this kind of project in a project —the projects echo each other. That’s why I think it feels so natural. And I happen to have had this experience now in the last four days, because as I said, Bas was here from Friday till Monday, photographing a few things for these new volumes. That means photographing the gray pages, as you know, “One, Two, Three,” and photographing, in a way, the buildings themselves.
That’s also why we made these books that way—it can be something which is not me, it can be some sort of data center, computer program, display, and that’s then a picture. And it can be also on the construction site of a building. And it can be just a piece of nature he just photographed, since they’re actually cutting the trees, and you have to ask yourself: “What is the status of the nature, of the tree?“— reuse, and so forth. This is something he just did in Java and he brings these on his computer, or he has prints with him, and we think: “Oh, wow!, that’s amazing. We should use this”. It can also be a picture of Aldo van Eyck, which we took together because we made a little book on this. And the same counts for certain things Stefano brings in. So that’s how all this is composed. It was like that seven years ago when we made “One, Two, Three”, and it’s still like this today. So again, it’s not predefined, but of course we share a very big world together.
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Hubertus House, Amsterdam, 1973-1981. Photo by Bas Princen from Kersten Geers & Jelena Pančevac, Aldo & Hannie van Eyck, Excess of Architecture, 2023.
SS: There’s also a certain analogy with San Rocco. I’m thinking of the contributions from your architect friends who wrote short essays about your work are dispersed through the One, Two, Three monographs. This actually anticipates my next question about the collages you produced, especially early in your practice. I’ve noticed that more recently you’ve also been using renderings…
Community Cenre – Tirúa, Office kgdvs in collaboration with Pezo von Ellrichshausen, UTIL Struktuurstudies, Chile, 2011.
KG: Well, yes and no. The problem, of course, is that these collages exist — we still make them for recent projects — but they shouldn’t become some kind of nostalgia for something. If they exist just because later you have to make a lecture and you have to pretend that it came together like this, then that makes no sense.
I also see this with students, like the ones I mentioned in Indonesia: we want to create simple images, but they produce a fully rendered object instead. You then have to guide them in making decisions about how to look at that object. In a sense, we also take this with us into the office, partly because some of those students might eventually end up working with us — that’s one aspect.
But of course, it’s also true that if a building becomes quite big, you go through many steps and processes. You maybe get close with the initial pitch — maybe the last five, eight, or ten iterations — but then they want you to develop that further. I don’t necessarily think that’s a good evolution, but gradually, if you ever win big buildings — and you don’t win them very often — they become endless iterative processes and dialogues. You have to add a lot more detail, or at least the fiction of the detail. These renders sometimes pretend to be more realistic and their aesthetic makes people believe a lot has already been decided, which often is not per se true.
So we are facing that and I think we are trying to find a way to deal with it. We’ve certainly had a period when these images came in, and we thought: “Wow, are we sure?”. At one point, we relied on external people to produce images, and we were endlessly post-producing them. That was crazy — a year and a half, maybe two — kind of a semi-crisis. Luckily, now we’ve moved on. We make these images, whichever they are, entirely in-house, and it’s very important. We aim for a certain abstraction, like before, although they’re different, because we make them ourselves now and in a way that’s entirely our own. This has given us a sense of control, which is incredibly important. It’s true that things change, but I’d dare say today— maybe something I couldn’t say three years ago — that gradually we’re landing really close to where we want. A few years ago, things were different, but now, fortunately, we’re there.
Now, truth be told — without being overly nostalgic — competitions in the late ‘80s, even early ‘90s, were about ideas and then later you would figure it all out. Of course, there’s some nostalgia for buildings we all love, like the Zeebrugge Terminal or Très Grande Bibliothèque by OMA. Nobody knows what they actually are, and I think that’s what makes them so durable in time, because we keep on projecting — that’s why they are so important, so influential.
Zeebrugge Sea Terminal, OMA, Zeebrugge, Belgium,
Competition Project, 1988.
Très Grande Bibliothèque, OMA, Paris, France,
Competition Project, 1989.
