As Dutch firm Mecanoo wins the competition to lead the renovation of the New York Public Library, Magali Robathan talks to its creative director Francine Houben about inspiration, playfulness, and why she’s embracing getting older

Last year was a huge year for Francine Houben and Mecanoo, the Dutch multidisciplinary practice that she co-founded three decades ago.

“It was a very special year; what we call a crown year in the Netherlands,” says Houben, speaking to CLAD from Mecanoo’s offices in Delft. In 2015 Houben turned 60, and the Queen of the Netherlands presented her with the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prize, a prestigious Dutch cultural award given in recognition of her lifetime of achievement as an international architect. Mecanoo, meanwhile, celebrated its 30th anniversary in September with a party at its offices. Two months later came the biggest news of the year, when the practice was chosen to lead the $300m renovation of the New York Public Library, replacing Foster + Partners, who were dropped from the project in 2014.

The practice also completed a wide range of projects in 2015, including cultural heritage museum Het Hof van Nederland in Dordrecht, the Netherlands; the HOME arts centre in Manchester, UK; the Hilton hotel at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol; a new train station for Delft in the Netherlands and the Bruce C Bolling Municipal Building in Boston (Mecanoo’s first US project).

“It was a chance to look back at the whole oeuvre; to realise how much I’ve achieved,” says Houben. “I started when I was a young student, and I never really thought about the continuous line in my work. Looking back, I recognise the coherence of the work we’ve done.”

During her career, Houben has hung out with Charles and Ray Eames, collaborated with legendary architects including Álvaro Siza, Alvar Aalto and Toyo Ito, and has worked across a diverse range of projects which cover libraries (including the Stirling Prize-nominated Library of Birmingham), museums, hotels, theatres, parks, skyscrapers and residential projects ranging from single houses to complete neighbourhoods.

There's a feeling, however, that the best may be yet to come. Being selected to lead the renovation of the iconic New York Public Library was a real coup for Mecanoo, whose first US project only completed last year. The practice is also working on a range of other high-level projects, including the renovation of Mies van der Rohe’s Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library in Washington DC; the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts in Taiwan; and Three Cultural Centers & One Book Mall, in Shenzhen, China. And, as Houben points out, she's now the age that Frank Gehry was when he designed the Guggenheim Bilbao. “As architects, we need wisdom,” she says. “There are so many valuable skills that come from being older.”

STARTING OUT
Houben launched Mecanoo with two friends when she was a 25-year-old student (she studied architecture at Delft University of Technology). They entered a competition to design a social housing complex in Rotterdam, and won. “A year later there was a competition launched by UNESCO for housing of the future. The prize was a trip to Japan, and I wanted to go to Japan, so we entered it and won that too,” she says.

“In the 1980s, there weren’t really any interesting architectural firms, not just in the Netherlands but worldwide; not really. Housing was horrible, so we thought we should change the way people live in cities. That’s the way we started.”

During the early days, they worked from Houben’s student sitting room. After winning the competition, they employed another two people, and came up with the name Mecanoo – inspired by the British model construction kit Meccano, and a reference to the playfulness of creating structures. Mecanoo then moved to the back room of a historic building on the Oude Delft Canal which was being rented out to start up businesses. The practice has since taken over – and refurbished – the entire canal house, including some of the neighbouring buildings.

Today, Houben leads a team of 160 people from 25 countries in what she describes as her “symphony orchestra”. They’re deliberately employed with a variety of backgrounds and skills, and include architects, engineers, interior designers, urban planners, landscape architects, architectural technicians, model makers, graphic designers, photographers and movie makers.

Mecanoo’s projects are suitably diverse, ranging from the sober, neo modernist housing projects of the practice’s early days to the flamboyant, shimmering metal-clad Library of Birmingham.

What unites them, says Houben, is the practice’s unique approach. “People expect architects to have a form-based style. For me, that’s not intellectually interesting,” she says. “The world of Mecanoo is warm, it’s human, it’s well detailed, it’s reacting to local culture. Our projects are very different, but what unites them is the idea of people, place, purpose.”

People, place, purpose sums up Mecanoo’s approach to architecture and urbanism, and is also the title of a new book published by the firm in November 2015. The book highlight’s the practice’s ethos of designing for people, and examines the effect time has on the function, or purpose, of buildings or landscapes. Houben believes strongly in “designing for unpredictable change” – accepting that the use of a building is likely to change in ways we might not be able to anticipate, and ensuring spaces are designed in a way that can absorb and accommodate those changes.

