Overview

The archi­tec­tural phi­los­o­phy of Erick van Egeraat strikes a vision­ary bal­ance between analy­sis, con­text and beauty. He envis­ages an archi­tec­tural future in which the cur­rently pre­vail­ing reduc­tive avant-garde phi­los­o­phy is super­seded by a new par­a­digm of com­plex­ity and rich­ness. Accord­ing to Erick van Egeraat, any project should be con­nected to and even blend into the net­work and iden­tity of its loca­tion. There­fore, great atten­tion to the cul­tural and his­toric makeup of the site is required for a project to become a nat­ural part of its sur­round­ings. This empha­sis on con­text stems from Erick van Egeraats aim to main­tain, accen­tu­ate and com­ple­ment the unique­ness of each indi­vid­ual loca­tion. With­out sur­ren­der­ing to nos­tal­gia or revival, he finds famil­iar­ity in the loca­tion itself, not in his own port­fo­lio or by way of a method­i­cal or even generic approach. My work relates to cul­tural and his­toric con­texts as a source of mean­ing. I aim to cre­ate a sen­sual and intu­itive archi­tec­ture that cor­re­sponds to a nat­ural lan­guage while evok­ing new, emerg­ing sensations. While Erick van Egeraat formulates unique architectural solutions for each individual project, his basic principles remain flexibility, sensibility and sustainability at social, economic and environmental level.