"No man strives to make ugly things, but with me functionality prevails, a building has to be perfect..."
Text: Hans van Wetering"Look, you have to see this." A sunny day in July, KNSM-laan in Amsterdam, an office in an old warehouse, from the terrace we look out on the North Sea Canal where ships sail to and fro.
On the table is a newspaper clipping. "This was handed to me by my wife this morning. She said, 'You're going to talk about beauty right? Take this with you.'" 'A miracle of beauty' reads the headline above the article. It concerns a review of Paolo Sorrentini's film La Grande Bellezza. "Those are two very complex things together huh, wonder and beauty. They have to do with each other, but what beauty is is so difficult to define. "Frits van Dongen ('s-Hertogenbosch 1946), former Chief Government Architect and architect of internationally award-winning buildings such as the Harmonie in Leeuwarden, the Landtong in Rotterdam and The Whale in Amsterdam's Westelijk Havengebied, is reticent when it comes to pinning down the concept of 'beauty', making circumlocutory movements. It has to do with phases in your life, the beauty of your children, it can surprise you, but no, surprise is not a necessary condition, and, again no, the pursuit of beauty is not an all-important driving force in his work, as people might suspect.
"No one strives to make ugly things, but for me functionality prevails, a building has to be perfect. Of course, you can insist that in that perfection lies beauty, but during design it hardly plays a role."
It is a surprising statement, especially since Van Dongen's buildings have been praised for their beauty. The Whale was called in the press 'a whale, with its tail in the air and its chest turned proudly towards the IJ', called a fish that rises 'above the waves of the brown, brick low-rise where its silver scales reflect the sunlight in all directions'.
But that shape was precisely the outcome of a rational process, says Van Dongen: "The brief was to create a building of more than 200 flats in an area of 50 by 100 metres. We started with a rectangular flat shape, but that didn't work. When we put it into the solar computer, it turned out that the lower floors didn't get enough light. To still provide sunlight, we lifted the sides, cut off the corners of the building and put them on top. "A building should 'work', be functional, the form is resultant. Van Dongen repeats it over and over again, like a mantra, almost as if to conjure the role of beauty in his work.
"In my very first assignment ever, I sketched a long winding building. The client loved it, but the people commenting saw nothing in it. In those days, people still smoked a lot. The table in the project room was full of ashtrays, matchboxes and sugar cubes. With that mess, I then made that pendulum shape during a meeting and then suddenly they were enthusiastic, now they understood the building. So is that beauty? Aesthetics?"
Becoming an architect was not a boyhood dream. He hesitated between art school and studying chemistry, but on reflection the former seemed very non-committal and the latter boring, "with those thick books of Catholic, wafer-thin paper". Someone suggested architecture. He went to have a look and was sold, because of the regime above all: " College in the morning, doing exercises in the afternoon and learning a bit in the evening, that seemed to suit me."
The romantic image of the architect as an inspired artist with a vocation is far from him but, surprisingly, he admires Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer, renowned for the mesmerising sculptural forms of his buildings. "Yes, that was truly a sculptor. I often visited him in Brazil. Unbelievable, then he made a drawing on the spot, in one line huh, the pencil does not come off the paper (Van Dongen's hand swings through the air)... tadatadatada.... so beautiful! His buildings breathe beauty, but they are also one-dimensional. He was all about the shell, how the building was put together inside was for others to work out."
Van Dongens is much less enthusiastic about another 'architect-sculptor', Portuguese Álvaro Siza (like Niemeyer, winner of the Pritzker Prize, the unofficial Nobel Prize for architecture). "You know that church of his with the 15-metre-high door? Then I think: yes, it's nice to have such a door, but could it be a little less? In that respect, perhaps I am also a Dutchman."
Back to the clipping on the table. What about that Sorrentini film, in which you are blown away by the aesthetics? "My wife loves it, but it also irritates me yes, it is so emphatically meant to be beautiful. I find Fellini's films fascinatingly beautiful, but mostly because of the bizarre stories. For me, it's all about the content anyway, that determines the quality."
"The ending of a shot movement, when the hand flips forward, that's like a dying swan, that looks so incredibly beautiful."
We walk into the office, on the wall a maquette of The Whale. Elsewhere, a floor-to-ceiling wall is plastered with specification drawings. As we get coffee, he recounts his days as a top basketball player. "The ending of a shot motion, when the hand flips forward, that's like a dying swan, that looks so incredibly beautiful," he says. And about how his children were annoyed that he was always touching buildings with his hands: "I have to feel the material, not just see that grey plate, but feel the grain structure of the iron." To experience the beauty, you have to touch the building? "Almost do, yes.
Van Dongen takes his monograph, released last year, out of the cupboard and flips it open. Musis Sacrum, the concert hall in Arnhem. "Was voted the most beautiful building in the Netherlands last year." It sounds careless and proud at the same time. "You can slide the glass wall behind the orchestra completely open so that when the orchestra turns around, it plays towards the park, with the park as the auditorium. The outside of the building is of different shades of green ceramic, so it dissolves into the park, as it were. The park becomes auditorium, the concert hall becomes park. When it was finished and I was standing there, I did think: this is really the most beautiful thing I have ever made. "You emphasise functionality and craftsmanship, but each time that one word keeps popping up: beautiful, so beautiful! "I don't number it away. But if you ask me: what is beauty, I don't have an answer. If I look professionally, yes occasionally it is beautiful. Is that beauty then?" He laughs: "maybe."
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