One element that crop ups again and again in Mecanoo’s work is a particularly vibrant shade of blue. It’s the colour of a stage paint Houben first used in a theatre set design in the 1990s, and it can be seen in many of Mecanoo’s projects, as well as throughout the practice’s offices.

New York Public Library Renovation
Houben has described libraries as “the cathedrals of our time,” and “the most important public building in a city,” so being selected to renovate one of the world’s most famous was particularly exciting.

“For me, the New York Public Library is a symbol of all the libraries in the world,” says Houben. “It’s a library for everyone – for the whole melting pot that is New York society.

“Libraries are about so much more than books. They’re about meeting other people, learning from them, creating things. The New York Public Library had such importance for all immigrants coming to New York. They felt this was a place where they were free, where they could get connected to their own country and their own language but could also learn the new language.”

The project will start with the renovation of the Mid-Manhattan Library, which will house a modern circulating library, a business library, a large education space, and spaces for public programmes and classes. Construction is expected to start in late 2017 and be completed in 2019. Once renovation has started on that branch, work will start on the expansion of public space – by 42 per cent – at the Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue.

“We will approach the New York Public Library project the same way we approach all of our projects – by observing,” says Houben. “Trying to understand the history and the future of the library, observing people in the city and imagining how they could use it in five, 10 or 50 years’ time.”

Mecanoo already has several libraries in its portfolio, including the Delft University of Technology Library in the Netherlands, which helped to put Mecanoo on the map when they opened in 1997. More recently, the practice designed the iconic Library of Birmingham – described by Houben as “a people’s palace,” which has won several awards and has been highly praised for its humanistic, accessible design.

“The Library of Birmingham is a very European building,” she says. “I’m extremely proud of it. It’s a beautiful interiors space, and one of the first things you notice is the people enjoying the building; people of all ages and sexes and races, all sitting together in a very harmonious way.”

LOOKING AHEAD
Houben has promised to spend much of this year in New York in order to work on the New York Public Library design process.

Elsewhere, work is underway on the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library in Washington DC. “We’re working very hard on that project,” she says. “Intellectually it’s very interesting because it’s an existing building of Mies van der Rohe, and it’s the very first building named after Martin Luther King Jr after his assassination.”

The concrete, brick and glass building was Mies’s last project – and his only library – and was completed in 1972, three years after his death. The renovation project sees Mecanoo working with local partner Martinez+Johnson Architecture to transform the library’s main entrance and two cores, turning them into focal points, creating new spaces and bringing more natural light into the building.

The biggest challenge for Mecanoo lies in respecting the iconic building, while creating a library that meets the needs of 21st century users. I ask whether Houben finds the project daunting.

“No, I like it,” she says. “It’s an opportunity for lifelong learning. I’m fascinated by the work of Mies van der Rohe. We went to visit as many of his buildings as we could, and we met with the original project architect, Jack Bowman. I knew the work of Mies van der Rohe, of course, but not as intensely as I do now. We’ve also spent a lot of time studying Dr. King’s teachings, embedding his legacy into our design. I’ve learned a lot.”

Another major project taking shape is the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts in Taiwan. “It’s a huge cultural complex featuring an opera house, a concert hall, a recital hall and a playhouse in combination with a huge open air theatre and a small library,” says Houben.

“When designing the centre, we were very much inspired by the local banyan trees. People perform underneath them because they offer protection from the rain and sun and give you a kind of wonderful acoustic atmosphere.”

The centre is an open structure, designed with Kaohsiung’s tropical climate in mind, with a theatre on the roof. The other theatres and halls are housed in the building’s four cores, or ‘trunks’, and the wind is able to blow through the centre of the structure. The project should be completed in 2016, and will be officially opened in 2017.

Work is also underway on Mecanoo’s first Chinese project, Three Cultural Centers & One Book Mall, in Shenzhen, in the Guangdong Province. The complex includes a public art museum, a science museum, a youth centre and a vast bookshop, and is due to open in 2017.

I finish by asking Houben what else the future will bring. Her answer goes back to the Mecanoo philosophy of being ready for unpredictable change. “You never know what will happen,” she says, simply. “You have to be open.”

Sign up for FREE ezines & magazines

https://www.leisureopportunities.co.uk/images/737650_759626.jpg

As she works on the redesign of the iconic New York Public Library, Mecanoo's Francine Houben shares the secrets of her success

Francine Houben, creative director, Mecanoo Magali Robathan, Journalist, Leisure Media,New York Public Library, Hilton Amsterdam Airport, The Library of Birmingham, HOME Manchester, Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library, Francine Houben, creative director, Mecanoo