Rein Jansma: Engaging Spaces

Rein Jansma briefly studied biology and architecture at the TU Delft but decided that ‘making things’ was what he had to do. In 1982 he published the remarkable pop-up book ‘Stairs’ with Joost Elffers production, which has been reprinted several times since.

On one of the book sites Stairs is described: “This unique interactive book surpasses all language barriers, enriching the traditional pop-up book format with fresh, timeless imagery. Its emphasis on visual detail and its absence of text makes it a source of simple pleasure and serenity” (www.zuckerartbooks.com).
In the eighties Jansma mostly worked as artist and designer and was involved in building theatre decors in Amsterdam and Paris as well.
Around 1990, together with Moshé Zwarts, Rein Jansma founded Zwarts & Jansma architects. The company is located in Amsterdam and operates mostly in the field of public buildings and mobility throughout the Netherlands. They build soccer stadiums, railway stations, bridges, tunnels and other mobility infrastructure. In 1992 Zwarts & Jansma created the Dutch Pavilion on the world expo in Seville. Currently Zwarts & Jansma also work for the Road & Transport Authority (RTA) in Dubai (expected to be finished in 2010) and are doing the renovation and enlargement of the Central Railway Station in Tbilisi in Georgia. Today Jansma is leading the office together with Reinald Top and Rob Torsing.

Rein Jansma explains that in the architectural company Zwarz & Jansma no distinction is made the between the design process and the technical development of design. All collaborators have to be qualified architects because research and inventions for technical development inform the design process in a fundamental way.

The research about how things work is vital for the architectural practice, Jansma argues. They work on infrastructure, mobility, as well as public buildings. Results of the research, including the algorithms they invent, are part of the identity and assets of the company.

Space is defined fundamentally by how one interacts with a space, Jansma argues. As a child he remembers drilling a hole in an internal wall, which came out in the bathroom of his mothers and fathers place. So for the first time he became aware of the concept of space.

He found that there was a spatial relationship between those two confined spaces and with the appropriate tool Jansma found at the age of 7, that he could connect those two spaces. By participating in a space, touching it, engaging with it, the perception and vision of the built world is, changes. For Jansma the most stimulating buildings are those where he can see or feel the joy of the designer while creating it. The joy and the curiosity one can sense gives a lot of energy and human beings want to connect with such energy. For Jansma architecture is not about generating meaning, he actually would feel embarrassed in such a one-directional concept of architecture. For Jansma architecture is about how people get energized or stimulated by a piece of work, so people get motivated and challenged them selves. Architecture is very much about people influencing their own environment and technology gives wonderful and very powerful tools to do that. As architect one tries to stimulate and convey the joy of searching for solutions, for meaning and imagination.

When designing buildings and infrastructure the human body is always key to the design. Vision, hearing, physical constraints of human sizes, it all relates to the building. Even more so, says Jansma, the sense of one’s body also creates a feeling that is crucial for the success of the building.

For example in a soccer stadium many people prefer to sit on a narrow bench and touch each other all the time, because that is part of the experience they seek. As architect one always looks for optimums between different interests and possibilities, analyzing use patterns and identifying other spaces and timeslots to be used. Issues like safety and emergency situations are taken into account as well of course. There are programs that do the math about how quick everybody can be out of the building. It has also to do with breathing. How long can an average person hold their breath and be in another space where it is safe and there is no smoke? So that has to do with respiration systems.

Zwarts & Jansma have made a lot of sports buildings but actually, according to Jansma, a soccer stadium is a very silly building for just watching the game. It costs many millions of Euros and you use it only once every two weeks for a maximum of about two hours.

For the price of a seat, it’s probably much cheaper to give everybody a flat screen television at home with a recorder, so they can ‘slowmo’ it and see it much better there. Jansma argues that the first place building a soccer stadium is about designing the ‘magic place’ for interaction between people who are present in the stadium. It is very much about the shared experience of being together, seeing each other and feeling each other’s emotions. For this reason Zwarts & Jansma design curved stadiums and no rectangular forms even though this means that on the long strands there is a bit more distance to the field. The curve makes it possible that ‘all can see all’ and there is no ‘us’ against ‘them’ feeling created; that it’s feels like one organism, as Jansma formulates it. If people share an experience, they are more open and relaxed when they are in a group. The moment you share an experience, you can relate to each other and you trust each other more. Also other elements, like sound (good noise) and smell (freshly mowed grass), are important to create a sense of reality so people know that it is real what they experience.

Jansma argues that we live in a society in which risk is reduced all the time: by the government, by the municipality, by employers. On the other hand, as a biological entity, the human being has been shaped over millions of years into a perfect machine tuned to assess risk and assess possibilities.

In that energy of “Can I eat it or will it eat me”, we feel very alive, Jansma notices. In modern urban society we loose a part of this feeling of aliveness. People need to feel risk again; by watching sports in a soccer stadium for example, people feel they share the experience of the hero they watch, as if their neurons mirror the ones of the hero they watch. Watching sports, like playing sports, triggers the sense of risk. When the player, who is your favorite, gets hurt, you feel it almost physically. Of course one person likes soccer and another likes film to feel ‘alive’ again.

Transport infrastructure is very optimized in our part of the world, but, this brings a danger that people don’t feel where they are, Zwarts & Jansma have found. On highways, in public transport things need to be different at different points in time along a track so people do not loose their sense of distance and understand where they are.

If not, people loose a sense of security and will not use the infrastructure Such ‘points of difference’ should have a quality of their own, so you recognize them immediately as another space, argues Jansma. This authenticity of specific places creates a sense of being here or being there. A specific design of a light rail station, for example, is also identified by people, who are not using the system and are just passing by. It’s very important to make a place have it’s own character so people know where they are. This is even more important when designing larger housing projects. People need to be able to identify their home as being different from the rest. Having identity and knowing where you are, makes people more relaxed, according to Jansma.