Now, competitions are different. There are plenty of new parameters in which competitions are judged and they are not often choosing the best idea, but something more pragmatic. Even the schemes that don’t win are almost too real, too practical, to be interesting as an architectural thought afterward.
SS: I was struck by what you said about misinterpretations — that simplified readings are central to how architectural culture travels, and that devotion can sometimes compensate for gaps in knowledge. Does this perspective still shape the way you approach teaching?
KG: Yeah, of course, we’re all getting older, so you hope that you still have something interesting to discover, and sometimes something interesting to say. You cannot deny that the architecture culture, or the architectural discourse goes in waves, and we are part of a wave that started more than 20 years ago. So you have to ask yourself: “What are we currently seeing?” And given that we are not blind, we are not dead, we also see what’s happening now and a lot is about material. The discourses today are a lot about material. And as much as we make precise buildings, I think our world has never been so much about material, because for us the interior has always been fairly interchangeable. So that’s, I think, some sort of confrontation to a certain extent. I mean, if certain people are only talking about wood, and rammed earth, or recycled concrete, and stuff like that, one of the questions you have is: Wait a second — are we saying this is all important and included, and by seeing this we’re part of that? Or is the fact that we see this as a fairly evident topic not well enough? I think these are serious topics, right? My tendency is toward the first position, which obviously opens up some criticism, but at the same time, I’m interested in these new anxieties — which are obviously there.
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The Large City , Office Without Office,
Map of Charleroi, Academy of Architecture USI, Mendrisio (Fall Semester 2023 / Spring Semester 2024), Faculty:
Kersten Geers, Chiara Malerba, Guido Tesio.
But I try to find answers not only in the symbolism of the material applied to a project proposal, but maybe by seeing them on a more urban scale. You talked about the even covered field — How do you make a reasonable building? How do you make a durable building? That leads us into questions like: What is Roman architecture? — territorial interventions and stuff like that. Most recently we were working in Charleroi with the studio, and we made this small book called The Large City. And so you ask yourself: “What is now this thing?” If you go to the territory around Charleroi, you see that actually everything there is the result of a modernist transformation. We’re talking about the mines, and how the whole landscape you think you see, all the hills, are artificial slag heaps. All of this, I believe, is an attempt to tweak or readjust the current debate. Also, working on De Carlo, I was thinking the same thing, you try to understand: “Wait — what are we saying when we talk about engagement? What were they saying in ’68, or ’66, or ’70?”. For me, that’s reason enough to think, but I don’t have to pretend to be sure — that’s what we are still doing in the studio. That’s also why it was probably healthy, about four or five years ago, to close Architecture Without Content. Within that umbrella of Everything, we said: “Through this, we didn’t radically change, but we did shift the focus a little bit”. We certainly started working more on the late modernist avant-garde — we are talking about Team X and the people around it. Because I felt I had never been so sure whether I liked them or didn’t like them — but I knew I had to understand them better. I had to figure out what they meant for us, and if we could use it. In a way, I simplified it: they were all, in one form or another, “enemies” of Koolhaas. And since we grew up in the 1990s — as kids in architecture — you ended up on one side or the other. And the side we landed on was the Koolhaas side, so to speak. So in the last couple of years, it was interesting to move over to the other side and ask: “Wait a second, what did they say in fact?”. They always had this aura of sérieux — De Carlo, the Smithsons, Aldo and Hannie van Eyck — very serious people with very good intentions. So I think it was important to figure out what those intentions were, whether we could work with them, and whether they succeeded. What was their form? Were they really as “non-formalist” as they claimed, or was it in fact more confusing? All of this was on the table in the last years. And I’m quite happy with what we tested.
But now I also feel — and I would dare to say it’s almost like a scoop — that this phase has, to a certain extent, come to a close. Last year, or maybe still this year, we made that little book on Itsuko Hasegawa, and I had the feeling that closed a chapter. After that we made The Large City, and again it felt like time to move forward. Of course, this was anticipated. When we were doing Architecture Without Content, all these structuralists were already in the air. There was no abrupt change — Ungers was always lingering somewhere, because he was everywhere. But I now think we may have to be more explicit. I’m very interested — there’s nothing spectacular here — in the modern project. Especially when you see what surrounds us today, I feel we need to embrace it more explicitly, and with less cynicism than in our previous iterations. I feel the need— well, I never really left it — but the need to re-embrace the modern project more tightly. For example, this semester, in the individual studio, I will explicitly state that this is the studio topic. Will it last for two semesters, or six years? I don’t know. But the very fact that you can do this—that’s the luxury of teaching.
