Freek Persyn

www.onarchitecture.com

Freek Persyn Interview

by Felipe de Ferrari & Diego Grass

June 24th, 2014

Brussels, Belgium

I. REFERENCES & MASTERS: ON STRATEGY

OnArchitecture Here is a quote from your interview published in ATLAS, a book by OSA Mendrisio:

When I finished my studies I decided for a moment not to work on projects by using references: it can also be a way to promote yourself, to put things on a level that is really incorrect (…) Reference as a form of self-justification is something that I dislike a lot. References are materials, not methods: you have to learn from them and digest them.

Although we entirely agree with you, we would like to talk about the arguments or references that may have marked your professional practice. This could be understood as a shortcut -just like the old saying you can judge a man by the company he keeps. References included, of course. You may have the word.

Next we’d like to go straight to your office’s background, specifically in relation with your strategic approach towards architecture. Quoting you again, we tend to do architecture very much in a kind of strategic way, and we don’t always want to control everything completely. This is something I like a lot when it happens: a friction between controlling some things and leaving other things open.

Can you talk further about this, maybe talking about some specific clients that we know have been very important for you in the design process?

Freek Persyn I was educated in a school in Brussels, which is partially an art school. And the spirit that they had was very free and open-minded. There were a few very interesting people in that school that really challenged the urban and social agenda. The moment of studying is always overwhelmed with a lot references and with a lot of possibilities. And the basic way in which architecture is thought is that there’s a lot of history to live up to. That’s the idea of the reference: you have to climb up like a ladder and reach a certain height, I would say. Of course is very important and very interesting.

But when we graduated we decided -implicitly, without talking about it too much- to forget about these references and to engage with reality, using these references but not necessarily living up to them. So, the approach was very much based on engaging with people, engaging with clients, and we had a few clients in our very early career, that challenged us equally. So you had the feeling that there was a kind of shared agenda, and we could help them and they could help us very early in our career, I would say. We had the opportunity to work in other contexts like Albania in a very engaged way, and it’s like becoming a mature individual over night, which -of course- doesn’t really work; there were a lot of growing pains, but I think this helped us a lot, digesting these references and finding a niche or at least our own space where you can look at all of your references quite freely. This sense of freedom is very important and it’s crucial that everyone finds it.

II. TO DESIGN THE BRIEF

OnArchitecture In that very same presentation at Mendrisio, you refered to something we believe has been left quite unexplored in architecture: to design the brief.

At least in contexts like ours, education is focused in providing solutions to certain requirements, not to program them. And in many cases this results in a-critical stances, blindly following what's given in the brief.

From recent history, we really like one anecdote of Cedric Price. He was doing a single-family house for a couple and he found out that the couple couldn’t agree on how the house should be. So he clearly understood they had a problem with each other: he told them you don’t need an architect you need a divorce lawyer. It's about responsibility, and sometimes this means that you have to suppress your constructive will as architect -in other words, the expression of your ego as buildings. It is quite similar to the approach Lacaton Vassal took in Place Léon Aucoc, Bordeaux, in which they did almost nothing -just the things that they had to do, nothing extra-.

We would like you to explain this brief design process in detail, particularly on how to persuade clients -cases like Price's could be well framed as civil disobedience, according to Andreas Ruby. Are there other examples of this in your work besides Wet 89? Can you go deeper on this?

Freek Persyn The question of designing the brief is something that came quite natural to us, yet I think it has a lot of implications. First of all, I think it’s about questioning maybe the modernistic procedure of cutting up a task in two parts and that the link between these two parts should be a very formal exchange. But if you go to a factory, and a person that needs something hands it over to the other one, then there’s no exchange and no interaction. And I think design processes in the last century have been set up like this. Maybe advertising offices are a very clear example of this, where you have people studying the context and reformulating what the client asks; it goes to the creative team, and the creative team gives a form to that, without ever questioning the brief itself. I think architects are not aware of the fact that they have a very limited role in this process, and if you want to look at what makes really sense -related to a context and to a society that changes- you have to question the brief, otherwise you don’t produce any change. I think it was intuitive from the very beginning. But I also think it’s a very explicit critique on the modernist process and that we have to construct a kind of enduring responsibility. Of course this puts you in a position, which I think it's weak. And the other opposite position is also weak, in the sense that you always have to do it with other people, you cannot take away the brief from the client -it is a responsibility as well. The idea that you can construct it together and that the design can help to clarify what the brief should do -and also what the brief could do- is a very important aspect, because in designing and showing possibilities you suddenly find things that you thought were not possible before. That’s why we think it is very interesting to work around this line of the brief, where the questioning or the desire is translated into a solution. So, to work around this it’s crucial today, especially because we think the modernistic way of cutting a process doesn’t make sense.

