As a designer, a deviser of forms, I am particularly interested in the spatial properties of forms. A building's spatiality is directly influenced by decisions regarding the conjoinment of its parts. I seek to achieve an expressiveness among the elements of spatial enclosure, roof, floor and wall. When designing I follow a path comparable to that followed by Louis Kahn, whose repetition of pyramid-shaped roof elements creates a spatial structure that also has a sculptural effect on the underside of the roof. The critic Colin Rowe regards Kahn's work as a reaction to the 'free plan', one of whose resources is an uninterrupted ceiling plane.

The design brief I set myself consists of a workshop and some smaller instruction rooms for giving short technical courses to young people who have left school prematurely. After a preparatory initial phase, pupils can move on to the second phase in the workshop. This post-school institution has much in common with a factory floor on an industrial estate. The challenge lay in giving consistent form to the workshop using repeating expressive elements and at the same time satisfying the spatial demands large and small spaces in a single system ought to meet.

My design is marked by a deep floor plan. This means that there is usually less distance between roof and floor than between the outer walls. I therefore looked for a way of expressing both roof form and daylighting to the full. The roof structure I developed is based on tetrahedra. Walls of profiled glass can be run together along the continuous lines, closing off the shared spaces of the workshop. The workshop can be viewed in its entirety from the cafeteria, giving an unequivocal view of a profession in the making. The floor is a space frame composed of tetrahedra far smaller that those of the roof trusses, giving a greater number of options in connecting the partitions of the smaller multiform spaces below. Daylight entering the spaces left by this floor structure penetrates to the lowest level. The facade is a derivative of the roof, consisting as it does of elements that can be fully opened up so that activities can move into the open air. In the workplaces, mobile instruction rooms built by the pupils act as a 'front office'.

My project shows that architects can use technology to achieve spatial quality. By controlling the relationship between detail and building and by deploying structure and daylighting as a means of expression, it is possible to design an expressive and consistent building custom-made for its programme. The technology is simple, the constructional elements basic and the outcome spatially complex. With nodes of minimal dimensions, the structure at all scales gives clear-cut intersections between the constituent planes. Hence the title of my project: Crystal.

Place of education: AvB Amsterdam | Specialization: architecture | Tutors: Chris Scheen, Yushi Uehara, Gianni Cito