In Conversation with Dirk Van Gameran

This transcript is an excerpt of a conversation between Saad Boujane (MAUD ’23) and Dirk Van Gameran from March 2023.

Dirk van Gameran is dean of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TUDelft, Netherlands, where he is also a professor of housing design. He is the founding editor of the book series DASH, Delft Architectural Studies on Housing. He is currently developing the Global Housing Study Centre for research and education on affordable housing in the Global South. He is also a practicing architect and partner of Mecanoo Architecten. In 2007 he received an Aga Khan Award and in 2012 the Best Building of the Year Award of the Dutch Association of Architects.

On Experimental Housing: Concepts, Cases and Future Trajectories in Incremental and Configurative Typologies.

Saad Boujane (SB):

You have been involved in academic research and teaching for many years, most notably through your professorship and later through your deanship at TU Delft and recently at the Graduate School of Design. How has your work in academia shaped the discourse around experimental housing and its relationship to urban design at large, and what are some of the most important challenges facing the field today?

Dirk Van Gameran (DVG):

I think the questions relating to academia and practice have been important for me throughout the beginning of my career. Most of the time, there is a gap between what is happening in both cases. I started the Delft Architectural Studies on Housing (DASH) as a tool to achieve two things: connecting academia to practice and promoting a collaborative working methodology within the faculty. I often see the academic sphere as one of individual enterprises and endeavors, but I believe that working collaboratively can be more fruitful, and this certainly relates to housing design.

Of course, housing has a long history, and this is what academia can teach us; to better understand and learn from the attempts and proposals that have been developed in the past in order to move forward. Moreover, housing design remains relevant today more than ever. It really is at the foreground of many of the big challenges that we face today, such as the continuous urbanization of rural areas and the growing socio-spatial inequalities, enhanced by the effects of the climate crisis. All of those problems have an inherent impact on how we build and design housing. I believe there is still so much more to learn from the alternatives and experiments that have been made in the past in order to find better and more adequate answers to the challenges of today.

SB:

You’ve pointed out the importance of looking to what’s already been done in the past as a way of moving forward, and I think that the DASH publication in many ways helps in the dissemination of projects and proposals that are not very well-known or studied by researchers, architects, and urban design. Can you discuss some of the key themes and topics that have emerged over the years, and how the series has contributed to the discourse on housing design?

DVG:

We have now published fifteen DASH issues focusing on different themes that we think are the most urgent to approach. When I was appointed as professor of housing design at TU Delft, some academic colleagues argued: “Are we not done already, do we need a group that focuses on housing design?” I think we are now in different times; many problems have arisen over time that we didn’t recognize 17 years ago. Of course, issues of climate change and inequalities were relevant then but were still not clear to everyone. Today, we see those problems as major challenges, therefore we should readdress how we build and design housing, and we are certainly not done yet.

Fortunately, DASH can still be a valuable tool with our documentation of projects that are not well known to show how we can learn from them and see ways we can reapproach them today. We made some ten years ago an issue on Eco-houses,  focused on individual, free-standing houses in nature. We now realize we need to address these issues, the effects of climate change and diminishing biodiversity, in large-scale housing design very urgently.

SB:

It’s almost as if the sense of experimentation that was so prominent in the 1960’s has been lost. Of course, you’re from the Netherlands, which is home to some of the most innovative examples of housing historically during the 1960s and also in the contemporary period. Can you describe some of the successful examples of incremental housing you have encountered throughout your academic and professional careers, and how do these examples extend to other contexts such as South Asia, North Africa, and Latin America?

DVG:

When you look back at the development of housing design in Europe, the idea of incrementality remained an exotic one, and perhaps not so relevant. It simply doesn’t connect to the way Europeans and especially Dutch people want to live. Over here in the Netherlands, the built environment is completely controlled by regulations from strong centralist spatial planning agencies. Incremental housing requires a certain freedom and a lack of rules, which is really difficult to implement in the Dutch context. If everyone can change their house over time - a beautiful idea for sure - then it has a direct impact on how others experience the built environment, especially in the dense urban context of the Netherlands. For some 20 years, we often work with rules like the ground floor being flexible, making it easier to change it for future use, and we understood that this eventually becomes very difficult due to the fact that it will have a direct impact on the area surrounding it. The famous saying “Not in my backyard!” is very strong. However, there are several famous examples such as the Diagoon houses by Herman Herzberger, or Jaap Bakema’s growing houses in Eindhoven. They’re beautiful projects, but they remain the exception.

In the global south, there are projects that are very successful in helping people to start living in a well-organized urban environment while still providing possibilities of incrementality and change when they have more means to do so. In the Netherlands, one completely moves to another house, thereby revealing one of the problems of housing and urban design in Europe. We often build too much of the same, and if you do so with little variation and don’t allow for change, then a neighborhood can lose its viability and people begin to move out. So, a community must be able to change, to grow and to become diverse, and if the housing stock doesn’t allow for that, a sense of diversity in the built environment will therefore not happen. I believe that we have to keep what’s already there and not demolish and build again, there is immense value in changing and adapting our buildings, and that is of course what incremental housing concepts allow you to do.

To go back to the Global South, you can see large scale examples that show success in creating diverse communities. A beautiful example for me is Balkrishna Doshi’s low-cost development in Indore, where it becomes very clear that large scale housing design as to be addressed as an urban design project. When there is a strong urban structure, you can change or replace the buildings, therefore providing maturity to the neighborhood, which you can see in Doshi’s work very clearly. What is important also is that it is executed by the inhabitants themselves, contributing to the success of the neighborhood. I was especially impressed when we started talking to a lady who was living in a house that had never been changed, but she was very content because she saw the future promise of the possibility  to add floors when her children would start earning an income and would live on these additional floors. For me, this was a confirmation of how these concepts of incrementality can be successful and meaningful.