III. ALBANIA

OnArchitecture We would like to focus now in your relation with Albania. It was really interesting for us to witness a dialogue between Edi Rama (Prime Minister of Albania), Arni Sala and yourself in the context of last Architecture Biennale in Venice.

First interesting topic was the the social contextualization of the dynamics between public and private life after Hoxha regime, in which private property was vetoed for decades. What Edi Rama explained in his dissertation was that in just one decade -the 1990's, If we are correct- almost the entire surface of green areas was privatized.

a) Before going straight into discussing your projects, we would like to know how this relationship with Albania starts, your position about this country and how architecture operates in the conditions you described -from an authoritarian regime to a democratic system looking for a defined identity.

Freek Persyn It is -of course- very interesting to witness in Albania a kind of movement, the settlements' movement and the way people use the territory. In the centralized state this was, of course, extremely planned, it was able to control it -“this happens here”, “this happens there”. And with the transition happening in Albania, you see things in a very brutal way, things that have happened in more democratic countries in a more slowly and softly way. It’s like an exception: people have no boundaries and they consume everything. Going to Albania today is like a critique on your own country, because you see that what they produce is -in the end- the same that Belgium or Europe have produced as well, this kind of sprawling urbanizing territories. And in Albania you still feel the tension of the two systems, very much because the transition hasn’t completely happened. You see a lot of moments where the friction between these two ways of thinking is still very strong and this also goes for the mentality of people, how they look at their own country. In that sense, it was very interesting for us -and still is today- to be present in that country, because it is a country that is adolescent: they go from one condition to another, and they have to find out what they want to do in comparison to Europe, especially the politicians, who have the idea that they have something to maintain -the idea of transition in Albania is inevitable. All this makes it a very fertile context to work in, because there’s no doubt that everything is in transition and maybe in Belgium you would have to force this transition. In both cases they are equally necessary, but in Albania it is very brutal -the transition that you feel happening on site.

OnArchitecture Could you please contextualize the development of three projects which have been really important for your office? We are talking about TID Tower, Skandeberg Square and Europetrol. We would like to have your own words on these projects' strategies and explain if there is an unifying thread which could relate all these three designs together.

Freek Persyn We wanted the TID tower because we recognized that it was important to understand Albania not only from the geo-political point of view, not from an administrative point of view being part of the east pack of the communist countries but instead it was about going further back in history: Albania as part of the Mediterranean, as part of all these different cultures. And, in fact, we valued this more than the idea that it should get rid of communism. I think this shift somehow gives oxygen to the project.

We proposed to highlight the conditions of lighting, for instance, as a very valuable cultural condition that stands almost for the quality that the country clearly has. But we also valued the ground floor and also the bottom of the tower that we developed. In the newspapers, for instance, the fact that we talked about public space and shared space, valuing history but without revealing it too much, I think this stroke a real chord, and I think that’s the reason why we were selected. This is also something that we feel very close when we talk to Albania and that shows very much the way gas stations are made. It is not a coincidence that we designed two gas stations, because gas stations in Albania are no simple functional entities: it’s not a space where you just go and fill up, it’s like a small part of the city where you go to and talk to people; there’s a bar and the bar is frequented by people who also don’t buy gas. So it is a kind of an hybrid situation, those gas stations are very interesting for us. Being an outsider, you recognize things that insiders do not explicitly see, they use it but they’re not really conscious about it. That has been our main role and our main value for the Albanians themselves, it’s like somehow we took up some items and we exaggerated them, making them very explicit and allowing a debate about what could be the smart thing to do, using dynamics that exist and valuing them. And the dynamics of social exchange, people interacting in public space and -let’s say- having collectivity, not in the way it was organized 20 years ago, but collectivity as a sense of being surprised by the environment and by people that you encounter. Taking time to value that is something that modernism didn't had, especially in the country were I come from -Belgium- where economic efficiency is highly valued. The value of interaction in public space, I think, is more important. And this is something that you find really strongly in Albania. It's almost a value that more Mediterranean or southern countries could bring to the northern countries which are still very much focused on the idea that they have to survive and work as much as possible to survive.

