As unambiguous as this shopping machine is lying here on its doorstep, waiting for visitors, as ambiguous it is in relation to its shape and colour, it is sometimes straight and other times round, from the one side purple and from the other side blue. In the shelter of this enormous lifted and stretched drop of water, an inner square with almost exotic conditions has been shaped. It is as if a whole life of its own has been able to develop itself inside this inner space, in which façade openings, bill boards, lampposts, wastebaskets, bicycle sheds and road markings have gone through a joint and balanced growth. As if they have been able to prepare themselves in peace for years, for the arrival of hundreds of thousands of visitors and their cars, ready to host and not being interested in anything else but to treat their guests to that one, exclusive experience.

That exclusivity does not necessarily mean an extraordinary budget, is the task we set ourselves by making something with a modular and therefore efficient building system which is specific and thus unique. Where modular systems usually result in all too predictable shapes, we managed, within the regime of recurring façade elements, to put up a system of façade openings with such variation that a seemingly much bigger variety of windows, shop windows and entrance doors can be made. Even the choice for a directionless system of patterns of 8,10 by 8,10 metres did not result in a neutral building, but in a design in which it is exactly the deviations and exceptions which become visible. Is that not what everyone dreams of: a modular system that results in something unique?

The building is completely made of polystyrene foam and polyester and is, as such, the world’s largest structure in synthetic materials (50m x 10m x 5m). The available budget meant that it could never have been created using conventional construction methods.

People often wonder about the building’s shape and what it represents, and there are a number of possible answers. A correct answer in architectural terms is that it can be viewed as a large boulder that has been worn away by footsteps and sight lines. A correct answer in philosophical terms is that it can be regarded as a form that has not been pored over but which simply allowed itself to be discovered. A correct answer in terms of the designing process is that it can also be explained as a product of this process, which in this case was somewhat intuitive because of the unfamiliar technical terrain in which everyone had to operate. All these answers are simultaneously correct and irrelevant. Like the white face of a geisha, every opinion and image can be projected onto the building and it has no answers of its own.

Compared to the furthermore generic tunnel the thing seems to have loomed up out of nothing. The thing is all the more strange because the rest – the other concrete walls, the asphalt, the paving stones, the fencing, the illumination lines that are at right angles with the road and the bicycle lane/footpath – looks quite normal. The only extravagance being that orange-red thing.

It is not art, even though it was designed and made with the same limitations. It was not invented to externalise an intimate or personal experience. No, on the contrary, it wants to make an inhuman form of life visible in a usually anonymous tunnel. Only in this way the tunnel is more than a connection between two areas: an alien, immeasurable, asymmetrical and disoriented experience. A tunnel that you will never understand, even though you have been driving through it every day all your life.

As soon as you walk through the colourful outer facades of glass mosaic, you enter yet another world, a low and difficult to define space, a black and white theatre in which the clothes are the most important actors. The white walls, ceilings and display furniture form the side wings that are being carried by a stage of black-pigmented concrete. Only the bar, the couch and some walls in the restaurant are red.

It was already clear from the beginning that the store would not be divided into separate little shops, but that the different brands and articles would be displayed in one big space. It was the proprietor’s specific wish to keep the finish and interior of the store space modest and black and white and to carry through only the curved lines of the exterior on the inside. Thus arises a store space with furniture lined up along a virtual and pleated thread, a thread that, like in Ariadne’s myth, you can follow to be all loaded up outside again.

For most bridges, whether they are fixed or moveable, an architect is not required. They are simply “engineered”, as they call it in professional circles, which results in functional constructions devoid of any poetry whatsoever. Unless it be big, prestigious civil works for which the necessary extra financial resources are reserved. That is why it is actually quite nice that for this relatively small bridge an architect was considered necessary, thus escaping civil engineering indifference.

During the design process we were inspired by the limbs of the praying mantis and the shape of the famous Jedi starfighter from Star Wars, but the language of this bridge corresponds most of all with the design of the pleasure boats that inhabit the Amstel-Drecht canal. It is truly amazing how many different types of these boats there are, every one of them very stylized.

We have made the bridge dark. The colour is something between green and blue, a bit like the water in Holland but more sparkling. The old bridge Vrouwenakker was white, as most bridges are. Why is that? Probably because white is a neutral colour, a colour that does not really express itself. In China white is the colour of death, a reason for us never to choose for it. This bridge is dark, a mysterious and yet elegant figure of which the contours slowly disappear when the evening falls.

Without what is in effect a screen of houses, allowing the level of ambient noise to be brought down to acceptable limits, the rest of the urban design plan for Diependaal would never have seen the light of day. The project’s congenital, altruistic handicap justified the atypical solutions eventually proposed by Nio and his associates in the face of the client’s reservations. So for example the answer to the darkness at the back of the plot was to cantilever out the living room at the first floor level. Moreover, not everyone considers the lack of a garden to be a drawback, and a terrace can be a sales argument, even in suburbia.

