SPACIOUS CRAFTING
Spacious Crafting is a collection of projects, events and publications that expresses our values of situated and hands-on craftsmanship. This approach is inspired by our experience with Asian architecture and further developed through a sustained experimentation at the crossroad between architecture, art and philosophy.
Architectural production often unfolds at a distance, digitally, remotely and detached from the building site. Instead, we value working in place immersed in the dynamic ecologies that sustain us. Architectural craftsmanship, in this sense, is more than technique. It is an relational practice, a way of thinking through the body and learning through direct engagement with the world. This approach resists the abstraction and speed that dominate contemporary building culture. Working on site creates space for slower, more reciprocal ways of making. It allows us to respond to the specific needs of a place, to use found materials, and to involve local communities in the process. It repositions design as a lived, relational act that fosters ecological belonging and the ongoing care of the environments we inhabit.
The Screen, Ningbo, China. Li Xiaodong Architecture
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The Screen
The Screen is a small management building nestled in the mountain range of Dichen Valley, on the outskirts of Ningbo, China. As the first structure in a larger development, it accommodates offices, dormitories, and a public dining hall for the team responsible for maintaining the valley.
Designed while working at Atelier Li Xiaodong in Beijing, the project explores the relationship between architecture and landscape, aiming to soften the boundaries between the built and natural environments. It combines traditional Chinese craftsmanship with contemporary construction techniques. A series of carefully positioned courtyards and a perforated façade blur the line between interior and exterior. Although the façade initially appears to be made of concrete, it is actually a finely crafted brick screen — a delicate, transparent layer that mediates light, privacy, and views.
Photographs by Martijn de Geus.
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Matching & Meshing
Matching & Meshing is a spatial installation exploring our evolving relationship with the sun. Presented at See Lab in The Hague (NL), it features a choreography of nine wooden frames, each moving with distinct rhythms and translucent textures. From dawn to dusk, sunlight animates the installation, revealing shifting colours and reflections that invite a deeper awareness of our entanglement with natural cycles.
Developed through a collaborative, sensorial process on site, the work emerged by engaging directly with materials, light, and the built environment. This embodied approach to craftsmanship emphasizes how attunement to ecological rhythms, such as those of the sun, can guide architectural practice. Iterating on traditional Japanese teahouse architecture, Matching & Meshing proposes a spatial experience that is responsive, situated, and alive to its surroundings. Rather than designing from a distance, it suggests that ecological belonging arises through making in place matching and meshing with the dynamics of the world itself.
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Tiny Perceptions
Tiny Perceptions is a collaborative, pedagogical project situated on the rooftop of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (NL). Over two weeks, students from the Jewellery and Architecture departments worked outside to explore how architecture can heighten sensitivity to shifting weather conditions. Guided by listening to, moving with, and breathing with the environment, we slowed down and opened up to subtle environmental cues. Inspired by Japanese performative practices, we ‘listened with the whole body,’ transforming the rooftop through gentle, site-specific interventions.
Tiny perceptions, a rough texture, a faint vibration, a shift in light or temperature guide the design process. It allows to forget our profession and immerse in an act of creation that is completely naive and yet extremely refined in its technique. New forms of care surface when, after a refreshing shower, the wood grew ‘lazy’ and the wind playfully scattered our materials. In a world marked by environmental degradation, we learn that in-situ craftsmanship can ground us and gently reshape the way we inhabit our surroundings.
Tiny Perceptions, Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam
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Promising Young Dutch Architect:
Future of Craftsmanship in Architecture
We approach architecture as an artisanship of relationships. One of our first explorations of this idea was a design for an inhabited bridge crossing the river between China and Hong Kong. The bridge accommodates border facilities, a historical museum, and a natural walkway linking the landscapes on both sides. Through spatial gestures such as zigzagging paths and reversible sequences, it weaves together different temporalities and ways of moving. What holds value for one visitor may remain unnoticed by another, as the bridge unfolds through diverse speeds, purposes, and perspectives. Detailing and materialization further dissolve boundaries as roof becomes façade becomes floor creating a fluid, relational experience.
This project led to our selection as promising young Dutch architects for the Future of Craftsmanship in Architecture by the Indonesian Institute of Architects, European Chapter. Alongside nine selected peers, we presented our perspective at the Venice Biennale and participated a symposium on the Future of Craftsmanship in Architecture at IFabrica, Amsterdam.
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No Architecture Without Craftsmanship: Thinking With Your Hands
Together with Michael Bolier (M&DB Architecten), Marlies Boterman and Elsbeth Ronner (Lilith Ronner van Hooijdonk) we published the article Thinking with your Hands: No Architecture without Craftsmanship in the Dutch Architecture magazine De Architect.
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Biotopological Craftsmanship
Through practice-based research we have further developed our understanding of architecture as craft of building relationships. Inspired by the Japanese–American artist and architecture duo Arakawa and Madeline Gins, we describe our approach as a biotopological craft: an in-situ craftsmanship of attuned, vital, and situated coordination between social and environmental bodies in motion. This craftsmanship is not about shaping wood but about shaping relations as an ongoing reciprocity between people and their environments. Following anthropologist Tim Ingold, we see these relationships not as connections between separate things, but as correspondences that unfold along the trails of life itself. In this sense, architectural making becomes an embodied dialogue between people, place, and the rhythms that bind them. In collaboration with the Studies of the Architectural Body Research Group at Kansai University in Japan we are deepening this approach to architecture through lectures and (joint) publications.