I think politicians in this country have a challenge that they don’t necessarily have to establish specific the program of what they need. So when Edi Rama was the major, tax system wasn’t that efficient, therefore he didn’t have a big budget, I think he took this problem as a fact and what he started to do was to link the private initiatives to outsiders; he would link developers which want to do something with foreign architects and we were not the only ones -there was a whole bunch of foreign architects. His assumption was that. And by linking these two and by giving the brief that they had in order to do something for the public space of the city, he had the assumption it would have produced situations that you couldn’t completely control but that would -for sure- be better than not addressing the private developers. So maybe it’s not a very controlled strategy, but it is proofed to be -partially- a successful one. That way we found ourselves being connected, for instance in the case of the gas stations, to people who -in order to get the permission to build the gas station- they had to put some effort in giving this gas station a meaning to the cit. For instance, for the gas station that we made -the one with the cupola- the person that we met was actually extremely interesting: we had a lot of discussion with him and he also explained us the psychology of the country, he explained us a lot about what it means to have lived under a regime and what it means afterwards, when you come out of it you and still have these memories. We also tried to develop with him solutions that made it possible to be built. This is why we linked this project to a technical school in Belgium, in order to build an exchange. It didn’t work, but we tried; at a certain point when it didn’t work we changed the design of it in order to have it built in a way, which was possible in Albania, which brought us on a small tour through the country, looking for workshops to make this thing which was in a way rather ambitious. So the exchange between this person and us was extremely enriching. In this sense, every project that we did in Albania was somehow building up part of knowledge, of how to do something, how to link the intelligence of Albania to our intelligence. And slowly we got a body of references and also networks and a way of working which valued both parties.

So I think this productive conflict, that Edi Rama produced, for some architects didn’t work, they found it very destabilizing, and they didn’t see the value because they had made a design and they wanted it executed. So I think our strength was the fact that we said “the design is the starting point: we can go from there and we change in order to provide what is necessary”. Some changes are for the better, other are for the worst. I think that you can really see that because of that exchange. Projects were realized, they produced a kind of presence in the city; they’re not neutral, they say something and they have become something on their own; they were absorbed by the city, they are not completely ours anymore. So it’s not that we can look at our sketches and say, “OK, the sketch is realized and we can take the picture”. That was indeed possible, but we choose to learn a lot from other energies and other dynamics that have been already absorbed by us. I find it is very interesting that you add precision to a process that is already happening, add energy to it and you are one of the people that are doing it. So we stand very much behind the things that we have developed in Albania -it’s true that we have. You are somehow forced to adapt your value criterion; or -let’s say- the criterion of judgment of these projects are not criterion that you learn in school. Let’s say that with the criterion that we learned in school, these projects would be failures because they’re not controlled, they are messy, but for us they are interesting and they are more striking and engaging than projects that we had a good control of.

OnArchitecture Last on this country is about Atelier Albania. Can you provide us with more context on this project? Which are their main objectives and strategies? In the debate with Rama and Sala you talked about ugliness, change of expectations an connections between people. Could you talk more about this entire operation? We are really interested about it, considering that an operation like this could be well appropriated and retested in a context like Chile, in which we also operate as architects.

Freek Persyn With Atelier Albania we decided to take a different role. We have invested a lot in doing projects and, of course, to do good projects you need good conditions and that has everything to do with the brief. Because the situation in Albania is a situation where the ministers have decision power but not necessarily a lot of budget. So they have created an Albanian fund not only to attract foreign money but also to deal with the little budget that they have Then you have the territorial planning agencies, which are basically about creating the rules and creating the frameworks for the projects that are decided by the ministers and executed by the development fund -to give it a frame.