SB:

Touching on your professional involvement with Mecanoo, have you tried incorporating housing models that allow for a certain amount of growth in the Dutch setting?

DVG:

There are a number of ideals that we aim to incorporate in housing design at different scales. I often wonder how a neighborhood can continue to have quality in the future, which has a lot to do with the non-space that you design. How does a house connect to its own private outside space? How can you also create collective and public spaces that add value to the individual units? Yet again, it’s all about the urban design scale. We strive to make housing that is not necessarily incremental, but rather one that is flexible and malleable, thereby allowing the residents to adapt their interiors to their changing needs.

Another lesson that we learned is that if housing is designed with a structure that hardly allows for change over time, then it has a short lifespan and can fall apart rather quickly. I’ve been working on a housing project for the elderly of different backgrounds and health conditions, requiring various types of care. It became clear that we had to design it in such a way that the building would allow for change over time, with the possibility of combining smaller units into larger ones. We designed this project to replace another building that was only 25 years old but had an unsustainable structure that couldn’t be readapted for future use. Of course, It’s a terrible decision to demolish relatively new buildings, but it gives you a sense of the reality of the short lifespan of many buildings across Europe. As urban designers and architects, we should prevent this in the future, value the importance of the open collective space, and design buildings that allow for growth, even at the interior level. These are the lessons we learned over time and continue to implement in current and future projects.

SB:

 In many parts of the world such as South Asia, housing design is still largely determined by traditional building models and approaches. How do you see incremental and configurative housing challenging these traditional models, and what are some of the barriers that need to be overcome to encourage greater adoption of incrementality?

DVG:

The keyword here is density. In Indian cities such as Mumbai, the entire city is more or less being redeveloped in higher densities that do not consider any measures of incrementality or personal involvement. People who come to the city with little or no means also need the possibility to adapt their house to their needs, to turn it partly into a place where they can work and generate income. The big question here is how do we as urban designers solve the problem of ever-growing densities?

We have also been working in Africa, specifically in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. 20 years ago, it was a place where 90% of housing was low-rise ‘informal. The city is now being rebuilt with more standard housing block typologies, and suddenly all the possibilities that the residents in the informal housing had in combining work and living have been eradicated. Moreover, the urban structure that is also part of the identity of the city is completely lost. So, what really are the alternatives? One can go for the acupunctural approach where you improve house by house, but it still isn’t a future-proof solution. We have a group of researchers focusing on the situation in Addis Ababa and developing some alternatives, and the key takeaway is to start from the scale of the neighborhood. Once you immediately connect housing clusters to open space and the rest of the city, then you can create a new urban structure that connects and doesn’t result in isolated enclaves is not one solution, but we need many to create livable cities.

SB:

Looking specifically at some of the post-war housing projects in North Africa, the contributions of Michel Ecochard and Candilis-Josic-Woods to the urban landscapes of cities such as Casablanca can still be felt to this day. Like the Nid d’Abeille and the 8x8m Grid, many similar projects in cities across the North African ecumene are still standing to this day and have been reappropriated and adapted to fit modern day lifestyles. How do you personally feel about the way in which such edifices have been incrementally changed in rather ad-hoc ways? Is it a successful model of incrementality?

DVG:

I think it’s certainly not a failure. Even if its incrementality was unintended, it still allowed for change and the residents could adapt their personal private space, and perhaps even the wider surroundings to suit their needs. It’s certainly successful in that regard. It’s important to note that people still live there and that because the neighborhood is in constant flux, a diverse community will continue to emerge. The Casablanca examples that you’ve mentioned are quite interesting to me because they display this notion of unintended growth and change, which sometimes is even better than designing it because it gives agency to the people. Another famous example by Doshi is the IC houses in Ahmedabad which have a kind of stepped section and free floors of apartments on top of one another. It changed completely over time so one would think it was designed as an incremental project. I doubt that was the case.

As architects, we should strive to be modest and think that change is possible to happen on its own without our immediate intervention. To some extent, I remain slightly critical of how Ecochard designed the courtyard spaces and the way in which they presented a real public health issue as they were covered up over time. This goes back to my previous argument that the designer should think about the open space and design it in such a way that it will remain.

SB:

Looking ahead, how do you see the concept of configurative housing evolving in the next decades, and what role do you think architects and designers will play in shaping this evolution?

DVG:

We have to place the idea of incrementality in a central position at the urban scale, instead of the individual unit. That is certainly true of the western part of the world where the densities are relatively low in postwar housing.  It is our collective responsibility to give the existing post-war housing a new life and make them energy sufficient for future use. We also need to create support for various amenities such as shops, schools, and cultural facilities by increasing the density of these neighborhoods that are confronted by a shrinking population. This kind of incrementality is important because it makes the neighborhood more mixed and diverse as well. As I mentioned earlier, many post-war housing estates suffer now because they only offer one kind of housing, and again with this incremental growth at the urban scale, you can add other housing types and categories, thereby making the neighborhood even more future-proof. It’s really an answer to a continuing discussion that deals with a huge demand for new housing. Should we build it in new developments, or can we build it within the existing city? I believe that these are key principles in how we can keep our cities livable and certainly more equal.