Curating transformation
The city is never finished. It is subject to continual change, each intervention the product of multiple hands guided by numerous interests. Design allows us to capture a moment of order and find a clear narrative, but we must go beyond design to enact meaningful and long-lasting change. We see the key to creating livable and sustainable urban environments in curating transformation processes throughout the lifetime of the development. Our role is broader than our specialisms as architects, urbanists, landscape, and interior designers suggest. As caring experts, we bring together collective needs and private interests to create places that nurture, enable, and inspire people. We add social value.
Creating Open Cities
The open city is a place that successfully accommodates change and difference. It is our vision for a sustainable and inclusive urban condition. To realise this vision, our architecture and urban plans create productive relationships between public and private realms, reconciling integration and separation, order and disorder to create a fertile home for collective life. We never treat buildings as isolated objects but part of the fine mesh of public spaces, landscapes, streets, and private realms that make up the city. The designs act as frameworks that allow individuals to flourish while supporting collective needs. To this end, they fulfill a fundamental aim of design. They establish the conditions for freedom.
Designing Coexistence
The essence of urbanity lies in the successful mixing of functions, activities, and people of diverse groups and tools to set conditions for vibrant, productive neighbourhoods, landscapes, and buildings. The programmatic concepts we develop form precise relationships and synergies within the plan. These concepts are ways to promote new patterns of activity, such as better mobility habits. We use programmes to activate ground floor levels, stimulate street life, and provide places for encounter and exchange. They are a fundamental part of how we make places valued by their community, creating authentic togetherness.
Redefining Cultural Landscapes
As cities grow and spread across a territory, they cease to be a single entity with a clear centre and periphery but become a complex relationship of parts, what we call a cultural landscape. It is where mixtures of agriculture, housing, logistics, infrastructure, and extensive natural areas co-exist. Our work aims to give legibility to different parts and improve each site's distinctive qualities. We intensify natural assets to create more cohesive and ecologically productive green-blue infrastructure. We define continuities and counterpoints in typology, functions, grain, and material to create new developments that are rooted in their place. Minimal environmental footprints and a close connection to the landscape are fundamental.
Planning for a Sustainable Future
The overwhelming challenge of our time is to build cities that protect the earth's resources and habitats while tackling the challenge of the climate crisis. We can only achieve a sustainable balance by reconciling human interventions and the natural environment. For us, the task is to design dense, adaptable mixed-use cities that work closely with natural ecologies and take care of their residents' wellbeing. We design productive urban landscapes where water and waste management, mobility, and ecosystems, the built and the unbuilt function are complementary systems, all with future requirements in mind. Bending these systems into circles, we limit waste and minimise the use of resources. Our buildings actively limit energy consumption as well as generate power, becoming part of sustainable urban districts.
Crafting our Built Environment
We have a straightforward approach: craft is making things that work well for people. We bring countless hours of experience and training to complex projects to arrive at solutions with clear rationality and a strong relation to context. Our interdisciplinary approach pushes us to seek a radical pragmatism: projects with ambitious concepts that are nonetheless imminently realisable and limit the ecological footprint. Our craft is expressed in the precise, elegant, and feasible resolution of the city's material. It is present within our architecture, urban, and landscape projects in an integrated and interdisciplinary manner.
Selection of Publications
The Potato Plan Collection: 40 Cities Through the Lens of Patrick Abercrombie
Kees Christiaanse and Mirjam Zuger
nai010publishersThe Grand Project: Understanding the Making and Impact of Urban Megaprojects
Kees Christiaanse, Anna Gasco, Naomi C. Hanakata, Ying Zhou, Pablo Acebillo, Dissa Raras Pidanti
nai010Textbook: Collected Texts On The Built Environment 1990–2018
Kees Christiaanse (author), Jessica Bridger (editor)
nai010 publishersOpen City: Designing Coexistence
Tim Rieniets, Jennifer Sigler, Kees Christiaanse
SUNKCAP: Situation
Philip Ursprung, Mark Michaeli, Werner Sewing, Wouter van Stiphout, Friedrich von Borries, Richard Marshall, Kees Christiaanse, Ruurd Gietema, Han van den Born, Irma van Oort
NAi PublishersCity As Loft
Martina Baum, Kees Christiaanse
010, Forum
Selection of Awards and Nominations
2023
Berlagevlag, Nomination
Station Post Building, The HagueArchitectenweb Award, Nomination
Station Post Building, The HagueThe Plan Award, Category 'Transportation'
K64 Keflavík Airport Area Master PlanGulden Feniks, Nomination
Station Post Building, The Hague
2021
Architizer A+Awards Jury Award
East Dike Dapeng, Shenzhen
2020
DGNB Gold Certificate
Aeschbach Quarter, Aarau
2018
Move Realty Awards
Golden City, St. PetersburgULI Leadership Award
2017
ARC17 Oeuvre Award
Kees Christiaanse
2016
RIBA International Fellowship
Kees Christiaanse
2014
TOD Standard Gold
HafenCity, HamburgTOD Standard Silver
GWL-Terrein, Amsterdam
2002
Nationale Staalprijs, Nomination
Stadstuinen, Rotterdam