Atelier Albania is a kind of small entity, ideally very free of both local and international expertise, which somehow takes these entities and tries to curate the connection between them, to link money, to link money to ideas and to link ideas to the right framework. So sometimes it’s taking up an idea that comes from a certain minister and to see how it could be possible within a certain framework. But it is also about re-thinking how frameworks should work and so what kind of data should you have and what kind of information you should develop to make the right decisions. We strongly believe that design could play a strong role in that, in creating a framework to use design to show possible connections. So the idea of Atelier Albania is to reinforce the links between these three different entities in certain moments, in time, where things are still open and to design briefs, basically. It means that we have taken the decision not to be architects anymore in that specific location, to step back and to create the conditions for other architects to work better -and not only architects, let’s say, it's for project developers in general. It’s linked to the International Architecture Biennial in Rotterdam, which has created a legacy of its own, together with its own culture of seeing architecture in this development of briefs, using design to do that. In that sense, it’s both an opportunity and an engagement that we want to take, because we have received a lot from Albania and we think it’s important that a country opens up and therefore we have decided to step aside and take a different role, to have different possibilities.

OnArchitecture Which is the current status of the Atelier?

Freek Persyn It is ongoing.

The structure it’s like this: you have 100 days, 300 days, 1000 days. So in 100 days we develop the basic structure, the basic position and role they should have. We are involved, the Architectural Biennial of Rotterdam is involved, also local people are involved and the territorial planning agencies.

A second step -that should finish by the end of August/ beginning of September- is that we’ve done a scan of things. And, for example, schools are a huge issue. We are proposing to have a kind of metabolistic reading of the territory, more based on flaws, and that’s only based on a spatial structure -this is something which has been developed by the IBR. So, in the beginning of September we will present a list of projects to be developed in the coming years, which it’s about linking projects to education. For instance, there will be a summer school in the beginning of September as well, and this is also linking two international experts. The idea is to have a lot of dialogue with these processes; it’s like a learning network of people working together. One plan that we have is also to collect all the architecture design material, because planning during communist time was very well done -it was very professional: there are some physical models in the museum of Albania, there’s a lot of things to dig up and to connect with, both from the past and in today’s possibilities.

I don’t have a complete overview; there are a lot of universities involved. But we’ve done things mostly together with Epoka University, which is one of the biggest -two studios together with them, together with an university of in Belgium. First one was to study the irrigation system during communist times, and the second one was about shared infrastructures -the jury was a few days ago. This school -I think- is very interesting, and they also have a new building, which I haven’t seen myself but -from which I have heard- is a very good building, done by Albanian architects, a young office. So, after ten years you see that kind of moves that Albania did to move up and invite other architects' influences on local culture. And quality is coming up, because -of course- they are also talented young people, learning fast and it’s a very young country. I think, in that sense, there is a lot of potential.

IV. URBAN PROJECT

OnArchitecture Let’s continue with urban projects. Here’s another quote from you at A-Week Conference Marathon:

Architecture as a way of how to deal with urbanism and also to open up situations in environments which is not only very built up but also very categorized (…) not to trace clarity in this mess but more to develop moments of different scale.

First thing we can comment is that 51N4E's urban vocation isn't something common in the most visible architectural practices. In general -and this is even more clear in contexts like Latin America- cities have completely forgotten by contemporary architecture. This is why we are interested in your big-scale strategies.

Second thins we want to remark is that, according to the latter quote, your way of dealing with a city project is quite different from the approach of your neighbors DOGMA, whom from day one have decided to trace clarity through their proposals.

a) So first question is about you describing your positions on the urban project a bit further, mainly focusing on how you respond to the current architectural panorama –if you want, you can take DOGMA or another practice to make a counterpoint with your stances-.

Freek Persyn It’s obvious that cities are not very clear. And cities have their own kind of problems urbanizing territories that we all live in, which -I think- are very equal: if you go to Flanders, if you go to Istanbul, if you go to Latin America, scales change and densities change, fold lines are stronger or weaker, but -in general urbanization happening there didn’t produce a lot of coherence; it produced a lot of efficiency and a lot of speed but not a lot of ambiguity, in the sense that you can't use one thing for more things than one. And so, when we approach these situations, what we try to do is to check for this multiplicity of things. We think the problem with cities is not a problem of clarity but it is more a problem of multiple uses and multiple interpretations; we have the feeling that if you want to enhance the strength of the urban environment that we have, it is more important to look at the margins than striving for clarity. This can be extremely simple. For instance, a sidewalk, which is six meters wide: if you provide it a wider surface, then you will notice that it has a lot more potential than a simple sidewalk of 1 meter wide, which is only made for walking -people just use it for walking and the rest is impossible. If you widen this up, then suddenly more kind of multiple uses are possible.

