Nl Architects

NL Architects is an Amsterdam based office. The three principals, Pieter Bannenberg, Walter van Dijk and Kamiel Klaasse, officially opened practice in January 1997, but had shared workspace already since the early nineties. All were educated at the Technical University in Delft. NL Architects aspires to catalyze urban life. The office is on a constant hunt to find alternatives for the way we live and work. How can we intensify human interaction? We understand architecture as the speculative process of investigating, revealing and reconfiguring the wonderful complexities of the world we live in. Can we compress banality into beauty; squeeze the sublime out of the obvious? How can we transform, twist, bend, stack, stretch, enhance or reassemble the components that constitute our environment into new and better configurations? Some of our projects include Parkhouse/Carstadt (an attempt to integrate auto-mobility and architecture), WOS 8 (a seamless Heat Transfer Station) and the Mandarina Duck Store in Paris. The BasketBar (a grand café with basketball court on the roof) and A8ernA, the redevelopment of the space under an elevated highway, have become emblematic contributions to contemporary culture. Currently the office is involved in ‘numerous projects in various stages of development’, including residential projects, cultural facilities and sports buildings. Early 2007 the office won the prestigious competition for the so-called Forum Groningen: an exhilarating mixture of library, cinema, museum and public space. Now, 12 years later, the building is finally completed and seems to be fully embraced by the locals. The renovation of Kleiburg, a super-sized apartment block in the Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam was granted the EU Mies Award 2017.