SS: Is there a difference between research and teaching for you?
KG: Not really. On the one hand I can say I’m pretty lucky with my team, teaching in Switzerland. Obviously it gives you a certain amount of context, a certain amount of means, to be able to do things you cannot always do in another place in the world, not even in Europe. And teaching there becomes an extremely pragmatic affair, right? You want to try to help kids study architecture, so you have to help them with that project. You don’t have a real space, a real topic, you have nothing, no context. So I guess that’s already good news in Switzerland in general. And that’s true for Lausanne, for Mendrisio, and certainly true for Zurich, where perhaps the means at your disposal are even more than in any of the other two places. At the same time — and that’s certainly true for Mendrisio — it’s not that you have so much to spend. It’s very difficult and Mendrisio is very specific in that. It’s kind of hard to academize your research — a little bit less so in Zurich, I know from my friends — meaning that it’s not a school built around lots of PhD researchers. I had my own trouble to actually get or not get these. So, in a certain sense, you have to have a lean operation.
Our lab — which is not even anymore called a lab in Mendrisio as it was in Lausanne, but in my head it’s still a lab — has to help the students, make an exciting semester, teach architecture, and somehow yield some sort of thinking. So the only thing you can do is share your thoughts with the students, share your doubts, discuss this, push them into an amount of directions, but be open, and look for possible tracks, possible doors, possible maneuvers, and land together. And that’s why there’s no distinction there. I don’t have the money, so to speak, to have a research lab and to teach on the side. And I don’t have the autonomy that some professors do. I think in Vienna it’s very much like that: you’re a chair, and then you research a bit, and you have other people teaching on your behalf in the chair, and you do a couple of lectures or so. I mean, I know Pier does it more or less in Vienna. We don’t have that. So, on the one hand, we have very good students. Mendrisio had had good students historically, and it still does. So if you bring something to the table, they’re interested, they want to work. And they’re also skilled enough — that’s the ultimate luxury — I don’t have to teach them architecture per se. I only have to teach them architecture culture. And that happens to be my interest, my topic, my research. So yeah, that works somehow, I think.
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SS: A final question: the Difficult Double. I first met you at the conference, on the day Bijoy Jain presented his work and his reading of Louis Kahn. Which architect would you consider your own “difficult double”?
KG: The good news about our lecture series was that we chose for them. Okay, so because it’s such a difficult question to answer — I would say this to you — although I’m not even sure. I mean, with whatever it means, my difficult double is evidently Koolhaas, that’s the evident one. Now, it’s also probably the answer I would love to hide as long as I can.
SS: You won’t be able to hide it when we publish the magazine, if you maintain this.
KG: That’s a little bit of a problem, I think. Honestly, I may come with another name by the time you publish it, but the real answer is Koolhaas. It’s also the problematic answer. At the same time, in the generation before us, Koolhaas is the one single person who tries to operate on these. But that’s also why the difficult double is a difficult double. Koolhaas is the one which probably somebody would give to me because it’s very visible, but it wouldn’t be me that says it. And I wouldn’t say: “Oh, fuck, Koolhaas”. That’s hard. I mean, yeah, Koolhaas.
SS: As an illustration to this answer, would you be okay if we republished your short essay, Showing Everything, on OMA’s Netherlands Architectural Institute ?
KG: Yeah, sure, but you expected my answer, right? You had the same thought.
SS: Yes, of course. And I’m also a great fan—especially of Koolhaas’s unbuilt projects, though of course many of the built ones as well.
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Jussieu – Two Libraries, OMA, Paris, France, Competition Project, 1992.