So there’s this kind of ideas of how to use cities, like, if if you look at children, you can learn a lot. We have unlearned a lot of things which are evident -this is our approach to cities. And maybe a lot has to do with what I said about unlearning your references, at the beginning: if you train yourself and look at things more like a child, like playing around, you can see what is possible, what you like, especially in trying to ask yourself the question: if I do this thing now, what will be possible for other people? I can like it or not, but I can also try to judge it. If it will give potential for other people to use it, it's good, and this is what we always said to ourselves -we never worked only for clients, but we see society as our clients. I think it has to do with small things like this. If you do great changes in Albania, if you do it in a certain way, suddenly you offer possibilities to other people, you don’t just design a nice bridge but you design a bridge which offers possibilities. This is, of course, a tricky statement. And a lot of architects would say we shouldn’t do this, because -of course- it is uncontrollable. It works in Albania, also because people have this kind of mentality. In Belgium, people may think in a more categorized way. But in the end, the young people always surprise me, they are really intuitive animals and if you offer these possibilities, it doesn’t happen very often that people do not use it. And it also hasn’t happen very often that, when we design something, we try to open up possibilities -that I saw a situation that I hadn’t thought of before. So there's always something happening which I didn’t think of, yet still you are preparing yourself and trying to design a good service, creating potential -I think it's very powerful. And it is about taking away the clear uses, not blocking them, but opening up and show you can use things in a different way. Very often it has to do with creating ambiguity in the things that you design, and it could be the sidewalk -which is too wide- or an interior space which feels very rough and a bit like an outside space; a handrail which feels like street furniture. All these things are very clear messages to people that use buildings, they say, “feel free to use it”, and people understand this message -you don’t have to put subtitles. This kind of physicality of dealing with buildings is something that everyone understands. And I think it is our goal to unlearn our professional practice and to relearn this kind of intuition: to make things to offer potential, and to use ambiguity to create these conditions. This is the main underlined goal of our work.

OnArchitecture We would now like to know more about your position on urban projects and how to deal with them in different contexts such as Albania or even Chile, in less developed conditions. Can you go further on this necessity of Europe to have large-scale public open spaces that allows introverted neighborhoods to open up to a new scale? You can also refer to the disappointing spatial presence of the European Union stated in your description of The Triangle project.

Freek Persyn The whole idea of the European project is to think of autonomy and individuality, but to link it to a larger common frame, and this is the key question of today society. We’ve all learned how to be individuals but now we all notice that -being by yourself- you are not as free as you think you are. The tension that you feel as individual is also the tension that, at least in Europe, states deal with: they want to be free and autonomous to decide, but still they feel they need to connect to larger frameworks, otherwise it doesn’t work. And especially today, with distances becoming so small, the world has became one thing -at least in terms of proximities in travels. You have to deal with this dilemma. To me, the feeling, the necessity of Europe as a political project is very strong. But I think Europe hasn’t arrived yet, at articulating the fact that this common frame should not be the dominating frame. Today's failure of the European project is that it still seems very much like the top-down implementation of a few ideas, and I’m not against top-down but this kind of top-down needs to articulate better -you have to use the friction between these two movements. Europe doesn’t seem to be interested in it and you can see it in the public space of Brussels, very strongly of course. The institution of Europe is present in Brussels and the way they deal with the public space, which is -I would say- the key value of the common frame, the place where its shown, articulated. So if you go to the main street of European district, you would see all of these entities showing off their programs and their ideas as posters on the pavement, without creating any interaction or any link to the people who are already there; they disconnect the program, which is -of course- important: to have ideas and to have main goals. You cannot do anything without that; you cannot do it without linking to a physical and concrete reality, that way they never become tangible and you have to do both things at once. Today, Europe is busy only on the clouds, but you have to link the cloud to a concrete articulation and that’s why we proposed projects for Brussels, because we feel that Europe could use Brussels as a kind of example. All the people that come to Brussels from all over Europe to meet here and engage with each other should use public space to do it. So we think it should be articulated on a different scale of locality, the one of the frame I mentioned before.