For Jansma technology is wonderful. Without it we couldn’t have the complicated urban society with every decade higher expectations of our interactions in our society. If there wasn’t a whole lot of technology, we would go back to a rural society, but on another level we are also challenged by the anonymous space, which the urban life gives us.

For Jansma it is a challenge in his work to make a nasty piece of infrastructure into kind of a social place and interactive technologies can play a role in this. Architecture has to do with gravity and some other reality issues. Before, the virtual and the real world seemed to be two different worlds; nowadays they merge more and more. Buildings can change color, people can communicate via walls, movements and more and this influences the experience of place, argues Jansma. The influence of technology has impact on the physical experience of realness and feedback of realness in the first place. If you get all kinds of sensors in your system, you’ll still know it’s not the real thing, Jansma argues. Walls of super flat screens, which render environments for example, do not feel real and people will feel tricked. The new way of technology is indeed that we build physical things, maybe print them, and that we can very easily, without a big eco footprint, redo it, suggests Jansma.

Technology deeply influences the architecture that can be made; because of the speed of calculation of computers the process of designing has fundamentally changed; lines and shapes can be made that were not feasible before; new materials and new ways of dealing with material evolve and this also changes the imagination as well.

These changes do not only create an architecture that may last longer. Jansma strongly advocates that this also makes architecture more fluent. One can build something today by lasering recycled corrugated cardboard, use it for while and then shred it, make new cardboard, laser it and make something new again. This makes the process more fluent; one does not have to build a generic building, which can always be used for everything. When building those fluent spaces no extra materials are used, no chemicals are used, just some electricity, which it hopefully comes from a sustainable energy source. The process is so cheap and renewable that you can use a certain space for a couple of years and if a different space is needed, one can just throw the old one in the grinder again and make new cardboard and make a different space. It is only a little bit of energy, which is put into it.

For Jansma the most important requirement of today’s technology is very simple: there should be zero footprint of carbon energy. People should be free to use energy; it should not feel like wasting energy.

If a person is alone in the forest and uses an axe to cut wood, this is a great because the tree grows again and the axe isn’t really changed after it is used. It is very sustainable and renewable. Technologies should be re-usable technologies, Jansma argues. There are great technologies popping in because of developments in biology and technology; we can grow buildings today. For instance there is a material, you have sand and you spread some fluid over it and then it gets sandstone, and once you’re done, you just grind it again. That is the kind of technology we need. The most important thing for technology inventors is that they should have fun inventing as long as it is not polluting and it is not using enormous amounts of energy. It does not make sense to set an agenda for these developers. A lot of technology, which is used today, was never thought of when inventing.

Discussing the relation between functional rhythm and aesthetic rhythm in the design, Jansma explains that architecture and music are very close and some people are more sensitive to musical rhythms and others more to visual rhythms. Both are compositions one can be sensitive to.

Rhythm is like a heartbeat. It’s not really interesting to find out why it is beautiful; it’s more interesting to build sensitivity for it. However, talking about visual rhythm is not something Jansma is willing to do because language operates in a different realm than spatiality. Form, space, rhythm are very different from language and he argues that space is defined by what Jansma calls ‘visual logic’. Language operates in a different realm, uses different parts of the brain and putting visual logic into words is not possible, according to Jansma. When using language to describe space one starts judging space by what sounds good in language and what sounds good in language, looks more true then. This happens a lot in today’s architectural practice, Jansma notices, but he argues that visual logic has to be judged within its own realm and cannot be presented nor can it be judged in linguistic terms because it functions in this different realm.

Language and visual logic can even be opposite each other. Regularly it is suggested that content is something different from visual culture. For Jansma visual culture is very much content; rhythm, timing, breathing, looking, getting tired later have very much to do with getting your body through a space and touching it and the tactility of it. This creates sense in its own way. The moment language is used to describe it something else chips in. So Jansma avoids talking about it. He does raise the question though whether space has acquired a new communicative capacity because of technology since we are now capable of sending each other ‘some space’, where before we could only send some language or things.

Space is communication anyway, argues Jansma. It is communication from the designer of the space to the user, but on a non-language level. It is a transferring of meaning and/or seduction.

Architects seduce people, and people seduce architects because they ask for a specific kind of a space, and architects say “okay, this one” and then people are invited to use the space. For Jansma, it is a very authentic communication channel, which doesn’t have another truth behind it.

To illustrate his words Jansma picks up a piece of cardboard with a specific logical 3D pattern. For technicians it is a known pattern. There are even shells, which have this pattern on the outside. The pattern is the result of a mathematical logic. Jansma likes this very much because it is also a pattern that shows complexity, yet it is not chaotic. It has a very clear logic on the top line, which just repeats and then the thing forms. Jansma is very interested in how mathematical logic expresses itself in form. Instead of copying flowers, which are also beautiful, one can use mathematical patterns when making a fence or wallpaper or whatever. Because of the enormous technology power we now have, this can be produced this very easily. A person, who witnesses the pattern, will not see the logic behind it but will experience this logic, and that logic is not always simplicity, on another level Jansma suggests.

Very logic things can relate to very complex and layered things. On a visual level people understand this like they understand rhythm. Logic is not noise, it is very much a rhythm, but it is different than music. In music one expects the beginning of a song and then the middle and the end of the song.

Jansma’s example has got more to do with visual logic, which is very mathematical. How people relate to such visual logic is highly personal. Some people need a fireplace and look to the game of the flames and for Jansma looking at such a pattern is also great when needing some piece of mind for example. A lot people are looking for the original quality of material or the original quality of space. We are now entering a time where we can make form or space and give it enough complexity to make it interesting. It has a logic and quality of its own.

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