KG: Yeah, but my problem with this is the following: I’m not sure whether I’m a fan. I’m intrigued. I’m impressed by the intelligence, by the manipulation, by the weird mixture of sérieux and absurdity. I think that’s what it is. But yeah, if you’re a fan of a band, you follow the band and you go to the singer and say: I’m a fan of the band, then you know that you’re that, right? That’s like the worst you could be. You should never be a fan.
SS: Yeah, fan is a bad word. I take it back and I replace it with...
KG: No, no, but I understand. I see the problem because of course, casually you can say: “I’m a fan”, you can say that between friends. Probably that occurred in other conversations that it’s certainly something which I share with Pier Paolo. I’ve been always a big fan, so to speak, of alternative music, say the early 90s, which was also very common back then. It was this whole bunch of American college rock, what they started to call later post-rock in some sense — Steve Albini produced — and there are Slint or Codeine, for example, very dark, depressing in some sense. And then Low came and all these figures. I did have my thing with Val’ Doonican and other people in the British scene. But apart all these being deeply independent, I think the most evident, most popular exploit of that, is of course Sonic Youth, the most accessible of this whole era. But with all of these, the love you have for them has a kind of an anti-hero aspect to it. It’s not the pop star, it’s not the rock star, and it’s not the Rolling Stones or something like that. And it’s kind of anti-music sometimes with hardly any singing. If there’s a singing in the mix, it’s so deep in the mix that you can hardly hear what they sing.
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Album cover for Sonic Youth, Goo (DGC Records, 1990). Artwork by Raymond Pettibon.
This ethos has always been very important and this scene doesn’t exist anymore because music is now made in a very different way. Perhaps in electronic music, you find here and there people, or in alternative hip hop or strange stuff. But yeah, I think that I find this exciting. And what is fun about this is that it’s very young and it has kind of a teenage vibe to it, it’s naïve, very serious and it’s also full of humor. It doesn’t take itself too serious, however and it’s totally convinced of its own truth. And I think San Rocco was like that, you know? We were like that. And San Rocco — even more than our office, in the office is in the end architecture, you know? — But San Rocco was like this kind of alternative music fanzine: zero compromises, you hate everybody, sometimes you love everybody. And today I say: “a new order”, great, and tomorrow I say: “I always hated — I don’t know who — Smashing Pumpkins or something”. That kind of absurd fanzine like radicalism, which is very serious and super devoted, but it’s also a little bit tongue in cheek, a little bit humorous. And I think that to me The Difficult Double works like that as well. Yes, you have that person, you love him, but at the same time he’s the biggest idiot in the world. So yes, my difficult double is still the same name we had before, but with that confusion. You love and then there’s not anybody you can hate as much as that figure as well. I think then it’s exciting.
1 - Kersten Geers, David Van Severen, Exposing Architecture, in ‘OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen’ Volume 1, ed. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Konig, p.7.
2 - OFFICE, Brewery, Brussels, 2018-2020; https://officekgdvs.com/projects/280
3 - Milica Topalović is Associate Professor of Architecture and Territorial Planning at the ETH Department of Architecture.
4 - The Lives of Documents – Photography as Project, curated by Bas Princen and Stefano Graziani, Center for Canadian Architecture, 2023-2024
5 - John Baldessari.
6 - In the monographs there are several page types: white, gray, etc. The gray pages depict certain places, buildings, etc – that seem to have a certain autonomy.
7 - Java, Indonesia, is the most populated island in the world, with more than 150 million inhabitants.
8 - Architecture without content, The Difficult Double, 2014. https://officekgdvs.com/publications/awc-9-the-difficult-double-i-iii
9 - Shonandai – Exposing the World, Kersten Geers, Jelena Pancevac, Verlag der Buchandlung Walther und Franz Konig, 2025
10 - The Large City, Office Without Office, Academy of Architecture USI, Mendrisio (Fall Semester 2023 / Spring Semester 2024); https://officekgdvs.com/publications/the-large-city
11 - Bijoy Jain (Studio Mumbai) x Louis I. Kahn; The Difficult Double; lecture at the EPFL, 05.05.2014, part of FORM laboratory led by Kersten Geers
12 - Kersten Geers, Showing Everything, published in OASE, no.94 (OMA. The First Decade), Rotterdam, 2015, pp.104-106.