OnArchitecture Could you refer to another visions or projects of your office that are dealing with the urban project? We are thinking, for example, in Brussels 2040, your work in Bordeaux or Slow Genk Fast Genk; or even the iconographic Eurospace from back in 2000, which you did only with Peter and Johan, a first approach or speculation on European Space.

Freek Persyn We have done a few proposals for Brussels. I don’t know if it’s necessary to explain them, but what is interesting in Brussels is that you have this poly-centrality: it’s a city looking for a common frame, and we think you can articulate it in different scales. It is basically about making spaces where you feel another scale, which is also made by another perspective, which is more inclusive rather than exclusive. Inclusive in the sense that they address different users and different perspectives. And I think there’s a real potential to create spaces, which make room for exchange. For instance, we proposed -not so far from here- to retrace a sort of openness to the city, to create some voids; some undefined spaces rather then categorized spaces. These undefined spaces -I think- are actually an invitation for people to provide a definition by themselves. It is important that public space is a place of confrontation and not just a leisure environment. So if you want to install a sort of sense of belonging into people you also need to confront them with something so that they can decide to step into it or not. It is not the strategy of a shopping center, where you are absorbed -you become a part of a general movement. It is really important that you are stabilized, thrown back into yourself and -again- children know how to deal with this because it’s how they learn to live. As adults, that’s a challenge for us -to step back into this mode. But I think that’s a real gift that politicians could give to people: to create a frame to allow design.

V. (HIDDEN PROGRAMME)

OnArchitecture Here is a brief quote from one article of your friend Anri Sala, extracted from Double or Nothing:

Back in 1998, they (51N4E) were concerned to challenge the marginalization of the architect as a ‘designer’. The point, for them, is not to embellish this reality with beautiful artifacts, but to find ways of affecting its performance, triggering new social relations.

What 51n4e are proposing is a change in the paradigm of the architectural project. Against the dominant trend of the past 20 years –which has been to over-express the materiality of architecture –they are proposing a return to a narrative approach founded on a response to the major social issues of today: the shrinking of the public domain, the growth of individualism, isolation, communitarianism.

a) Which was the cultural and social atmosphere back in the days when you founded 51n4e? Was this attitude towards architecture a reaction to the things you were seeing in Europe –the rise of star-architects or even styles like Superdutch-?

Freek Persyn The context when we founded the office was indeed a moment when Dutch architecture was very strong and also very interesting, I think. But it also was the moment when Flanders started to organize its procedure system. So when we started, there was a potential for young Flemish architects to be involved in situations where they could try out things and to grow through these experimentations. For me, it is very different if you talk about Dutch architecture of that moment in time: there’s a very big difference between the attitude of some offices, especially I think the office of OMA, which was very pro-active but also always very self-critical. And the more festive atmosphere of the Super Dutch, well, the festive atmosphere doesn’t necessarily link to the attitude of all the offices involved in that scene. I had the feeling it was more of a kind of policy or branding operation, which didn’t make to the work of these architects a lot of justice. Because most of these offices were dealing with very multiple ways and suddenly they were reduced to a certain formal style, which, in my perception, didn’t do them very well. But, after of the success of this movement, we have to found it interesting yet we didn’t need to belong to it, although we appreciated it very much and we have learned a lot from it. I think it has to do with the need of finding your own reason to do things and I believe it’s never good to do something just because you want to do it like this person or that person; you can look up to people and never try to become like them in order to find your reason to do things. We also found an important reason to do things in the relation with clients and people we meet; we always try to understand very well want they want but also how they could be more ambitious with what they want and at the end we always worked for people that were interested in exchange and dialogue. And thanks to the context in Flanders, where experiments were allowed and built, all this was possible. So procedures were defined like this: if there was a competition, where one or two younger people were always invited, this kind of condition slowly allowed to setup a network of people that were interested equally as us in exploring things. That way, we quickly developed our own approach and we were also very supported from Holland -we won some prizes there. The way Dutch people are open up to the world, well, I think is something Belgium for sure can learn from. Also its International Architecture Biennale: I’m very impressed by the way they really try to construct something with it, it’s not just about showing things to other people, but they are specifically constructing a culture -I think this is very powerful.

