This graduation design for an opera house on the Spui in The Hague gave me the opportunity to seek out for myself the areas architecture is capable of addressing today. I opted for a cultural building because of its representative aspect. Cultural buildings often reflect the ideology and zeitgeist of the period they were built in. In this design, zeitgeist joins forces with the Baroque. Transformation, manipulation, melding of nature and technique, vanitas, transience and other such Baroque themes are back as topical issues. The Baroque transformation sets out to solve the problem of representing the present age without slipping into such clichés as trendy information- and media-facades. Just as Piranesi built his Rome on the rubble of Classicism, so I let the ruins speak. It is time that the indoor car park - once the symbol of progress - ceded to the theatre, became theatre. Having stripped away all superfluous facade elements, the remaining raw concrete structure can serve as a free zone for theatrical performances. This garage opera house plugs into the new logistics network of the inner city, the prime feature of which is OMA's basement project. Proceeding from the existing floor areas, the auditorium with its terrace and balconies is manipulated into a continuous concrete structure. Double glazing divides the auditorium from the foyers, its leaves separated by a curtain. Unlike the stage curtain, this one shuts when the performance begins. The public facilities sit on the existing sloping floor areas. A Baroque route architecturale, a carpet of red plush laid over the untreated concrete floor areas and ramps, is dramatically illuminated by a structure of garage lighting and spotlights at the edges of the voids, this way extending the movement of the city into the theatre. Visitors to the restaurants are likewise drawn into the choreographed game of seeing and being seen. All this is visible to the city through the transparent crystalline skin enveloping the theatre complex. The glass sheets of the structural curtain wall alternate in an oblique pattern, as much to provide sufficient transparency as to glitter like crystal. The concealed portions of the theatre, such as the fly tower and artists' facilities, come in a single hermetically sealed box. The unyielding character of this part of the programme is quite literally elasticized by cladding the box in rubber, a concealing, mystifying material.

Place of education: Rotterdam
Tutors: Umberto Barbieri, Paul Bosse, Frits van Dongen, Menno Homan & Jan de Graaf
Specialization: architecture.