Conscious of the gap between high and low culture, theory and design the Powerhouse Company neither only wants to build, nor just to theorize on the reasons for a new architecture, but instead bring back architecture as an encompassing, constructive and innovative practice.
Our main focus and dedication is on two levels: first of all, we love to design and we want to make things beautiful. As Raymond Loewy once put it: ugliness is hard to sell. So not only do we try our best to design beautiful facades, or beautifully efficient plans but also a beautifully good commitment to regulations. Secondly: we aim to build technically perfect building without looking high-tech. We aim to stay within the budget without making things look cheap. We believe in details. That’s the reason why we try to have the technical control on all our projects. So that we can work from design to detail, and supervise the construction on site.
We are an office of modern architecture and paradoxically that sounds old-fashioned. After all wasn’t the modernist agenda about making things better for everyone? Back then the question was how to provide everyone with light, air and space. But today the questions are no-longer single sided. Now, design can be on the one hand a question of ceiling integrated video beamers, rain-forest showers and play-station rooms – yet it can also be a question of designing hooligan-proof public space that gives place to our culturally rich modern society. For us, these times ask for both exclusive and inclusive designs: specific buildings and objects that embrace the richness of reality and charge their contexts with new means and meanings.
From villa’s to investor driven office buildings: research and design go hand in hand in addressing the issues at stake. Architecture and design are in the end materialized answers to immaterial questions. The proces of design starts with defining the relevant questions and ends with finding the right answers in space, form and shape. It is a dialogue with the site, the client, the advisors and the possibilities of our imagination. But in the end a buliding exists in its own reality and possibly survives its initiators and makers. That’s why, in the end, it is our goal to create architecture and design that has its own distinctive character and is able to create a quality on its own.