OnArchitecture Here is another quote from this same article: The sheer diversity of the proposals seems to suggest fluctuating architectural positions. But let’s be clear: this coherence does exist, even if its not expressed as an easily recognizable style.

Although we agree with Anri Sala, these fluctuating architectural positions are almost unavoidable when you are working associated with more people. It is impossible to aspire to have the supposed coherence of someone like Olgiati when you work as a collective- In your case, these fluctuating positions could be represented by the three founders of the office –Johan, Peter and you-.

We would now like to talk about the inner logic behind 51n4e, its operational structure. How would you define your role and the one of the other members at the office, including Peter (who has just left 51N4E)?

Freek Persyn The culture of the office was really built on the productive conflict at the beginning, between the three founding partners. And maybe now we are in an office ten times the size of back then and the question has become how to use this potential of productive conflict and not to link it to persons but to cultures. So we have no ambition to become a proper office: we want to become something like a cultural movement, where this idea of productive conflict is shared by many people; it doesn’t become an office with a brand but more an office of cultures and of mentalities. And we are interested in sharing and exchanging this, so the way we are setting up the office today is that we articulate the moments of the brief more clearly, working more before the brief and explicitly organizing situations where we can do this. But we also want to trace the line from this strategic part before the brief all the way through to the implementation of it, because the way architecture communicates is intuitive and it’s physical and that’s the real power. So the goal of the office is to trace this line from strategy to implementation, and that implementation also starts to produce the strategy that you have invented in the beginning. I think today 1/3 of the office is working more on the real strategies to think of conditions, to work on territories and to work on research questions, and 2/3 are working more on implementation, trying to set up the office like this. The link between the two is always activated, so it means we don’t see the office just as two partners and just a bunch of producers but we work a lot with very motivated and intelligent people, both inside and outside the office. I think it’s important to create a common frame for this work, but this common frame has to allow a lot of freedom and responsibility for people to engage with projects and take responsibilities for them. So, the kind of engagement we took 15 years ago was that we would like the people that work here to have the same sense of autonomy as we had back then, and I think if we achieve that it will be successful.

VI. VICES: LABOUR

OnArchitecture One good thing with time is that it provides you with a lot of lessons on the mistakes made by your predecessors. Maybe you reacted to the objects, fetishizied materialism and virtuosity of the architects before you, following your own path towards an strategic understanding of architecture.

These days there is a lot to react to, many things that go beyond the mere forms or shapes in architecture projects. We will go straight to some of them, specially because you seem to have a honesty in the way you present your ideas, something quite really rare amongst us architects.

First thing we can recall are the exploitative working conditions of architecture offices. A model promoted by big practices such as OMA, instrumentalizing their own statement of Voluntary Prisoners of architecture. This way of dealing with your own colleagues has been appropriated all over the world, from Japan to Chile, abusing the old idea of master and apprentice in an industrial scale. This situation is not only worryingly wrong because a group of people is abused every day -unpaid interns, long working hours, high doses of stress, anxiety, etc- but also because this amateurism is quite wrong as a portrait of our profession towards society, lowering our standards in comparison to other fields.

a) First thing we would like to know is your general position towards this conflict. Do you agree with us on the idea that this is a vice that should be eradicated as soon as possible? On the other hand, how do you manage this problem in your own practice?

Freek Persyn In general, architecture and spatial production is not valued very highly. It is also true that this kind of system of offices, where people are exploited is something to really avoid. But it is also very important to realize that people that are at the head of these offices are not necessarily in better conditions than their workers. Some time ago, I read an article about Rem Koolhaas and he often complains about the fact that his financial status doesn’t match his international reputation. So I think there is a real issue of valorizing the profession and it goes for the whole range of building production I think it also goes for contractors and for people that work on the building, and it also goes to what kind of responsibility you take to the client.

In the beginning of your question you were saying something about architecture's morality and that’s something that we always avoided, to say “they are like this and we are like this”: we are all part of the same system. And if we want to change that system, we have to take completely different positions and they shouldn’t be reactionary to people we admire. If you want to work differently, you have to value people differently; you have to look at the whole system, you have to look a how politicians use architects to challenge that. So, we have to build a lot of resistance, but this resistance shouldn’t be reactionary but a real resistance and try to improve conditions for ourselves and for everyone as a common agenda and not only an agenda of “the young versus the old” or of “the successful versus the unsuccessful”. And what is really interesting about this aspect is that the world is changing and the exchange between the West and the South and the North and the South, well, there’s a re-balancing of that. And the notion of exchange could help a lot in building this new awareness, which is an important topic of scale to work on.