In Hilversum, as in any fantastic setting, a house can be both a cavern and a giant, a term that could just as easily refer to the block of flats opposite. The residents are all explorers who are just passing through, threatened by poisonous rays and nostalgic for a place of peace and unspoiled nature that only a handful of neo-modernistic architects, obsessed by the American subculture and pessimistic prophecies, still dare to denounce publicly.’

Is it possible to transform a space that has gone underground and that has been buried as traffic space, into a place to stay? A room that you do not just enter and leave, but that you actually visit? And the other way around: are people capable of behaving like guests instead of hooligans suffering from amnesia, in these kinds of spaces? Not as long as the tunnel only belongs to the municipality, but they will if this is the room of a lucid mind who has decorated the civil construction to his own personal wishes (we suspect, by the way, this is Vasarely’s room).

A boy cycles after his own shadow in the tunnel. He lives in Westwijk and commutes every day between his house and his school, which is situated just at the other end of the tunnel. At home he lives in the well-oiled 3-D world of computer games. At school he slowly writes letters and numbers in clumsy little 2-D notebooks. Both worlds are completely incompatible, also in the cycling boy’s head. Both worlds are constantly arguing except in this small black-and-white universe in which they embrace (or strangle?) each other and become profoundly 2½-D.

Because the bus lane traverses various areas (residential areas, inner city areas, industrial areas, office locations, greenbelts and tunnels) we have conceived all landscape, urban development, architectural and civil facilities for the Zuidtangent as a continuous system to make the image of the Zuidtangent appear as powerful and as clear as possible. With recurring elements – such as coverings, fencings, viaducts, windscreens, sound barriers, tunnels – a system has been designed in which subtle variations are possible. All bus shelter facilities are black and white, apart from the alternating coloured glass roofs (and the bicycle tunnels in the Haarlemmermeer).

The 14 bus stops of the Kerntraject Zuidtangent are partly situated on works of art. Consequently, the concrete constructions can never ever be conceived of as neutral platforms. You simply cannot dissociate the baroque high-tech shelter facilities of the other much-needed civil interventions. Quite some time has been put into adapting the already worked out but not yet designed concrete works of art, in which the cross-section of the viaducts is optimised in order to get a sharper and smaller construction. Within all restrictions, a more elegant road surface profile has been designed. Underneath this profile, expressive solid supports predominate. Therefore, the whole of works of art stands out in a rather fierce way against the flowing coloured glass bus shelter-coverings.

The bended steel fencings, together with the thin prefab concrete panels form the finishing of the edges of the profile of the viaduct. The trick was to avoid the traditional beam/T-bar construction, or at least to make it invisible. This way, what is created in appearance is the desired continuous profile above which the red Zuidtangent-busses skim along at a high speed. The pillars that have been round off at the edges and that have been placed slantwise, literally hold up the bus lane. They are musclemen made of self-condensing concrete. Sometimes, as is the case with the viaduct of the Spaarne hospital, they actually do come out of the ground, as if they give the bus a little push for it to go even faster.

With that the building sets the tone: not only is it embedded inZeeland’s nature, but it also refers to adventure, excitement, discovery and surprise. It is an adventurous building in which all kinds of things can be experienced, from the most intimate moment of relaxation to the wildest impressions. Everybody has something to look for here.

For this leisure park we looked for real experiences. The trees that border the car park and that grow on the square, are real and not made of plastic. From the ZEP-tower kids can actually float to the ground, they do not play in a virtual image. The things that are there to see, to do and to buy relate to physical, often sporty activities: skating, sailing, climbing, biking, working out, dancing and last but not least playing soccer. Of these real experiences the building wants to be a continuation, an experience in the form of wind and water.

At the same time, however, there is the awareness that 90% of our universe consists of dark matter. Matter that could well be the cause of many incomprehensible phenomena in the universe. If you apply this hypothesis to our world, that would mean that fortunately only 10% could really be transparent and obscene. So let us search for the rest, for that 90% dark matter.

Dreams, emotions, plants, stones, but especially animals are part of that 90% dark matter. Animals do not talk. They growl, hiss, whistle, bark. We can hear them, but not understand them. That in itself makes them a mystery. What is more beautiful than staring at an animal that does not say anything? What is more beautiful than an animal that does not communicate and withdraws into its own shadow?

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(The work of art is a 17-meter-long polyester object of 8 animals that have melted together and that are hung with ropes.  At one of the 2 heads of the sculpture a steel box with 12 screens shows movies of animals, recorded by webcams mostly at exotic locations.)