Biography
I’m an architect who primarily writes, or a journalist who happens to have studied architecture. Either is fine. When people ask whether I don’t miss designing buildings (which happens quite a bit), I always say that writing is also a sort of designing.
I used to want to be farmer, or a barge captain, or something equally autarkic (I didn’t know that word yet, but in retrospect it fits all of my old dreams of the future). In grammar school the architect entered the picture: at home, instead of doing my homework, I would sit at my desk, looking out at a deathly quiet residential street, and draw one building design after the other. Houses, streets and cities flowed effortlessly from my pen in my teenage bedroom.
So I went to Delft University of Technology. There, and later during a brief career at an architecture firm, I found out that architecture is more than just making sketches. When detail plans, structural calculations and contractors came into play, my interest suddenly plummeted. My work for the university newspaper, Delta, soon took more of my time than my studies, and gradually the lines made way for the letters.
Following a journalism programme in Rotterdam I became a professional architecture journalist. I wrote for publications including the newspapers Het Parool and NRC Handelsblad and the magazines de Architect and Frame. I also contributed pieces to various books. These days, along with a few other architecture fanatics, I produce the English-language magazine Mark. Sometimes I write a freelance article as well. And very occasionally, secretly, at my desk at home, looking out over the Ertshaven docks in Amsterdam, I draw a design for the most fantastic house in the world.