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Het strandwachtershuisje is vandalismebestendig omdat het aantal toegangen op de begane grond is geminimaliseerd (slechts 4, waarvan die voor de boot voor het publiek niet herkenbaar is). Bovendien is de buitenkant voorzien van een harde en duurzame afwerking met een toplaag van zand. Onverwoestbaar. De binnenwanden zijn eveneens voorzien van een harde en gladde onderhoudsarme afwerking. Verder is het door de bolle vorm moeilijk beklimbaar en kan het glazen uitkijkoog in de winter beschermd worden door translucente polyester panelen. Ondoordringbaar.

Het strandwachershuisje is net zo contextueel en tegelijk onverwacht als het strand van Nesselande zelf. Het meer en het strand, immers, zijn schitterend ingebed in het stedenbouwkundige plan (beter nog dan het Weerwater in Almere), maar blijft telkens weer verrassen door zijn on-Nederlandse allure. Zo ook het strandwachtershuisje. De voorziening is locatie-eigen door zijn zanderige uitstraling, maar tegelijkertijd onverwacht door zijn eigenzinnige, unieke uitstraling.

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.)

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.’