Shaping Chaos: Winka Dubbeldam
Winka Dubbeldam, with a wink, said Wednesday she really liked the name of the Rice Design Alliance Fall lecture series, Getting High: Towers in Architecture. “Getting High, this is a really great title for a Dutch person, ” she said to laughter from the roughly 300-member audience.
Dubbeldam was the third of four speakers of the series, that concludes Wednesday, Oct. 7 with Ross Wimer of SOM, Chicago. All the lectures take place at the Brown Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Dubbeldam is the principal of Archi-Tectonics NY and an elegant and pragmatic designer whose work has made her hotly sought-after.
In explaining how she tackles projects, Dubbeldam said she has, of late, been exploring the idea of fragmentation and shaping coherence out of seemly disparate elements.
She had two particularly striking examples. A residential project on Greenwich Street, located on the lower west end of Manhattan, involved the renovation of a six-story former warehouse and the addition of four stories atop the structure. Next to the warehouse — more specifically wrapped around the former warehouse — an eleven-floor building with a pleated glass facade was slated (renderings left and below). 
The residence offers 22 units for “loft-style” living. According to Dubbeldam, “the crease between the two buildings was left on purpose to show the two systems.” The pleated glass facade is telling of Dubbeldam’s early training as a sculptor. “I cannot think flat,” she said.
The second project was the American Loft Building in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia. The building is 12 stories and came with design and budgetary restrictions. “It was quite a challenge,” Dubbeldam said. The building (pictured below) was going to be the tallest structure in the neighborhood and Dubbeldam was concerned with overwhelming the surroundings. So she “made something from several fragments so it does not feel like a tower,” she said. “It was fun to make a building on a low budget and still make it something good to be in,” she said.
According to a profile of Dubbeldam, written by Bill Millard of designbuild-network.com, her work has caught the eye of other architects. He writes in his April 2008 piece:
(Dubbeldam) has noticed for several years that other architects’ work repeats ideas associated with hers – porous facades, sinuous creases, L-shaped overhangs using existing buildings’ air rights – usually in general principle, but at least once in essentially exact imitation, planned for the street directly behind her Greenwich Street building.
Initially surprised, she now attributes most such phenomena to synchronicity and graciously takes the imitations as a compliment. The late Herbert Muschamp of the New York Times told her, ‘obviously this is the new urban model you figured out, and people will copy it, so it’s fine.’ She agreed and took the one blatantly derivative design in stride (privately noting ‘there is justice in the world’ when it ultimately went unbuilt).
The hovering-L form, in any event, looks fairly widespread these days, not least in some of Dubbeldam’s other works: her American Loft Building in Philadelphia comprises three interlocking Ls distinguished by different cladding materials, one featuring dramatically random punch-card fenestration.
During her talk in Houston, Dubbeldam was a charming and self-effacing speaker. She also provided an insightful portrait of the practical challenges an architect faces when tackling a project. She described, often with humor, tangles with zoning authorities, contractors, and opinionated clients.
“Going from pragmatic to champagne is really important,” she said.
According to her website bio, Winka Dubbeldam, a native of the Netherlands, is the principal of Archi-Tectonic NY which was founded in 1994. The firm just recently opened an office in Shanghai. Archi-Tectonics has been featured in several professional journals and in the two monographs “Winka Dubbeldam Architect” by 010 publishers (1996) and “AT-INdex” (2007) by Princeton Press, NY.
Archi-Tectonics has been a finalist in several invited design competitions including the recent Staten Island Sustainable Housing Competition (winner) and the Houthaven Competition in Amsterdam. Among others, Dubbeldam received the “Emerging Voice” award from the Architectural League NYC in 2001 and was nominated as “The Best and Brightest” by Esquire Magazine, Dec 2004.
At the end of her hour-long talk, Dubbeldam took questions from the audience. She was asked how she personally approaches designing to make her creations less of an object and more of an environment.
“I build (the project) from the inside out,” she said, clarifying that she conceives of unifying spaces like courtyards and, with that cornerstone, builds around it. “I’m interested in the politics of spaces and the economies of space.”
Dubbeldam was also asked about an earlier comment in her talk during which she said that she saw no reason why a tower could only have one penthouse at the top of the building.
“Why not make a penthouse on the second floor,” she said. “I like rules because they can be broken,” she said. She also noted that architects have been taking design cues from car companies. Dubbeldam said she saw no reason for her car to be more “intelligent” than her home.
Dubbeldam, graduated from the Academy of Architecture in 1990, then studied at Columbia in New York in 1992, she said. She got to New York City and “forgot to leave,” she said.
In her talk she also stressed the importance of incorporating flexibility into projects. She noted one past job in which she was given contradicting instructions about five times.
“If you don’t design for (changes), you’re really in trouble,” she said.
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