During the lecture, Holtrop explained that his work starts with form and material that often come from outside architecture. The architect believes that things can always be re-examined and reinterpreted and, for this reason, they can also always be seen as architecture. The lecturer explained that in his daily life, inspired by how someone can see a butterfly or a lake in a Rorschach inkblot, he tries to look freely at material and form and work with them intuitively, more or less without a plan.
In his way of looking at architecture, the architect wants his work to remain interpretable, exactly the way it originated, but not for one single conclusion, even when the project is finished. In this way, architecture emerges by imagining the next step after the previous steps that have been taken.
Anne Holtrop was born in the Netherlands in 1977 and graduated cum laude in Architecture from the Academy of Architecture of Amsterdam in 2005. He opened his own practice in the same year and was awarded several grants from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB). He was also awarded the Charlotte Köhler Prize for Architecture from the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation.
He was an artist-in-residence in Tokyo in 2009, in Seoul in 2011 and in Copenhagen in 2012. He is the Course Director of the Master's Degree Programme in Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam and is the editor of OASE, an independent architectural journal. His work includes projects for temporary and permanent buildings and he occasionally collaborates with the artists Krijn de Koning and Bas Princen. He has won several awards, including the Stipend Fonds BKVB (2012), the First Prize National Museum for the New Dutch Waterline (2011), the First Prize Cinema Hill (2010), the Charlotte Köhler Prize and the First Prize Work for Marne-la-Vallée (2008).
The lecture was part of the 2013 ESARQ Forums "Atmospheres. The Sense of the Things" organized by the ESARQ School of Architecture. It is a subject dedicated to discussing and reflecting on the realities of architecture. The main objective of the lectures is to share knowledge, perspectives and contrasts between students and teachers on the theory and criticism of architectural work.
This year, the aim is to discover a new architectural perspective by paying thoughtful, sensitive and intelligent attention to the different speakers. Led by experts such as Pau Pedragosa, the architectural firm Flores & Prats, Arturo Franco, Adam Kahm, Barão-Hutter, Tom Emerson, Anne Holtrop and Studio Mumbai, the lectures delve into areas in architecture that were hidden in the past by styles, trends and ways of thinking.