For me that’s the core issue: it is an issue of autonomy versus a common frame. So I think I like that young people that come and work here have a clear idea of which are their boundaries. They don’t want to be exploited and they want to be taken seriously. And if you want to be taken seriously, you can’t just look at you own circle, but also at the circles that are bigger than you. I think the real challenge it’s also a challenge for young people and for people older than me, which is to construct this common frame together. In the Biennial in Venice, it was very striking to see that modernity is still very much considered as a strike and not as a condition. And modernity is a working condition, a condition of intelligent workers as ourselves and, if you want to value things differently, this has to become our primary concern: to value architecture. It means completely changing how you judge buildings, to step away from static value judgments and more ethical ones.

I know this is a challenge and I’m only making the first steps.

VII. HONESTY

OnArchitecture One personal quality you do not really feel until you meet someone is a feeling of honesty in the way this people express their ideas or thoughts. We have to say that you project this kind of aura. So question is about honesty and how important it is for you to be straightforward, particularly when practicing architecture, making projects and talking about them.

Freek Persyn You treat people the way you want to be treated: you want to be taken seriously, you want to be respected, you want to be challenged. Therefore, it’s like natural not to be cynical.

VIII. COMMON SPACE

OnArchitecture As we told you in our first e-mail contact, our architectural practice is named Plan Común (Shared Plan). From last year we have been leading an international research project titled Plan Común: Público-Privado (Shared Plan: Public-Private), a critical approach with architecture projects on the tension between public and private space: the ultimate aim is to provide fertile alternatives of public space. In other words, instead of trying to be politically correct when it comes to deal with public space, we want to provide an explicit position towards it -even if it means to undermine private qualities-.

In relation to this, here is a brief quote from your interview for ATLAS: The idea of common spaces which are not necessarily public spaces, thinking if it can be shared space, or how can a building be organized around it. I think this is the common thread running through all the work.

We would like to know your conceptual and ideological position towards this tension between the public –understood as common- and the private -whether it be domestic life or straightforward accumulation of wealth. You may have the word.

Freek Persyn One thing we have always found very valuable, and we have always tried to work with in the projects, is the idea of the public and the private not as categories. Our interest is in the interaction and also the productive conflict between them and you cannot actually think about one without the other. Common space, which is a representation of the public and the State, well, they are very often spaces which do not produce a lot of meaning. The only moment where they become meaningful is very often the moment where people decide to challenge the authority of the State and they go and protest. So, it is important to have these kind of spaces that allow this kind of definition of the public space; is something that is organized by the public authority that represent us, I think, this is only a very small limited part of the question. There is a huge question to be developed in the sense of daily construction of public-private interaction, and the private has a lot to gain by using this. To give a very simple example: I have a very small son, he’s 2 and half years old. Brussels is a city which was entirely built in the 19th century, it is a very bourgeois city; the facades are very representative, very symbolic representations of the people that live behind them, so the interaction with the street is not very strong. Last week, my son was sitting on the door and he didn’t want to get in, he wanted to remain there seated, looking at the street. And if you imagine that the whole city of Brussels changes and all of these interaction spaces could become into something where you could seat and look at the street, well, it would change it completely and it would be a much more pleasant place to seat, instead of how they are like today -enclosed in themselves. This means to expand the space that you have by linking it to other spheres and diminishing economic circumstances. There’s a lot of potential to be found in linking up and opening up things like this in a more ambiguous way, you could use it in a better way. In the Chilean pavilion (of Venice Biennial 2014) I saw this comparison of all the prefab systems and you see that it's inevitable to work with this method if you consider the world's growing population. If you only look at the units, this method is simply suffocating. But if you think about the interaction that you can create with the surroundings, with this systematic approach, I wouldn’t mind it so much. If this approach is combined with a functional way of looking at space, then it becomes really suffocating and I think this is very challenging.

So, it is about playing with the tension between the private and the public. Not separating them, not confronting them, but using the tension -there’s a lot of potential to be found.