Register - Architecture & Landscape

In this episode Andrew Clancy interviews Job Floris, a partner with Sandor Naus in Monadnock Architects, a practice based in Rotterdam. Their buildings possesses a formal intensity which is leavened with careful attention to their materiality. Their buildings sit at ease with their place in the living tradition of European architecture and yet speak of our current time, and the ambiguities of contemporary tectonics. In their practice the history of architecture is seen as a place for invention, a place to dream using the tools of our age. Their buildings possess the same peculiar familiarity of their drawings, a sense of something seen before and yet entirely new. A sense of delicacy and simultaneous formal heft. This takes great skill and careful balance which can be easily overlooked. If we examine how for example they treat brickwork in two projects (Atlas and Nieuw Bergen) we see in one (Atlas) how the joints are manipulated to offset the purity of the skin, giving a textural reading which chang