Besides my admiration for the multiple talents of the Dutch artist Armando, it was also our shared interest in the Second World War that prompted me to choose a studio house for Armando as the subject of my final-year project.

This last-named fascination, linked to my family history, seemed certain to place a great strain on the project and the design. So I have done everything to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment and sensation in this project by giving minimum and fundamental shape to a metaphor for life - 'passage'.

If passages are generally used in architecture to join spaces together, in this design the passage is necessary to allow one person, Armando, to change from one guise to another - actor, artist, writer, musician, boxer. At the same time, the passage, a modernist taboo, works as an offbeat proviso for the 'free plan' in which 'emptiness' is present in all its facets. It is this emptiness, a core concept in Armando's work, that has heavily influenced the process and, ultimately, the outcome.

By gathering together all kinds of information, concrete data as well as abstract ideas, I arrived at the present exercise - one house for Armando.

My brief was determined by unravelling Armando into his various roles - actor, artist and musician, with writer and boxer in between these. The exercise became an assignment and from then on, the assembled information was organized so as to climax in a perfect state of emptiness: three buildings, one house.

The choice of Teufelsberg in Berlin as the site (Armando is Dutch, but has lived and worked in Berlin for a very long time) emphasizes the ritual aspect of the house: three buildings along the various routes of his personalities.

Armando Drew, Painted, Scratched and Screeched.
Rage. Incomprehension.
Fascination.

I can still see them.
Innumerable books. War.
My father Reading. Reading to understand.
Not being able to understand.
Incomprehension. Why, and For What.
Who is Guilty. The Enemy.
Those who killed my mother's father. Bergen Belsen.

Place of education: AvB Tilburg
Specialization: architecture
Tutors: Tony Goossens, Wim Korvinus, Pnina Avidar & Martien Jansen